Has the Book Business Learned Anything From the Music Business?

It has been twenty years since David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard published their manifesto The Future Of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution. I wrote about it in my April 2017 post called The best way ho not to drown in the “music as water”. After the initial enthusiasm subsided, my thinking went the opposite direction. This is what I wrote further about the manifest – There they predicted “a future in which music will be like water: ubiquitous and free-flowing.” The idea sounded great. Why wouldn’t you or I, as a music listener and a music maker, want to get freed from the shortsighted business and copyright policies of the ‘big music business’ conglomerates and media?

Recently I was reading about the business of books publishing and realized an unfortunate amount of similarities between the development in the business of music and the business of publishing books.

Actually it was the newsletter by Ted Gioia, that made me aware of the article by Elle Griffin on her blog The Elysian. The article is titled No one buys books, and it sums up the very first similarity with music. Who buys music these days? Are you even aware of an actual music store in your area? In this ‘spotified’ world people buy an access to music streaming services, but they rarely buy music as in a form of an album, or a particular musician. And it looks, it is quite similar with books, that people tend to appreciate less and less.

Photo: Yale Alumni

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