What's Coming

If you really want to see where digital distribution is taking us, look at Apple's app store. Volume sales of really cheap media. That is the model that works, at least for now. Some companies (and individuals) are getting rich because they understand the model. Most of the established video game companies are floundering around, and likely will not survive the digital shift, when the package goods market dries up.

Amazon, and the Kindle marketplace, are another example. Some authors are getting rich, a lot more are getting their work out in front of readers for the first time. The big companies are mostly trying to pretend ebooks don't exist. Guess who is gonna survive this little tussle?

Recorded music, where this all started, is a nano-second away from benefiting from all this change. Artists are finally getting smart, realising they don't need a label to put their recordings in front of fans.

All of this change is going to accelerate, rapidly, as we move forward. The tablet market is going to have a huge effect on comic books, board games, and visual art. Better screens, smarter phones, and so on will continue to erode the physical markets for media. And then there's file-sharing.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing is unstoppable, and the death of copyright (as a tool of artificial scarcity) is inevitable. Making money from content will depend on convenience, low price, and easy accessibility. In digital media, scarcity is obscurity. And obscurity is not much of a marketing strategy.

The network infrastructure will improve, or wireless networking will get faster. Processors and related tech will always get more powerful, and cheaper. I'm not sure what the optimal financial strategy becomes in that world, or if the low price/high volume backed up by convenience model will continue to rule.

Rank speculation, and/or wishful thinking: I'm not even sure money will continue to be a useful concept, at least for non-physical goods. Art-barter, anyone? Hmmm...