Interesting post from Simon Waldman outlining an idea for a decentralized publishing model. He builds on the idea that content is decentralized – a fact that publishers need to embrace – and that aggregators are making money off of their content. Some implicitly through licensing deals and others via “fair use” methods such as crawling and scraping.
He bases his idea on the relationship between radio stations and record labels. Waldman writes:
“What we need is a swift, easy and unpunitive licensing structure to allow content creators to distribute content; and for aggregators to aggregate – with value to each fairly represented.
Unworkable? Well, actually, this model has been cracked before. It’s how record labels deal with radio stations – through a centralised rights agency. If we start to think of our stories as songs, our feeds as albums, and the new wave of aggregators as radio stations, you can sort of see how it makes sense. And, yes, it all started out in exactly the same ‘we need you more than you need us’ kind of way – and has matured. Yes, people will still jockey for position, but the underlying commercial relationship is taken care of elsewhere.”
And he nails the crux of the issue here:
“This is critical because the world of distributed content means that our vertically integrated business model (we create it, put it all together, print it and distribute it) is potentially going to fall apart. Because there is a good chance that others are better at bringing large audiences to our content than we are.”
As an aside, I couldn’t help thinking about Radio Userland when I read this post. I remember thinking that “Radio” was a really odd name for Dave Winer’s product. Whatever you may think of Winer, he saw the future.