VS. 
In Jeff Howe's article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", it it shown that with the Inter-net, there comes a greater source of competition and with that competition, people at the bottom of the pile, even if they did start the trend, get eliminated. The truth of the matter is that this is reality and if you want your work to be chosen, then you have to make it stick out or come up with something better with less competition.
Competition and the Internet seem to go hand-in-hand. A major example of this would be albums versus downloading music at a lower price.
Napster, Limewire, and other downloadable sources make accesing music easy for people in the comfort of their own home. People no longer have to spend $15 on a CD if they only enjoy 5 songs, instead they are able to download those particular songs for ¢99 each.
With this happening, the music industry is blaming anyone who is responsible for these applications and anyone who downloads the music, even if they do pay for it but at a cheaper price.
However, if the music industry understands that this is happening, then they should make buying a CD more appealing as opposed to downloading it. An example would be giving a free little gift with the purchase of the CD or having all the CDs autographed by the entire band, and that might be the little push that music lovers need in order to choose buying in the store instead of buying online.
Competition will never go away, you just have to climb to the top by becoming more appealing to the public and by making your work stand out from the rest.
1 comment:
You're certainly right that the internet and competition go hand in hand. The truth is that competition is the very basis for our economic system and thus our societies.
In the Western world, we've been mostly sheltered from fully realizing this aspect of capitalism. With the growth of our middle classes and our relative national wealth, we've lived in a bubble of comfort for the past 40 years.
A great majority of the populace isn't aware of real poverty, and for most of those who live in poverty, there are institutions and systems that will help.
This is still the case and might be for quite a while yet, however, with the rize of new economic heavy weights we will increasingly face the fact that work, work and more work will be necessary to maintain a certain level of living and maintain are social programs.
With the internet and the way it is changing business models and making people reestablish their assumed roles in society during this period of change and adaptation, we can glimpse the way the world will work when 2 billion more people enter into the open market of international capitalism.
I'm not saying it will be bad or good, but that those who have the opportunity now to analyze the new trends,(the long tail, crowd sourcing, the gift economy, blogs)understand them and better prepare for them will be the ones succeeding. the old business model is gone. Time to reassess our preconceived notions of how to make a living in the digital world...
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