Free Ride: How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business and How it Can Fight Back

Description

Do you read newspapers online? Own a kindle? Download television programmes so you can skip the adverts? Free Ride explores the implications for modern culture of all these activities and asks how businesses can fight back against the expectation that everything we value should be available for free. On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.' So said the influential technologist Stewart Brand at a 1984 hacker convention. Not only did his words evolve into a media business mantra that has shaped the internet as we know it today but the conflict which he predicted has led to a revolution in the way that our culture is disseminated and consumed. Over the last decade the traditional media - newspapers, music, television, films and books - have been systematically ransacked by digital organisations. Every media business has had to contend with the growing consumer demand for free online content. As it is currently configured, both technically and legally, the Internet allows technology companies to reduce the price of content to zero by letting them build businesses with content copyrighted by others. It's a very effective way to draw an audience. MySpace attracted a user base larger than the population of most European countries, in part by letting its audience stream music, then sold itself to News Corporation for $580 million. But what are the consequences for cultural businesses? Is the result simply mayhem and inevitable cultural impoverishment? Free Ride is the essential guide to a global marketplace in transition- where we are, how we got here and what we have to do to avoid cultural meltdown.

Robert Levine was the executive editor of Billboard and has written for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and the arts and business sections of the New York Times. Before that, he was a features editor at New York magazine and Wired. He holds a B.A. in politics from Brandeis and an M.S.J.from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He now covers the culture business from New York and Berlin. Free Ride is his first book.

Meticulously researched book...Levine's solutions are sensible...it's a vital discussion we need to be having -- Davin O'Dwyer * Irish Times * Levine is an engaging, provocative writer, and there is much to like about Free Ride...an entertaining read, with an entertaining cast * Observer * A book that should change the debate about the future of culture * New York Times Book Review * Brilliant... A crashcourse in the existential problems facing the media * The Times * Important -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *