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Technology Stocks : e.Digital Corporation(EDIG) - Embedded Digital Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Savant who wrote (2301)	2/10/1999 12:06:00 PM
From: chris431	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 18366

"Christopher made some good points, but Betty countered most of them easily." With all due respect to all parties involved in the above statement, I do not quite understand how Savant came to this conclusion. Board paternalism, perhaps? Not much of what I said was even addressed in the only post that could have possibly been a response. You are correct concerning the needs and demands of the market. The market may not necessarily need or even desire better quality. Yet, the market has a historical standard for also not reverting back to a lesser quality once it has adopted a standard. This is especially true if the market must pay more for that substandard quality. Furthermore, the consumer market, per se, does not always dictate what they want. Many, if not most, technical innovations have not been brought about by market demand. Rather, the innovation is created, and the market accepts. And, given competing innovations, the market will usually select one based on several factors including availability, support, price and quality. As such, MP3 has a great advantage b/c it destroys all other forms of delivery at the moment in a key category....price. But, introduce any online compressed format, and sell it for the same price as you would a dvd-audio disc, and the market is likely to accept the dvd-audio disc. Although this may be to the detriment of the market, the market is often blind and follows whatever the millions of dollars of advertising tell them to follow. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious being the lack of understanding. This will continue and introducing a non-portable online format will not help (again, back to the stereotypical, "how do I program my VCR"). Yes, I did give alot of credit to corporate entities for one important reason....that is where the money flows. Indeed, most bands start at the local level. But they seek the corporate entity so that they have a chance at national distribution and success. You simply cannot compare the internet to the local level. It is much more similar to the national level as terms of the vast amount of participants and the large amount of information available. As such, stating that the internet will allow bands at the local level to distribute at a national level is analogous to arguing local bands would be able to garner national attention without some corporate entity. Does it happen? Definitely. Often? Not at all. As such, musicians find that it is worth the cost to enter a corporate entity so that they can lower the risk that they will fail at the national level (simple cost/risk analysis). Internet radio stations have the opportunity of dispersing information as does the corporation I discussed. I fully discussed the "utopian" problems with that in my previous post. Once the radio station takes on the role equivalent to the corporate entity, it will become the corporate entity (no, the radio station is not the equivalent at the moment). This same thing will occur with any other form of distribution, no matter which role it takes. It's simply a transaction cost of diseminating information and no one will do it for free. I apologize for not explaining what I meant by "unheard." We all have our cd's that didn't sell many copies, etc. that we simply enjoy. But, this is far from the group who goes online to distribute it's music amongst thousands of others with no marketting advantage. How many bands do you listen to on a daily basis that started by distributing on the internet? How many bands have you come to enjoy that were found solely on the internet? I would speculate that this is relatively low. And, more importantly, we are not part of the "average" consumer....many of use are probably exploring internet music if not outright looking to see what is out there. Believe it or not, most people are not doing this. The internet has been a bigger success for traditional media than it has been for its "newfound" distribution mechanism (re: recently looked at a survey where music and books were the 2 most purchased items online....music on cd/cassette, not downloadable, even though it's free). (PLEASE NOTE: BREAK IN THOUGHT PATTERN SINCE AS I HAD TO TRANSPORT MY COMPUTER FROM 1 ROOM TO ANOTHER (laptop)) Savant's 2nd post concerning royalty is a great example of the BS that does occur. Guns N' Roses, the band that has one of the largest selling albums ever (Appetite for Destruction), received ~$.25/copy sold. Of course, they made much more on subsequent releases. But, again, this can be explained economically and I'm sure we all already understand the concept so it will be brief. I'll have to explain later....Civil Procedure is calling!