And by that I don't mean that music artists are not producing music but they are changing their businesses. This week the Apple-Beats acquisition became official. At the same time, there was news that Beats was not taking its design team with them to Apple. Suffice it to say, with that went my theory that …
Continue reading "Are music artists exiting the music business?"
Yesterday, Google pivoted on self-driving cars. Yes, I know we don't normally describe established firms as 'pivoting' but the notion applies when the same core idea (in this case, autonomous vehicles) is reapplied to a different customer set. For the self-driving car, this moved from retrofitting existing cars to Google building its own new and …
Continue reading "Will regulators really hold back self-driving cars?"
The diffusion of the internet has had varying effects on the location of economic activity, leading to both increases and decreases in geographic concentration. In an invited column at VoxEU, Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and I presents evidence that the internet worked against increasing concentration in invention. This relationship is particularly strong for inventions with …
Continue reading "Did the Internet Prevent all Invention from Moving to one Place?"
Piracy is everywhere but in music artists' supply. That's the strong impression I get from the academic literature on the subject. There is evidence that piracy has reduced straight-up music sales revenue but overall it is unclear whether digitisation has impacted adversely on artist returns (because they make up losses with concert revenue and the …
Amazon.com, in its zeal to keep book prices low, is in a large fight with Hachette -- the smallest of New York's big 5 publishers. According to the NYT, it started with tactics to crimp Hachette's sales and has now apparently led to the removal of many Hachette books including, ironically, the paperback version of Brad …
Continue reading "How Hachette could fight back against Amazon"
We all know the issue with copyright and patent enforcement whereby some creative upstart uses some IP without permission only to be slapped down by the IP rights holder. And we all know that economics does not help us out much here to sort out what to do beyond: if you could just work out …
Continue reading "Income-contingent IP enforcement: Paying for your right to party"
For the last few weeks I have been working on a paper out of the notes I posted on weak and strong net neutrality. The paper is now done (at least as a working paper) and it seems appropriate to summarise its main findings as some were unexpected. The first finding is one that I had …
Continue reading "Net neutrality may be harder to achieve than we thought"
The recent interest in Net Neutrality has been spurred on by Netflix's fight with Comcast for a fast lane. The issue of whether a lack of access to a fast lane might stifle innovation is a big one (see here for an impassioned plea) but what I wanted to consider today was the more basic …
The New York Times Innovation Report that was "leaked" last week is a fascinating document. It covers the struggles the NYT is facing in many respects. Well, I say in many respects because while the report was at a solid level explaining trends with a few graphs one cannot help but wonder what is being made …
Apple are reportedly going to buy Beats Music for $3.2 billion; a number that would have been big news a year ago but is modest news today. Beats is a very interesting entrepreneurial story in of itself and I encourage people who want to know more to read this Inc piece from a couple of …
Continue reading "Speculating on Apple-Beats: It's the capabilities"
Digitopoly 