Robert Frost, storico della tecnologia e dell’economia,
insegna alla School of Information,
University of Michigan. Il suo ultimo paper spiega una possibile via d’uscita dalla crisi del mercato della musica. Una soluzione che potrebbe piacere a tutti, salvo che alle etichette musicali.

Link: Rearchitecting the music business: Mitigating music piracy by cutting out the record companies.

«Disintermediation — the process of removing superfluous agents in a transaction chain — has been a major promise of e–commerce. Disintermediation offers the benefits of lowering prices to consumers and a better information–feedback loop between producers and consumers. In this paper, I propose a systematic model of disintermediation in the recorded–music business. Were such a model successful and tied to digital distribution, prices to consumers would fall considerably, artist compensation would rise, online piracy would drop, and the information–feedback loops necessary for signaling consumer tastes back to artists would become far more efficient as information asymmetries were mitigated. Such a model would leverage recommender systems as a way to determine consumer choices beyond the use of simple sales figures».