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LATEST ARTICLES

Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery:

This is the inverse of Swift leveraging her fans to acquire her masters: future artists will wield that power from the beginning (like sovereign writers). It’s not that “art is important and rare”, and thus valuable, but rather that the artists themselves are important and rare, and impute value on whatever they wish.

To put it another way, while we used to pay for plastic discs and thought we were paying for songs (or newspapers/writing or cable/TV stars), empowering distribution over creators, today we pay with both money and attention according to the direction of creators, giving them power over everyone. If the creator decides that their NFTs are important, they will have value; if they decide their show is worthless, it will not. And, in the case of Swift, if she decides that albums are valuable they will be, not because they are now scarce, but because only she can declare an album “Taylor’s Version”.

I found this article interesting. I’m not sure how much of it I agree with, and how much seems to be reaching to draw connections between unrelated things, but it did make me think.

The IT Era and the Internet Revolution

Stratechery
Jason Tate

Stratechery:

Newspapers obviously weren’t the only industry to benefit from information technology: the rise of ERP systems, databases, and personal computers provided massive gains in productivity for nearly all businesses (although it ended up taking nearly a decade for the improvements to show up). What this first wave of information technology did not do, though, was fundamentally change how those businesses worked, which meant nine of the ten largest companies in 1980 were all amongst the 21 largest companies in 19951. The biggest change is that more and more of those productivity gains started accruing to company shareholders, not the workers — and newspapers were no exception.

Unilever Buys Dollar Shave Club

Stratechery
Jason Tate

Unilever purchased the Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion. Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery, has a really good analysis of the purchase and how it fits with the disruptive power of the internet:

Probably the most important fact when it comes to analyzing Unilever’s purchase of Dollar Shave Club is the $1 billion price: in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG) it is shockingly low. After all, only eleven years ago Procter & Gamble (P&G) bought Gillette, the market leader in shaving, for a staggering $57 billion.

To be sure Gillette is still dominant — the brand controls 70 percent of the global blades and razors market — but there is little question that Dollar Shave Club is a much better deal, in every sense of the word.

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