AxBlog

played risk for the first time ever tonite. well, the first time i’d ever played the board game version. mucho setup time, but once the game’s going… mmmm. hard to imagine i’ve lived without.

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was thinking earlier today while doing yard work — which is the best place to think — about how difficult it would be to set up a record label. since the distribution model for music will be (has been) changing, why not try to think up innovative ways of giving music to the masses? find some lucrative nitch and make a fortune, etc.

actually, that got me to thinking — are Make Money Fast business opportunities (no matter how sound) really worth getting into? i mean, assuming you are the first in a particular market — is being first really worth all of the risks that entails? aside from having an astounding market share, you’d also be making the first mistakes. and a monopoly facing competition for the first time can do nothing but lose market share. why not be the second or third into a neomarket, so you can parasitically feed off of the common knowledge obtained by watching the early birds make mistakes?

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another random thought: it took what, a generation and a half for sanfran to move from the hippie-free-love capital of the world to latte-sucking-ikea-shopping-yuppie-central?

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back to the lucrative business model for a record label. or rather, an interesting idea for any existing label: sell the album a month or two in advance, as a download. i’d pay $5 for radiohead’s newest (i’m still trying to decide if i like it or not) iff (… and only if) 1. it came with a $5 credit toward the purchase of a physical version, and 2. it came with a $2 credit toward another purchase for an album from the same company if i don’t buy the radiohead album.

this would do two things for the record company: it would tell them whether the demand for the album is high or low, so they could determine how hard they wanted to push the physical version. and it would also keep people sincerely interested in the album honest by offering that $5 cert.

if you get a copy from a friend, that usually means one thing: you wouldn’t have paid for it in a record store anyway. however, if you’re really interested in the album, you’ve put a $5 down payment on the physical album if you choose to purchase it when it’s released.

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back to the yard: i’m thinking of getting a reel mower when my carcinogen deployer dies. this, i think, would be extremely cool.