> While I think the author's heart is in the right place, I think he's fallen into the trap that nearly everyone in the music startup industry has fallen into: the content and distribution are the easy parts, getting people to give a damn is the hard part.
> The hard part in all this is getting it in front of users, and getting them to care about the music.
Similarly, the hard part of a political campaign is getting noticed. 100,000 people out there would be happy to run for president I'm sure; the vast majority of them are never noticed. Some few are. Fewer still are noticed a lot.
I would love to see a world in which money-buys-attention is not the primary rule that determines who gets the most powerful job there is. But turning on the firehose and flooding people with free ads from 100,000 presidential hopefuls, does not look to me like the way to make that happen.
How to make it happen, is worthy of some serious discussion.
Again, nice post. I think the first part is right on target.
> A solution is for the Internet industry to start giving free advertising to political campaigns on our own new media assets...
A comment by daeken on the "Can we kill the music business too?" HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3493002) has some ideas that apply nicely here, too.
From that comment:
> While I think the author's heart is in the right place, I think he's fallen into the trap that nearly everyone in the music startup industry has fallen into: the content and distribution are the easy parts, getting people to give a damn is the hard part.
> The hard part in all this is getting it in front of users, and getting them to care about the music.
Similarly, the hard part of a political campaign is getting noticed. 100,000 people out there would be happy to run for president I'm sure; the vast majority of them are never noticed. Some few are. Fewer still are noticed a lot.
I would love to see a world in which money-buys-attention is not the primary rule that determines who gets the most powerful job there is. But turning on the firehose and flooding people with free ads from 100,000 presidential hopefuls, does not look to me like the way to make that happen.
How to make it happen, is worthy of some serious discussion.
Again, nice post. I think the first part is right on target.