The future of stealing music and everything else

Before technology allowed for recorded music, it was a pretty difficult thing to steal. You’d listen to the medieval minstral and maybe sing it to yourself after they’d left town. Heck, I’m sure that’s what they wanted. In those days, money only happened when they we’re ‘in the room.’ But then music changed…. it was something you could listen to when the musician wasn’t present.

When we entered the magnetic tape era, it become relatively easy to copy or ‘steal’ music for the first time. When I was a teenager there were a few ways of making copies of music:

Tape it off the radio: Wait patiently during the American Top 40 for your favourite song to come on, and hope like hell the DJ doesn’t talk over the top of it and screw it up. It was annoying to hear their voice each time your re-listened to it.

Tape it off the vinyl record: Have a friend who had the money to buy the record and tape record it onto your tape. We’d often do a swap – buy one record each, and tape each others – it was very give and take. A bit like the web should be – let others access your files while you access theirs. The basic economics of trade – by sharing we both had more.

Tape it off a tape: The old school double decker tape recorder – put the tape in and make another version off it.

Steal it from a music store: Heck, I’m sure some people did this, in those days it was the only way to get a perfect recording. All the other methods above had quality issues as the copies were imperfect, until…

… we entered the digital age. All of a sudden anyone could make a perfect copy, from perfect strangers. Napster…. Limewire…. Kazaar……Pirate Bay…. Youtube. Some got shut down, but the music never stopped, and the battle is still alive. It’s a battle people selling recorded music will never, ever win. The technology is an organism with its own agenda. So what happens next when there is no device or host of the music?

“What – no host? What are you talking about Steve?”

20 years from now you’ll have a chip with petabytes of standard holding capacity. It’ll be attached to your body, and most likely inside it permanently. It will be an extension of our brain capacity in much the same way as our notebooks, libraries and computers are today. Except, it will record everything perfectly. It won’t just be what we interpret, it will be an exact copy and it will be inside us. Every sound, every song, every visual, every movie we ever hear or see will be on recall on demand for us to re-listen to and re-watch on demand. We only need to be exposed to it once and we’ll have a perfect copy, forever.

Will that be stealing? 

It will be difficult to police, because the technology will arrive and be implemented into ‘people’ before most industries realise the implications – especially those pertaining to copyright. When our technology merges with our biology, when it becomes part of our permanent memory and experience how can it be stopped? How will corporations even know what we are holding in our organic data banks?

The connected augmented human

The reality is that all biology and technology is built upon the concept of ‘copying’. Everything from single cell organisms, to our DNA, to manufacturing, to emergent technologies. Copying is ‘the’ feature, not a bug. Any business model built on this idea that all copies are controlled by the originator is flawed. It’s a business model that worked for a blip of time for humanity during the 20th century – it was the anomaly. If any business wants to survive in the future, it should be built around the idea where things getting copied is what you actually want.

What your garage & spare room can teach you about the future

There’s a pretty good chance your spare room and garage is full of yesterday. The equipment, events, life stages, projects and stuff, but mostly ideas of what mattered then. Unless you clean it out (and I know you’ve been planing too for some time) it will be pretty hard to fit anything else in there. In fact, you might have been planning to clean it out to make space for that new project…. some clean floor space to get that idea underway…. some space to let the new come into.

Garage full of junk

Our brains are like that too. They need a spring clean. I’ll go even further and say we need to unlearn some of our outdated ideas from our past. Make room for the new truths of the world we are about to enter. The future will arrive regardless, best we make room for it mentally.

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The tradeoff Startup founders must never forget

Them:

So, we’ve just nailed our MVP and we are getting some real traction.  Next we’re going to raise capital, get some funding. We’ll probably go to the Valley as it’s easier to raise there. The valuations are more generous. We’re super pumped, finally getting our startup off the ground.

Me:

I thought you were an entrepreneur? 

Them:

What are you talking about? Of course I am – didn’t you hear what I just said?

Me:

Yes, but here is what I heard….  That you’ve finally got something people want, you’re probably solving a real problem and you’re on your path creating value for others, and eventually yourself. But in this process, you’ve got caught up in pop culture. You’ve forgotten that a big part entrepreneurship is independence – creating your own path. So, you’re off to raise money and get caught up in someone else’s objective – that of the venture capitalist. The same group of people who’d rather see you fail trying to build a billion dollar company,  than help you build a $10 million company. Their business model you see, is based on the former, not the latter. 

Venture Capital - the downside

If there is anything startup founders should remember it is why it’s worth doing at all. Startups are hard, and rarely a path to riches. Entrepreneurship is more about exploration and freedom than money. If you want to be rich, there’s more chance of that happening being an employee of a company that already has a billion dollar valuation.

In both cases: a funded startup or being employee – you’ll compromise control. In that case you may as well have the certainty of money that goes with stock options and employment. If you want to be answerable to anyone other than your customers that is.

It’s a rare event indeed when the deal terms favour the founder. Real entrepreneurs find ways to make money independently with that anti-modern thing called a profit. For every example of an entrepreneur succeeding with funding, there are 99+ that do not. It’s a bet I’d never take unless the VC came knocking on my door and / or I could maintain total control and independence.

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What do Google and George have in common?

Famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is known for doing lots of things; he invented the first graphical web interface, he said software is eating the world, and his motto is that he has ‘strong opinions loosely held’ – which I dig. We all ought to be able to change our mind when new information arrives.

And let’s face it, new information is arriving daily with new possibilities to match. Take this recent quote from Andreessen:

“One guy can now build a self driving car. We recently backed a founder who had built his own self driving car. Literally, one guy can now build a self driving car. Ten years ago this was like a DARPA Funded Grand Challenge Research Project. Five years ago this was a team of a thousand at Google. And now, it’s George. It’s one of those things (AI & machine learning) that looks like it’s about to tip, there is one George today, and a thousand Georges tomorrow.”

George & his self driving car

He was referring to George Hotz above.

The insight for entrepreneurs is that the pace of change is faster than a linear human mind can cope with. That idea or technology that you think is just a little too early probably isn’t. The most important thing in society, economics, business and Government today is the law of accelerating returns. And this is just one example of it in action.

If you you’d like to learn more, there is a rare opportunity to attend Singularity University in the Souther Hemisphere. An SU summit is being held in Christchurch this November. I’ll be there absorbing everything I can – why not join me? More details are here – I imagine it will sell out quick given the 2 year plus waiting in the Silicon Valley Campus.

This is the best efficiency hack I know

Have you ever noticed how you floss more frequently when a dentist appointment is looming? 

Our brains have a bias for focus on imminent events. Knowing this, here’s the best hack ever to GSD. 

Set up a meeting which creates a deadline before the work is done. And then make the meeting sooner than you think you can finish the work. You’ll find a way, simply because this leverages another human bias we have – our need to maintain social contracts. 

Getting stuff done is hard, sometimes the  thing we need to hack most in startups is ourselves. 

As seen on Hacker News


It’s easy to believe that reading Hacker News, Techcrunch, Quartz or Aeon is keeping us update with our industry.

It’s not.

Reading this stuff is the reality TV of the technology industry. It’s entertainment disguised as knowledge and personal growth.

All of us have already got a plan, and a list of things to do. If we invest more time executing that, there’s a far greater chance we’ll instead be written about in one of these forums.

So what's after the MVP?

First ever hammer

Ok, so we know we’ve gotta build an MVP.

Then, we go build our MVP.

Now what?

It’s time to find out if it was actually Viable. Find out if it was viable by the truth of how the market reacted. Did it solve their problem? If it didn’t we need to build a new kind of Viable. What we should never do is make it a bigger Minimum and hope that that increases the probability of the Viability.

Only once we have a proven “V” should we increase beyond the “M”. And we’ll know if we’ve nailed the MVP by the traction or lack of it we achieved.

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