What the Internet is showing us is that there is a great deal of things that we previously believed to be non-substitutable that are in fact quite substitutable. News, right. Straight up news reportage. If the New York Times puts up a pay wall, you simply go to Google News and you can find another news site that carries essentially the same story that doesn’t have a pay wall or where you don’t have to register and still can get the same information. So to the extent that the New York Times long-term business fortunes rely on this strategy that even though people come to them, even though they are harder to get to than anyone else, because the brand New York Times is more valuable, I think is a doomed strategy. And for artists this is really becoming the case. Where I sit down to do something in front of my computer to kill an hour I can look at pornography, I can read a novel, I can get into instant messaging, I can play a massively multiplayer on my role-playing game and they are all one click away to finding the thing that’s just as fun as the thing that I was planning on doing. If the thing that I was planning on doing costs too much, or is to hard to get to, is a pain in the ass, or is down, it is actually getting easier every day to find something else to divert yourself with for an hour or two, or day, or whatever, and something that’s just as good, something that’s just as educational, uplifting, interesting.
