OTHER TECH

P2P. No longer the story. The press is burned out on it. As are the insiders at music conferences. Bring up file-trading, and they wince. But more people are downloading more files than ever before.

THE MAJOR LABELS. Playing a game of LOOK AT ME! As if they count. That's the big story of the decade - how the flattening of distribution eliminated the Big Four's monopoly. All that blather about P2P lawsuits, variable pricing at the iTunes Music Store, DRM - it's irrelevant! A sideshow. It's as if Smith Corona were putting out press releases on how the company is just about to turn the corner and typewriters are coming back!

MYSPACE. Ripe to be eclipsed. It's the social responsibility of Fox. Eliminating 250,000 profiles did nothing for the site's cred. And its slowness and crashability aren't endearing it to users either. But MySpace has two big advantages. One, free hosting of content, and two, social networking - with the latter more important.

If Viacom were smart, it would either start a social networking site tomorrow or buy Facebook.

Power isn't going to change hands forever. Someone's gonna end up the ultimate winner. And Tom Freston and his MTV team are the right corporate seers/managers for this. Because they always cross the line and stand their ground. The ultimate winner will not play by parental rules (or Washington, D.C., rules) but by Internet rules. Where parental guidelines are out the window and anything goes!

The press needs a hysterical story. MySpace is not leading to a plethora of child kidnappings and abuse (these have always existed). But baby-boomer parents, with a helmet-always-on mentality about their kids, are prone to hysteria. You can only win if you ignore them.

The ultimate site must have standard programming tools, so you can customize your own site. And it will focus on hooking people up. Music is secondary. Music is a different play.

A music site would be incredibly fast, incredibly simple, à la craigslist. With music-specific tools/content. Charts, tips, reviews. That's the musical future, not social networking sites (the social networking must be subsidiary to the music). It's about filtering what's available, not throwing it up against the wall.