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Wednesday, October 27, 2004

New Trend Alert! The Digital Boxed Set
We Were Ahead of Our Time Dept: Steve Jobs just announced the digital boxed set (see story below) and may have accidentally stumbled onto something new and even better for musicians with huge song catalogues - the one-time mega download of an artist's entire album lineup.

But guess what? We did the same thing over ten years ago. To celebrate our column's anniversary we jokingly created the "Alice and Bill Digital Box Set" and put it in a zip file on CompuServe. Users could download the whole year's worth of our column and every year after that we simply pasted in another 12 issues.

Wish we had those files...Anyone out there have a copy?

But keep this in mind: Jobs (and us -- Bill) has created a whole new way to package music, and eventually electronic books, back issue of magazines, and I'm sure movies, games, and on and on. This is only the beginning.
# Permalink Posted at 1:30 PM 6 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

Jim Baen has been giving away "digital box sets" of books for a couple of years now. Some books come with a CD of all the author's prior work for Baen on them, specifically folks like John Ringo, Eric Flint, and David Weber. All part of his little eBook revolution. He even puts up free copies of many books in non-copy-protected format.

# posted by Anonymous 1:55 PM

Interesting. Anyone know of other digital boxed sets floating around out there?

# posted by Alice 7:39 PM

The real concept here is that if they can sell music for about $0.33 per song, why are they charging $0.90+ usually.

# posted by Bill 7:42 PM

Linux Journal does a CD of all thier back issues: https://www.ssc.com/cgi-bin/lj/back_issue

# posted by Anonymous 11:36 PM

Though they're the first to do this in a big commercial way, I've no doubt that this is a reactive measure rather than an innovative one.
Most musicians of popular acclaim from the last 30 years have their entire collections being shared as single files on the P2P networks.
I do like seeing them moving in a new direction rather than trying to jam the old business model down our throats.

# posted by Tom 5:28 AM

Packaging a collection is hardly patentable Bill. Nice to know the limits of comment here. It takes a brave blog to put up with me. I was pretty sure you were chickenshit from the Hard Edge.

PenGun
Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

# posted by Anonymous 1:49 PM

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