Sunday 9 October 2016

How can creative people make money in the electronic world? I asked Eric Schmidt of Google in July 2016

How must copyright holders make money? I asked Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet/Google.

The Electronic world has changed all that controlled selling of creative content. I asked Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet/Google how creative people can be rewarded and compensated when search is so precise it will find a version of creative content available for free, somewhere out there.

He answered as you can hear here. Listen to minutes 6-9.


Eric Schmidt says in July 2016 at the Google Campus in London, with sincerity, that they struggled with this. 95% of the revenue comes from branding, merchandising, endorsements and so on. Revenue comes from adjacent activities. What seems to have happened is that you are able to monetise fame. The product remained very popular when ‘ubiqutous’ and available electronicall, but you made your money in a different way. Writers are making more money than they did 20 years ago because of higher speaking fees, endorsements and so on. ‘We looked at this, and in aggregate the size of the total market place for the type of content you are talking about has grown significantly in terms of total dollars. But your strategy to make money has been forced to change. The model changed from monetising your creative output directly to one as you say, in an adjascent way.’

This means that owners of copyright, the authors, musicians, journalists, teachers and the publishing companies need to accept that their creative work will be electronically available. They must therefore find ways to make money in adjacent ways. Musicians play more concerts, where they can control the rarity value and keep ticket prices high. Authors can go on speaking tours or endorse products. We see commercial relationships which artists of the 1970s would have frowned on as selling out! How the world changes. It changes in so many ways as owners of IP find new ways to do the same old thing: follow the money.

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