Pirates Dilema

I just finished a book this past weekend, "The Pirate's Dilema: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism" by Matt Mason, which i would highly recommend.
Basic premise is that a lot of new business models start outside the law before they become accepted and adopted by more mainstream culture. It argues that instead of legislating against such new 'illegal' methods, the market should be (and already is in many smarter cases) seeing it as the more cutting-edge competition that it is, and needs to rise to the change in order to remain relevant themselves.
The idea is quite simple, but the book itself is very well written and runs through a whole list of pop culture's origins to illustrate the point. Its a fun read and covers pirate radio, graffiti, the remix, disco, reggae, video games, hip hop/sampling, p2p, and how eventually each of these areas has given rise to whole profitable markets and new ways of looking at and consuming art/music/entertainment etc.
Have a look at Amazon for more of a description. The author also has a blog going at http://thepiratesdilemma.com/ following the same ideas. Theres a link on there today to a new article he has written for TorrentFreak which is well worth reading, dealing specifically with how the entertainment industry has to adapt to survive.

Labels: books, music industry, record industry, reviews