Jason Fry’s impressive article in the WSJ yesterday echoes much of what we’ve been saying around here for some time. He talks about the foolhardy attempt by some Belgian media outlets to sue Google for linking to their content without paying for it. More generally, however, the article describes something of the havoc that traditional media are seeing.

The center is losing control:

Whether or not content creators like it, this is the age of fragmentation. In industry after industry, consumers are voting with their feet against old methods of packaging and distributing information. They want to pick and choose what’s of interest to them, without having to pay for or wade through what isn’t.

While people are consuming content on their own terms …

If you put executives from a TV network, a record label and a newspaper at a bar and let them get to sharing their troubles, they’d find themselves telling much the same story: Their content is being chopped up and reused in new ways they can’t control.

This is proving highly disruptive…

When digital technology broke albums into individual songs, consumers voted against the album by either stealing individual songs from peer-to-peer networks or buying them from services such as iTunes. The music industry has been left scrambling to make the transition from the dying old model to an uncertain new one…

But it’s inevitable, given the effect of the internet

Ultimately, what content creators face isn’t new technology, but a sea change in consumer behavior. Consumers don’t want to go back to watching TV at set times, buying albums or reading newspapers page by page.

However, lest we get too cocky, he also has this to say:

… at times Google and its champions fall prey to thinking that they know what’s best for everybody else… no one likes being told what’s good for them…

Ahem, yes. And finally…

VCRs, which let consumers “time-shift” programs and skip the bits that didn’t interest them… Despite becoming nearly ubiquitous, VCRs had too many moving parts — clocks, tapes, labels, rewinding — for most consumers to take full advantage of their time-shifting abilities. In practice, VCRs’ primary use was to show rented movies.

The man makes sense.

Via, the indispensable Buzzmachine.

Ken Carroll