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Title: Free Ride
Subtitle: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back
Author: Robert Levine
Narrator: Byron Wagner
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-25-11
Publisher: Random House Audio
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 21 votes
Genres: Business, Commerce & Economy
Publisher's Summary:
How did the newspaper, music, and film industries go from raking in big bucks to scooping up digital dimes? Their customers were lured away by the free ride of technology. Now, business journalist Robert Levine shows how they can get back on track.
On the Internet, information wants to be free. This memorable phrase shaped the online business model, but it is now driving the media companies on whom the digital industry feeds out of business. Today, newspaper stocks have fallen to all-time lows as papers are pressured to give away content, music sales have fallen by more than half since file sharing became common, TV ratings are plummeting as viewership migrates online, and publishers face off against Amazon over the price of digital books.
In Free Ride, Robert Levine narrates an epic tale of value destruction that moves from the corridors of Congress, where the law was passed that legalized YouTube, to the dorm room of Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster; from the bargain-pricing dramas involving iTunes and Kindle to Googles fateful decision to digitize first and ask questions later. Levine charts how the media industry lost control of its destiny and suggests innovative ways it can resist the pull of zero.
Fearless in its reporting and analysis, Free Ride is the business history of the decade and a much-needed call to action.
Critic Reviews:
BrilliantA crash course in the existential problems facing the [media]. (Richard Morrison, The Times)
"The most convincing defense of the current predicament of the creative industries that I have read. (James Crabtree, Financial Times)
With penetrating analysis and insight, Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard magazine, dissects the current economic climate of the struggling American media companies caught in the powerful fiscal grip of the digital industry. This incisive book is a start at an informed dialogue. (Publishers Weekly)
