A new creative ecomomy - based on mutual interests not Monopolies

At my recent speech during the Ars Electronica Symposium in Linz / Austria [note, the podcast is here - in English], this (below) was one of my points. Quoting Google China's fairly brilliant Kai-Fu Lee "... mutual interest, rather than monopoly, is the key to sustainable growth". 

This statement, I think, encapsulates an essential point: if the large players in the creative industries - and in particular, the music industry's used-to-be giants, the big independents and their new organizations such as Merlin- do not let go of their desire to continue to rule as monopolies that can dominate by force, or not play at all, then we won't have a sustainable future.

This is simply because of the well established mindset that the Russian President Medvedev (and lately, this writer...) has called Economic Egoism that is quickly becoming impossible to maintain in this age of transparency and 24/7 rivers of information. Update: a good review of Medvedev quotes on this is here.

Big Media's role as the sole authority, the controlling entity, the gate-keeper, the market-owner is no longer a given.

Currently, this drastic paradigm change is the main stumbling block to figuring out just how this new, open, connected and networked content ecosystem will actually work. It's not like it's a huge and unanswered question whether Attention-based income streams and overall revenue sharing scenarios can be more lucrative than the traditional copy and paid-per-unit model - the answer is a clear and resounding YES - the costs of distribution and marketing are much lower, and with an advertising market of over $750 Billion per year  (2012 estimation by EMarketer) there should be enough juice in the pipeline to pay for quite a bid of content.

The single most important issue here is CONTROL, not about money (and then, of course, closely followed by the issue of who actually who gets the money - the creators or the middlemen ;). Thus, my new book. Soon, I hope.