Kevin Kelly wants to tell you about the Internet, what it is, what it does, and what this means for those folks who base their livelihood on selling things that can be copied, and eight good solid counter-strategies for selling beyond the copy. Sure I've told you about how the CD is dead, how Voice of Fire defeated the publishing industry, how the future of the music industry has nothing much to do with yesterday's songs, but Kevin just puts it all so straight and simple, I had to, well, copy it:

The simplest way I can put it is thus:

• When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
• When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
• When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well ... what can't be copied?
[ Better Than Free ]

What indeed. For starters, Kevin lists: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and 'Find-ability', all of them directly and succinctly elucidated for the price of a click-through, and to which I would add just one more, the price of 'Presence' because there is no digital or interpretive copy that can compare to standing in the presence of original greatness.

is the CD really dead? well ...

Now, given that list, given that knowledge that the CD itself is going to travel home, encounter a computer and BAM the contents instantly and effortlessly and costlessly duplicated ad infinitum, is there a point to the disk? Actually, yes there is.

But it is a fine point.

Kevin lists the reasons, although not explicitly, but I recently learned the reason from several friends who have discovered the real reason and purpose to the CD disk+jacket and they do include Authenticity, Embodiment and Patronage, but far beyond those, the CD can be proof of our existence.

Really.

These friends of mine all offer all their work online for free download, but they still sell their CDs ... hand-to-hand, directly to the people who see them, at the event, or after their performance, and that is the only way to get one. No record stores, no label-distro deals, no mail-order -- although two of them do have friends with stores who will sell the CDs, they say they sell nearly none from those shops and that this is a good thing because what they sell is the memento that you can carry home as proof that you were, once upon a time, hip enough to have bought into that performer's work.

CDs collected this way have a preciousness to each individual owner because they don't just tell the band's story, they tell the owner's history, they are proof they were there, they are something to tell the children and the grandchildren, they are relics, proof of who we were, where we went, what we'd done.

True, you can thread together a store-bought storyline, but does bought that one at Zellers in '71 really carry the same personal authenticity as having a crudely fashioned xerox-cover feltpen-signed disc where you know that moment personally?

What's actually on that disk hardly matters, as it should, as art should, the disk becomes a thing of itself, a thing with its own value and its own time-line and being part of that is worth a price of admission.