ayesimo

The global economy is, if you think about it, a pretty incredible human achievement. We made up this thing called "money" and started using it to track and transfer value between people. Today, thousands of years later, billions of people have exchanged value between each other, building a nearly unbroken streak of increasing economic prosperity worldwide.

Imagine a box. No, a bigger one. Big enough to fit some people into, and maybe a few desks. It's like a little office, I guess.

When it comes to the future, I consider myself one of the optimists. But sometimes our collective optimism can run too far away from reality when the technology involved is complex. And the largest disconnect I see right now is this: Though the music industry has very many problems that technology can address and potentially solve, Bitcoin will not be involved in any of them.

More of the same ---------------- Last week at WWDC Apple announced something "revolutionary": yet another music streaming service selling a $9.99 per month subscription. For those not keeping track at home, that adds Apple Musicto the fairly lengthy list of competing services with the same music at the same price: Spotify, Rdio, TIDAL, Deezer, and not-into-the-brevity-thing Google Play Music All Access.

"Content" and Art --------------- Great art has tremendous emotional power, but its value isn't always reflected in the salaries artists take home. The cliché starving artist is not only a common occurrence but is, in the eyes of many, the ideal state. An artist not willing to sacrifice all for their art isn't trying hard enough. And an artist willing to "create content" just to get paid has sold out. Artists should make art just for art's sake, right?

As 2013 comes to a close, Spotify has published an in-depth article about their business. The report, [Spotify Explained](http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/), lays out the economics of their business in great detail. It even debunks some long-held beliefs about how Spotify works (e.g. they don't pay per play, so most of your money goes to popular artists no matter how indie your listening habits are).

In the early days of Dropbox, we spent a whole lot of time coding and not very much time thinking about business strategy. So whenever anyone asked me how worried we were about competing with the myriad well-funded companies in our space, I mostly just shrugged the question off. Paul Graham recommends worrying about [product, not competitors](http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html). Our strategy, if we had one at all, was simply to build a killer product, and let it speak for itself in the market.

Ancient History --------------- There was a time, a storied era, not so long ago, when men were men and companies had names that meant something. When you heard that someone worked at [Mumford & Sons](http://www.mumfordandsons.com/), you knew something about the man. Namely, his last name. And the fact that he, along with his familial business partners, was running a business that was successful enough to keep food on their table. Based on the fullness of his beard, you may have even been able to guess whether he was Mumford or just one of the sons. Nowadays, if someone tells you she used to work at [Jooce](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/jooce), you know only two things about her: One, she's spent a decent amount of time spelling J-O-O-C-E for folks. Two, she's spent even more time explaining that [Joost](http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/joost-acquired-adconion/) was another company entirely.