I’ve been continuing to ruminate the marketing paradigm shifts that need to occur as products go completely digital. Will consumers still go to Tower Records to browse for albums when they can be downloaded online? Will music stores disappear faster than bookstores? You don’t really experience the physical nature of a CD. It just disappears into the player. If marketing folks want to keep us coming to stores and shelling out cash for physical items, I’m sure they will devise clever ways to continue to use up petroleum and trees. But it will be entirely more convenient to download music off the ‘net. I’m just not sure how I would package that up to give to someone else as a present. Will someone invent digital giftwrap? What would that be? And what about album cover art? Perhaps the music player of the future will have a screen to show artwork instead of just text to identify the song and artist. John Perry Barlow’s article “Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net” has some relevant thoughts on this topic. If you don’t want to slog through the entire article, go to his conclusions at the bottom, the last of which is: “in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.” And, not surprisingly, he has a lot to say about the inadequacy of current intellectual property law. Many thanks to Dru for sending me the Barlow links.