Bryce Blakely's Blog

If you’ve been even passively following the media over the past few years you know that the music industry has a problem. A very serious problem at that, pricing; what do you charge people for something they can just as easily get for free. Any economist will tell you that any rational person will download music for free, it costs too much money to not. So the problem is transformed from what do you charge them, to how? Justification? Pleas that piracy is destroying the industry the consumers so love and that they are thereby hurting the musicians they love when they download illegally. Business world pay attention, this is how you pricing in the music industry of tomorrow is going to work. Members of the UK alternate rock group Radiohead decided for their 7th release, In Rainbows, that the band would sell it independently online. The band decided that the consumer would decide what they would pay for the album, you could say pay $15 on your credit card or simply type in free and download it. In Rainbows outsold Hail to the Thief, the band’s previous album with Parlophone Records.

A free market is a fairly straight forward concept when you break it down to its fundamentals. Private organizations provide the goods and services for the consumers for private profit. There is no grey area here. This is a black and white concept, it is capitalism. In 2008 a new concept was introduced, businesses can be “too big to fail”. Private companies, usually banks, can grow so big that they literally are supporting the whole economy and if they were to fail the entire economic system as we know it would begin to collapse. When the government supports a corporation with capital it’s no longer capitalism, or is it? Could the economy really fail as a result of the failure of one or more major entities? Is capitalism a system that allows for infinite growth or is there a limit where the system ceases to be feasible?

To Google; to search the internet using the Google search engine, I googled, he is googling. If you ever want to know anything you can google it, find something, google it, go somewhere, google it. It would not be too broad a generalization to assume that most students at this university have told someone or been told to google something. As a matter of fact I “googled” Google to get the definition for the intro to this post. In the last few classes we extensively covered positioning, branding, getting your brand established in the public eye. Google is a textbook example of this theory. The name Google has become so ingrained, so associated with the service Google provides; internet search engine, that it has become that service. You’re not searching for something on the internet, you’re googling it. The name and the action become subconsciously associated, you’re thinking of it even if you’re not. 91 million searches per day, that’s how positioning works.

…But if you’re still not sure you can always google it http://www.google.ca/

It’s been over a year now since the bailout and reforms on America’s big three automakers and other firms was instated and things are getting back to business as usual. In February of last year the Obama Administration mandated that all firms receiving “extraordinary assistance” from the government were to have certain limitations imposed on them. These limitations included a $500,000 salary cap for top executives as well as restrictions on severance packages (which had come to be known as “golden parachutes”) and policies on luxury spending. Fast forward to the present day, the United States Government still owns 61% of GM but has for the most part reversed many of the previous year’s pay and benefit cuts. With the salary cap no longer in effect GM’s newly appointed CEO Daniel Akerson (pictured here) is set to receive $9,000,000 in annual pay, just barely over a year since the company’s utter bankruptcy. How does GM justify paying executives this much money annually when the company only recently recovered and only recovered as a result of the $50,000,000,000 granted to them by the United States government?