Menelaah Kembali Kontroversi e-KTP

Persoalan e-KTP kembali mencuat semenjak Menteri Dalam Negeri mengumumkan perihal moratorium untuk penerapan e-KTP di Indonesia, dengan salah satu alasan “servernya di luar negeri”. Walaupun masih belum ada bukti nyata bahwa ada server di luar negeri, namun entah kenapa hal ini jadi cukup menonjol. KPK juga mencatat bahwa pengadaan jenis chipnya juga harus diteliti, “apakah open source atau monopoli”.

Are [Digital] Music Services Scalable?

[Previously published on Medium.]

This article by Daniel Ek is quite a treatise — I’m not sure if any of the numbers, especially those that have a currency symbol next to it, are true, yet it does revisit many arguments and myths surrounding music services and the music industry in general.

Before I go into any detail, though, I would like to just point out that artists — while fully having the right to do so — are making a mistake in either rejecting Spotify’s streaming business model or pulling their catalogues altogether. Sure, in terms of dollar value, services like Spotify might not deliver the economies of scale of something like iTunes can deliver from downloads, but it doesn’t mean it won’t be larger in the future. The fall of the CD era should be a great example for all people wanting to sell recorded music, that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, that being, at the time, the CD. Progress of technology should provide an almost limitless amount of business model interactions, each probably providing small initial value but as a whole, increasing the potential revenue gained. Case in point — a small convenience store might only sell 10 ice creams a day, but imagine if you have access and distribution to 10,000 stores. The numbers don’t look so small anymore, do they?

Paid provided monetization without scale, free reached scale without monetization, and neither produced anywhere near enough money to replace the ongoing decline in music industry revenue.

This is probably one of my favorite sentences in the article, if it is indeed possible to like a blog post. It’s quite telling, really, and answers a lot of questions that I myself had building music services one way or the other for the past few years.