A Swarm of Angels is the first example I have seen of what I think is the new era in entertainment media. The basic principle is this: lots of people pay £25, a film is made, everyone gets to see the film. The basic principle is sound because the buisness model is correct.

What do I mean by that? Well look at what happens when you buy a CD. You pay for the CD, box, sleeve and the data on the CD. But lets now look at this a little closer, what did you actually want, what were you actually willing to hand over money for? What you wanted was for your favoured artist to produce some new work that you could enjoy listening to. You desire some particular artistic creation and you are willing to give up some of your hard earned cash to make that desire a reality.

However people don't tend to send U2 a £10 with a note saying "please make a new album". That's not to say that it couldn't happen (in fact if you go back to the classical area when princes used to be patrons of composers, then it did hapen - it was just one person with a lot more than £10) just that a mechanism for expressing that directly is not currently in existence. So instead we have to have record companies. They act rather like futures traders, but trading in desire for an artistic creation. They begin by attempting to pre-empt desire (or generate it through marketing), pay the artists up front as a gamble on the desire they think will exist after they have done their marketing, and then make a further gamble on more marketing to maximise the desire out there on the streets and finally attempt to cash in on it all by selling the finished product. The problem is that they are using the sale of a CD as a proxy for the creation of the art work. Through DRM they want to restrict you to a one-person universe. In that universe before you buy the CD the art-work does not exist, and after you buy the CD it does. Only the genie is out of the bottle, now that digital media makes copying and distributing artistic works easy, it is harder and harder for the record companies to maintain the model they use.

So that brings me back to the subject of my post today. The model used by the swarm of angels is one that gets rid of the middle man and all the inherent complications it brings with it. I want to see the film they are going to make so I pay them some money. They make the film. I watch it. I had always thought that this model would start with music - an artist produces some demos and says that if he can get £200 of sponsorship he will release a new song, if he gets £10,000 he will mix an EP, £50,000 (that's 10,000 people giving £5 each which isn't rediculous) and he'll put out an album. It will take people changing their attitudes, and it moves all the risk off of the record comapnies on to the consumers, but it is ultimatley more efficient and means that all produced content is free for everyone. Anyway, a film is an inherently more complicated starting point for this whole exercise, but it could work, and if it does work it will be a much more potent example of the potential of this way of doing things. There is also a snowball effect here - if people like Film 1 (whatever it's eventually called) then the chance of people pledging £25 towards Film 2 is much higher.

Whatever happens I wish the guys the best of luck

Here is this site's first sister site Joe and Holly's Wedding which unimaginatively enough will contain a log and details about our curent wedding plans.

The fact that there isn't much up yet is pretty accurate!

So, as I said, Holly and I are now engaged. I proposed to Holly here:

As she said yes I rewarded her with this

And on her hand it looks like this:

Not too bad, but not as pretty as she is!

And what is Feniom? Well, we are looking for rings for me! I saw one from these people that I quite liked, and we are going to see if we can find any more from them that are suitable.

jk