Business Insight Zone

Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m feeling some schadenfreude about this item in the news:

Sirius XM: What Price Bankruptcy?

Before the XM/Sirius merger was finally approved, I joined the chorus of those who argued that the combination of the companies shouldn’t be regarded as the establishment of a monopoly. The point wasn’t the medium of delivery — radio specifically via satellite — but the host of competitors that the combined company would continue to face, from terrestrial radio to the iPod to the whole world of Internet audio.

I’m also hardly the first to point out the bigger issue: that it doesn’t work for us to think of our media the way we’ve always thought about them. Literally, it doesn’t work, because we as media consumers are disintegrating the old ways of doing media every day.

In other words, the “magazine business” isn’t just about physical magazines anymore. In some cases, it’s not even primarily about physical magazines. Same with “radio,” “movies,” “books,” “television,” et cetera. The underlying content is still there, because people still like to listen to music, look at pictures, read stories, and so on. But the parts of these businesses that were about the delivery of the content — those parts have been changed forever, and they’re still changing.

Oh, but one more lesson from the Sirius situation spans the ages and all media: cash is more important than your mother.

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Related:

• Western Union and record labels.
• The social media have historical precedents.
• The Social Media Are Not So New.

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