In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote an opinion piece titled “The Internet Is Ruining America’s Movies and Music.” She talks about how both businesses aren’t like they used to be, because of—you guessed it—the internet.

It’s easy to understand why many people in both the music and movie industries long for the good old days. They used to exist in government-sanctioned oligopolies where consumers had little choice in where their entertainment came from. Whether it was the three network TV stations, limited spectrum for radio, or your local theater being the only option for a movie. Here’s a passage from Wurtzel’s article:

In the era of the online music store — even if you buy from iTunes rather than stealing from LimeWire, the problem is the same — no one knows how to listen to a complete album anymore. Everything is slanted toward the hit single. This means that the music industry is oriented toward one-hit wonders rather than consummate musicians, and talent development is just not worth the trouble.

In reality, the opposite is true. One-hit wonders have always dominated sales in the music industry. This won’t change anytime soon—there will always be the megahits in the “head” of the long-tail. Places like iTunes or Netflix allow the obscure musicians and moviemakers to find some kind of an audience. Also, in the past, if I liked only one song from an artist, I may not purchase their album at all. Now, I can at least get the song I like.

In fact, 47% of our gross domestic product involves intellectual property (IP) transactions, and about 6% of our national worth — $626.6 billion annually — is from our copyright businesses. These are the segments of our economy that are suffering, or stand to do so, as a result of the Internet. The Internet, glorious as it is, should be thought of as the plague of postmodernity.

Because the internet (and computers in general) makes it easier to copy things, people like to blame it for destroying intellectual property rights. Yes, the internet has changed the dynamic for the media companies. But technology radically affecting an industry is nothing new. There are many reasons why the internet has changed media for the better.

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The following three videos from TED are not necessarily related to business or investing. But you should watch them anyway.

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections. [See Zander’s book “The Art of Possibility“].

Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It’s “ubuntu,” he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. [See his first TED speech here].

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. [This is an old talk, but if you’ve never seen it, stop everything you’re doing and watch it now.]

Guy Kawasaki points readers to a list of videos from the Consumer Electronics Show last week. The feed includes the keynote speeches and more specific sessions by CES presenters. Below are the links to my favorite presentations. The Bill Gates keynote (very funny) link on the feed is broken, so below is the link to a segment of it on YouTube.

Bill Gates keynote
International Retail Power Panel / Retailers talk about retail trends and technologies (includes heads of Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target)
Chip Heath keynote / One of the authors of Made to Stick explains the concepts of the book.
Michael Dell keynote
Top 10 Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

Seth Godin points readers to evidence that there’s real people working at Amazon.com (AMZN). This is just one of the many reasons that great service is sending more and more customers to companies like Amazon.

By doing something that customers don’t expect—Amazon stands out from the crowd. One person has a good experience. They tell their friends, and their friend’s friends. By using money that would have been spent on marketing on a better experience, Amazon gets very sticky customers for a cheap price. Widening the moat, one day at a time. It’s unfortunate that the stock is a little too expensive for my taste.

Make sure to check out the Amazon reviews of the Bic Ballpoint Pen that Seth linked to. Out of all the pens I’ve tried, this one’s the best. As noted, the ink consistency is just right for a variety of different papers. (Click the “Comments” of Matt Williams’ review - I’m glad some people have a sense of humor).

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts recently regarding the split-up of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). Basically, IAC is an internet/retail/media conglomerate that has been trading at a discount because of its complexity. Last Monday, Barry Diller announced that IAC will be splitting up into 5 separately traded public companies. I won’t go into too much detail as it has been discussed more thoroughly elsewhere. (A few good descriptions can be found here and here).

The two divisions that I’m most interested in as businesses are HSN and Ticketmaster. Below I go over HSN in more detail. Out of all five, I think that (depending on timing) HSN, Interval and LendingTree will have the most downside pressure once spun off.

I don’t know much about LendingTree. But with what’s going on in the housing and mortgage sectors right now, investors will probably dump it in favor of IAC’s more desirable properties. Namely Ticketmaster and the IAC internet properties.

Home Shopping Network

The Home Shopping Network (HSN) is the largest division of IAC in terms of sales. Out of the businesses that IAC currently owns, HSN was also the first to be acquired by Barry Diller. It sells a variety of products over the air, 24 hours a day, in over 89 million homes across the world. HSN has a 30% share of the home shopping market, with QVC(owned by John Malone/Liberty Media) and ShopNBC accounting for the other 60% and 10%, respectively.

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