Long or Short Capital

I’ve been thinking about music technology on a couple levels. First of all, I’ve been drawing together a proper music snobbery response to two of Craig Newmark’s posts, the first about how technology has killed the rock snob star and letting him know what the perfect album is. During this process, I came across this tidbit of information via CD.com: the overwhelming majority of people use only a paltry percentage of their iPod’s total capacity.

Why is that? The most obvious answer to me is that most people have such small brains that they can only handle having 375 options available to them. The second most obvious answer is that there is a constant 18 month moving average of 375 top 40 songs.

But why do people continue to buy iPod’s, and other digital music players, at capacity levels which they won’t ever approach? Because people are stupid and cannot properly gauge what they need. Alternatively, people are vulnerable to the power of marketing featuring Bono gyrating in bizarro shadow relief video style.

A running theme here at LOS.com is that in every group of people, most of them will be idiots. Applying this maxim here, in any group of iPod owners, most of them will be idiots. This is good news for Apple.com as any growth they hope to achieve, now that everyone and my mother has an iPod, is dependent on the continued existence of the Idiot Demographic (aka TID). Oh you have released a product which already far outstrips anything I need, costs twice as much, and is difficult to order? I must have the OmegaPod Mini Shuffle!

We think that you can always bank on idiocy. The post-war diamond industry was built upon this. So we will continue to focus on business plans and companies which are dependent upon TID. Future entries in this series include “Why own when you can lease for 50% more? The Rent-A-Center Story” and “SBUX: Hot water and filtered dirt for $4.50.”

Full Disclosure: JD owns an iPod Mini and an iPod Shuffle. He fully embraces his inner-hypocrite.