Porn and Music are the canaries in a coal mine

While it can be argued that the attention economy has hurt the pornography and music industries the most over the past few years, I’d turn that around and say they are both spheres where real innovation can be found. Two cases in point:

Andrew Chen: Freemium business model case study: AdultFriendFinder ARPU, churn, and conversion rates

NYTimes: Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan:

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand.

Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living.