The More Things Change...

I was reading Mark Cuban's Blog and his continuing thoughts on the proper path for music distribution. Some people may not remember, but it was actually Cuban's internet music/audio distribution company that made him the $4 billion. If nothing else, this is a man who honest to goodness DID figure out how to make billions of dollars on music distribution, the music industry probably should listen to him at least a little bit.

I know, I know...wishful thinking

I have to hand it to Cuban. He is in his own way a true "man of the people" as noted on this post on the Freakonomics blog. I am not surprised, at all. Mark has always been fabulously generous with access. When I wrote about the internet regularly in the mid to late 90's, Cuban gave me exceptional access. I would chalk all that up to his desire to create a frothing frenzy that would result in his company being bought for billions of dollars, but I dealt with plenty of people who played that game (and lost) -- Cuban never struck me that way.

He definitely is a guy who likes to be right and likes to win an argument, but he is also a guy who likes to learn. If you disagreed with him, he really was interested in understanding why -- not just so he could sell his company for billions, it seems to be one of the methods he uses to learn. I admire it.

What really surprises me is how much energy this guy has for all this AFTER he made the $4 billion. I have to be honest, I didn't get a dime of that $4 billion even though I am sure I was singlehandedly responsible for at least $8.7 million of the $4 billion -- even still, after Cubes made his money *I* didn't have the energy for all of this stuff. But he keeps chugging along.

I posted a comment to his post on the music industry and within minutes received an "Ah, the good old days" e-mail from Mark. Pound for pound, he's the hardest working man on the internet. Maybe that's $/pound...