One of the most exciting and transformative things about the world wide web at first was the concept of "disintermediation", i.e. that small independent shops could reach out directly to customers via their web site, or (using the example in the article) artists could reach out directly to their audience. What has happened of course is in many ways the exact opposite of this, the "re-intermediation" of even bigger and even more dominant organisations than in the pre-internet era. Not sure what the solution to this is though. Even if there were a standard easy to use open source set of tools for users to build their own sites/apps and ecommerce facilities with very little effort (little enough to compete with near-zero effort), which integrated with a variety of low cost hosting providers so they could deploy and run at little cost (little enough to compete with zero cost), you'd still face the problem of how users would find these sites/apps - via an internet search or an app store?
Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell.
Disintermediation is the cellist being able to sell on iTunes for $0 to anyone in the world, compared to having to ink a record deal and get lucky just to be in record stores.
>Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell.
What we wanted to see was people buying 90% of the time from smaller shops, directly from producer websites, direct artists sites, and so on.
Instead, the intermediation is just what happens the 10% of the time, which is probably even worse than what happened pre-internet (when e.g. music fans in England would get most of their music from indies, not from Spotify and co).
