ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a historical and comparative look at the strategies of the music industry in the face of the digital development. It analyzes based on a variety of sources, covering digital strategies and developments in the Norwegian and the Nordic context. The chapter provides "a critical history" of the different and changing strategies of the two industries in their encounter with online distribution. The music industry and the newspaper industry chose diametrically opposite approaches to the Internet. The newspaper industry established online papers where the content was freely available for the users and bracketed the question of earnings—in what editor Kvistad called "a seizure of commercial idiocy." According to exponents for the somewhat loose theory tradition connected to the term "the new economy," the future was looking bright for producers of cultural content in the 1990s. Rifkin explained that we are faced with a shift from industrial production to cultural production.
