Digital Entertainment is changing the way we live. Starting from the early 1990’s, fundamental changes in markets, content and technology have altered the traditional entertainment industry, creating a significant and growing shift in how people interact, socialize, relax, and spend their time – at work and at home. The challenge and opportunity for organizations, from telecom operators to media companies to publishers, is to capture a business model that provides services and functionality within this new Digital Entertainment space that will capitalize on content through the current disruptive evolution cycle and into the future.

In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type print in Europe. Gutenberg was as much an artist as a technologist. While his friends marveled at his apparatus and the first print that left his press, a poem, he quickly discovered that he had to align four important things to recoup his loans and investments: advertising, distribution, content, and audience.

Using his craftsmanship as an engraver and goldsmith, Gutenberg decided to print the bible and then decorate and illuminate it by hand. The bible was his advertisement targeted at a wealthy and literate audience – the church – and contained probably the most sought after content of its time. With this advertisement, he was able to secure a deal with the church for thousands of indulgences, an arrangement equivalent to printing rights for a publisher – and the publishing value chain was born.

In the early days of printing the church appears as an early technology adopter: 20 years later Gutenberg’s process was adapted for sheet music, and the church was the first to use it on a larger scale. Crossing the chasm to mainstream was much easier with music than with the written word, as polyphonic music created a need for documentation capturing information beyond a single monophonic melody. While the church paid more per print, the mass market of entertaining music had economies of scale; printers of small batches for traveling „Meistersinger" discovered the long tail; the so-called „Guild of Announcers" was responsible for the advertising and viral marketing. But it was not the printers and technologists, nor the composers and content providers, nor the stores and markets that dominated the music industry, but the sheet music publishers. They dominated the music industries with an almost unchanged process and approach for nearly five centuries because they understood two key concepts:
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