Content creators have no shortage of troubling questions to answer, but media entrepreneur Edo Segal poses yet another one to them:

Media scarcity is dead. In the future my son will have a flash drive that he will pay $29 for that will have the capacity to hold all movies and music ever released by a major label, studio or tv/cable network. It will take 30 seconds to clone the data over the network to a friend who will pay $14.99 for a device with double capacity a year later. How does the media industry survive such a coming disruption?

I would rather not insult my readers by repeating the same tired buzzwords that have sank entertainment industry discourse  over the past decade (MONETIZE!), so all I will say is that the easier your media product is to digitally re-create (i.e., a MP3), the less valuable it will be in the marketplace. Creating value means creating unique experiences that have consumer appeal in real-time that cannot be copied and mass distributed (or at least have less appeal when copied and mass distributed). This is why live music tours have held up as a primary source of revenue (at least for the big players).

In this world, distribution platforms are either your best friend or your worst enemy. Internet stripped media of its ability to create scarcity. Originally this was a positive as it forced record labels to stop charging $17.99 for a CD. Over time, of course, even the basic scarcity needed to create demand, and therefore value, has been worn away. Thankfully for the media world there is a little company called Apple. By established the the iPhone App Store, Apple has single-handedly created a new and thriving marketplace for media content. Who woulda thunk it??? A digital distribution platform where you can actually charge for content and consumers don’t necessarily mind paying for it.

As Segal puts it, the App store is a clean and consumer friendly eco-system in which media players can re-package content and either charge for it, or at very least have more control over its distribution. Very simple and based on early returns, very effective. Segal notes your friend and ours, Britney Spears, and her decision to premiere a music video on Twitter:

This drives people to Amazon or iTunes to buy the track but in the not too distant future it could be the start of much more than that. A complete experience will unfold that will be interactive and convert to new revenue streams. Not just a purchase of a track but of an app that pulls consumers into an experience and further promotes user engagement and virality. Media becomes a platform with a funnel of traffic and conversions to alternative revenue streams. All boosted by the frictionless billing that Apple has created in the App Store.

The App Store has resurrected the control of distribution that content creators once had too much of ($17.99 CD) and now have too little of (”hey buddy, can you transfer me your 10,000 iTunes tracks?”). The App Store is only the first step in a journey back from the precipice, but at least it’s a start.