Best Idea
Here is a free idea. I was going to write it up as a business proposal, but realized this idea is so good anyone that can’t see it’s genius in a few sentences is to dumb to use it good anyway. So here it is, in just a few sentences, for all the people that know a good idea when they see it
Get ready…
Magazines on tape.
Let the idea sit there for a minute. Let it settle in and simmer. Really own that idea for a sec. Yeah, you are starting to get that warm tingle down in the nethers aren’t ya? Ok, here is the strait dope, every month customers get a magazine tape “mailed” to their house. Titles such as Home and Garden, Vogue, Ms. and Boy’s Life can now explode in the ears of happy customers the way they have exploded in their eyes for centuries.
You will be rich and famous beyond your wildest dreams, assuming you do everything right and avoid the pitfalls, which I think we can agree are pretty obvious (the pitfalls) and therefore easy to avoid (by virtue of being obvious).
Let me address a few question’s I’ve gotten over the years.
Why not use mp3 (or 4 or 5 or whatever is hip right now) or CD’s for these magazines on tape?
Whoever asks this question is obviously illiterate or just doesn’t get it. Does the idea say “magazine on digital”? No. It’s magazine on tape. The reason for this is that fragile nature of cassette tapes is one in spirit with the immediacy of magazines. No one wants to keep a magazine more than a month. Let’s be honest here, most of us only want to flip through them once, twice tops. A Compact Disk, with it eternal and unchanging quality, would make the average customer feel that they would have to keep them forever thereby destroying the dynamic of the customer/magazine relationship.
Wouldn’t that be expensive, all those cassettes I mean?
Have you ever taken a walk downtown? Have you ever stopped at a flea market? Shit, man people are GIVING cassette tapes away. I could probably get enough tapes for Maxim’s entire back catalog at a single swap meet. A little leg work and I assure you there will be no end to the supply of cassette tapes. Ever.
So how much money do you think I can make with this idea?
I’m estimating somewhere in the tens of hundreds of dollars. Perhaps more.
Should I partner up with the magazines or work independently?
I suggest independent operation. Buy the magazines and read the articles into your cassette tapes yourself. It will be a little more work on your side, but in the long run, both you and the magazine (the printed kind) industrial complex will benefit. Plus you get the satisfaction of knowing it’s all your own original work.
Isn’t it illegal to read magazine articles into a tape recorder and sell the recordings?
I get this question all the time. The simple answer is, probably not. The complex answer is, as indicated by it’s designation, very complicated. It has to do with converting printed words into airborne words (via the reading-speaking transference process) and how, via that process, it (the article, I mean here) is a completely different kind of thing than what it was before. I don’t really have time to get into that here, ok? You should be fine, that’s all you need to know.
What do people without cassette players do if they want magazines on tape?
I’ve heard a few variations on this one. The core idea here is that some naysayer is concerned a portion of the population is getting excluded. The answer to this can be provided by the magazine industrial complex itself. Are they excluding illiterates? You bet. What do illiterates do if they want to read a magazine? You guessed it, they learn to read. Same idea applies here. If a customer wants magazines on tape bad enough, they will buy a cassette player.
Do you have any cost saving ideas for distribution?
Yes. Mail is expensive. Children + bicycles (their own, do not supply them) + candy = dirt cheap distribution. Now, I read somewhere that it’s a crime to shove things into people’s mail boxes (federal offense or whatever, I don’t know, I don’t remember voting on that one). If it is, in fact, illegal to put things in people’s mailboxes then it could only be illegal for U.S. citizens because our law only applies to us. With me so far? Ok, so you need a living person that is not a citizen, because then, since the laws only apply to Americans, it would not be illegal. Ok, we all know immigrants are untrustworthy, so that idea is off the table, but children are mostly trustworthy and easy to threaten and manhandle. This is why you need children. Children, by virtue of not being legal voting age aren’t really citizens and are thusly not bound by law. See? Easy, legal and cheap.
As a side note, if you are going to make your own stamps and “certified US mail” stickers, as I highly recommend you do, you’re going to want children doing that work as well, for the same “immune to our laws” property I’ve just finished explaining.