Wouldn't it be nice to know how markets change?

All the world's a stage - and markets must be too. So one way of finding out how markets really change may be to analyze our stories about them.

One such narrative is the war on music downloading, the story that has taken us all the way from the rise and fall of Napster.com to the triumph of Apple's iTunes Store - and beyond. I analyzed this market story from 1999 to 2006, seven long years.

The amazing thing about stories is that they always follow a particular plot. It's never entirely the same but if I've seen "Romeo and Juliet" and I know it's a tragedy, I will have a pretty good handle on predicting the action in, say, West Side Story...

I found that market stories follow a distinct narrative as well. I call it marketplace drama.