Frankly, I believe that power in digital media has shifted too much to the consumer side. That’s not healthy, because an industry that doesn’t make enough money can’t produce decent products. The goal in any market is equilibrium, not the total dominance of either the supply or demand side.

Of course the key to bundling is to have exclusive content that is highly desirable and not available anywhere else. The problem is that media companies seem to have a hard time understanding what that could be (hint: it’s not slightly re-edited news agency material). And they don’t get that there are multiple target markets that you have to serve with differently priced packages, because this didn’t exist in the offline world.

two examples: back in the old days there was only one way to get the articles you were interested in: buying the bundles (aka the newspapers) and that’s why you used to buy the whole thing – you had no choice. but that world is going away now and it makes sense from a consumer point of view. (and don’t get me started on paywalls, putting a paywall around your content diminishes the content no matter how you bundle it. you can only successfully charge for the content directly if you’re offering something of high value that at the same time your consumers don’t want to share with others, such as financial news (I agree on you with your examples for the FT))

you can bundle the hell out of your articles but the first moment a competitor offers substitutes for free he’s going to get momentum and you’re going to lose (in the long haul anyway).

the second one is the music-business: it made totally sense to break off the LP-bundle. it was an artificial construct anyway coming only from the boundaries of pressing music on vinyl. (and really: I don’t know how many LPs I bought back in the day with one or two killers and the rest fillers. Thinking back on it it was most of the time a simple ripoff. I can live without that, thanks.). a lot of people are buying single songs rather than whole LPs when they get the choice.

here’s the point: if itunes would only allow to buy whole LPs (and bundled EPs and “Maxisingles”) Amazons MP3-Shop or someone else would jump in and offer what the consumers want.

The same goes for label against label and news-company against news-company (the first unbundling its offers would have seen an increase in revenues and the others would then have followed anyway. it was inevitable (you could even argue with game-theory on this one)). the online-market is highly competitive hence you should think twice before taking value for your customers out by bundling your products. you might just open up an opportunity for your competitors.

in most cases the web broke bundling because the market demanded it. also the more you bundle your stuff the more you take away from the advantages you could get out of the long tail (hence aggregators like itunes and Amazon will always go for unbundling stuff or at least offering consumers the choice). some single companies might lose revenues because of it but that doesn’t mean they ever had a choice.