Free Art, Intellectual Props, and Micropayments for Fame
I find the debate over micropayments that went on between Clay Shirky and Scott McCloud really interesting and important. First off, this is kind of ironic - McCloud said, in 2003:
“If paying is easy and fast, then yes, of course the price matters. We’re seeing right now how 99¢ a song looks next to 79¢ a song. It’s not hard to imagine that we’ll hit 49¢ before the dust settles. Audiences know instinctively that without the disks and trucks and cash registers, ten bucks an album is just too much—and they’ll act accordingly.”
Of course, audiences did (and continue to) overwhelmingly pay 99¢ a song when they choose to purchase digital music. Emusic’s subscription model is making a valiant showing, but the 79¢ a song pricing and all the WMA subscription services were hardly a blip on iTunes’ radar. I think this points to ease of use being a barrier when the difference in price isn’t noteworthy. In large part, Apple is increasing their computer market share and dominating digital music in spite of price because of their ease of use. A major part of the reason iTunes DRM is accepted while WMA DRM has been largely rejected by the marketplace is because Steve Jobs won concessions from the music labels early on (and fought to keep it, recently) that allows iTunes to be less restrictive to the point that many people never even know their music is DRMed. This ease of use, more than the price, is what keeps people buying from iTunes. And only recently have Macs and iPods been price competitive, yet millions of people owned iPods when they were priced well above industry norms.
So, back to micropayments. At this point, I, personally, would have to really want something and be confident that it would be valuable to me to warrant signing up for another system. It has little to do with the actual quarter it would cost me to buy a comic - I don’t want to manage another account with another payment system for something I’m not confident I’ll use often or to great results. Allowing users who have paid for the content to freely redistribute it is a great way to do this - if I had seen a number of McCloud’s comics and found them worthwhile, I would at least consider signing up for BitPass to purchase them myself. I think McCloud underestimates the mental hurdle to join the service in the first place, while Shirky overestimates the amount of mental commitment for each individual purchase.
Once signed up, I’d probably purchase bits of data quite freely. But selling me on your system will take a lot more than one comic - I need to trust that there will be enough there for me on a continuing basis to make it worth my while. And yes, contrary to what McCloud says, I think a lot of media is somewhat interchangeable. He’s right that news is more interchangeable than art, but it’s also more integral - art and entertainment is almost always optional. There are only a few creators in each type of media whose work I purchase the moment it comes out. As for the rest, I might one day buy it, if I happen to have a yearning or hear particularly good things, but in general I’ve already got enough of a backlog that untested content that comes with a price tag (in terms of time or money) has to have some sort of draw to hook me. I’ve recently taken to purchasing things that I know I’ll want immediately when I hear of them, simply to ensure it isn’t lost in the shuffle. This might make me more likely to use BitPass were I already signed up, but the hurdle for getting my business in the first place is set a bit higher - if I don’t immediately find the content on tap compelling, I’m likely to dismiss it outright.
The other question, from the content creator’s point of view, is whether you must choose either fame or fortune to pursue when you begin using the internet to distribute your work, and whether, as Shirky says, everything is heading toward free. The amount of freely available content is definitely contributing to that content backlog - there’s a lot out there that seems worthwhile and is both free and easy to get. I think Shirky is right in that it’s much easier for unknown creators to become famous than to become rich off their work. Everyone’s joked about being “internet famous”, a ranking which falls somewhere south of a D-list celebrity. I find his idea that digital distribution has broken the once-solid connection between fame and fortune that analog distribution imposed pretty compelling. At the same time, I think that McCloud has a good point that people will voluntarily pay for something they can get for free elsewhere (see bottled water), and that it is possible for content creators to make money through their work. I wholeheartedly would pay for a subscription to some of my favorite webcomics, and voluntarily gave money to Jason Kottoke, John Gruber, and Andy Towle because I find their blogs indispensable.
But I resent the notion that I should have to sign up for another service merely to sample a webcomic or, say, a longer piece by a blogger, when such things have previously been free. And, really, I’d much rather see Google ads all over a site than be bothered by such a service - then take them away once I’ve donated my $20/ year. What’s wrong with that less-intrusive model? It’s worked for millions of bloggers so far, and despite numerous claims that advertising revenue online can’t keep growing, the evidence points to the contrary. I guess I don’t understand why BitPass, which is more inconvenient for the user, no matter what McCloud says, is better than AdSense. Three years later, I’m wondering if sites which use BitPass are making more money than they would if they were simply putting ads on their site. Like it or not, much of the new content creation has been fueled by AdSense, and if I’m wrong and users aren’t so inconvenienced and BitPass is actually an effective source of income for content creators, I think we should know about it.
While the way that money flows to content creators is important, I have a feeling we’ll eventually figure out several ways that work for different people and different industries. In the end, Shirkey and McCloud will probably both be proven right, and everyone who’s looking forward now will have few problems making a living. I’m actually more concerned by the ways in which un-enlightened industries are trying to stop customers and fans from using their art and media in ways that humans have been using them for centuries.
I’ve written a lot about my feelings around intellectual property, copyright reform, and DRM in the past, so the articles from EFF and on The Grey Album didn’t dredge up anything I hadn’t read and thought about a lot before. The BBC article on the Warner-YouTube deal is good news, if hardly surprising - there’s no sustainable business model which includes suing your fans for lip-syncing to your music in public. I know we’re supposed to be grateful when big media companies come around on things like this, but they’ve behaved so badly for so long that I’m not willing to give them much credit for allowing the obvious things which they cannot prevent. Doesn’t a law become invalid if enough of the population is not abiding by it? Kind of like a grassroots overthrowing? I often wonder if that’s where we’re heading with all these IP issues.
I did really enjoy reading some of Negativland’s articles on their troubles with the music industry. Their thoughts on the nature of art in a capitalist society are great:
“No one much cared about the centuries old tradition of appropriation in classical music as long as it could only be heard when it was played live in front of your ears. But now all music exists as a mass produced, saleable object, electronically frozen for all time, and seen by its owners to be in continuous, simultaneous economic competition with all other music…
Society does not thrive on commerce alone, and an enlightened one would have long ago established the legal primacy of artistic intent and authority to be at least equal to that of private commercial activities when these two social forces come to blows within our free market system. One feeds the mouth, but the other feeds the spirit, and either one without the other can only be seen as a form of societal decline.”
They are certainly an articulated voice for the enlightened artist. I would love to hear their reaction to the notion that all content is trending toward free - I’m not sure if they would support that (as good liberal culture producers) or not (as a band which has earned significant income from their work). I wonder what they’d think of BitPass…
Activity