Re: Will they work for free!

In an area like music, where copying and piracy are trivial to do, and old business models just plain don't work any more, it seems like the only way to beat that is to try something new.

And what has been tried for a while now in music is to fight the losses from pirating by making it up on volume, and by pricing in the realm of 'micropayments'. This is I think why iTunes worked and other similar systems failed: any song, just 99 cents, period. A full CD, by comparison, with 2-3 songs you want and five you don't, was stuck in the $20-$25 range way past the time it cost a lot to make the CD.

At 99 cents each, for only what you actually want, a song is an easy impulse buy on iTunes, easier even than in our youth, when we'd spend $5 on a 2-sided 45 record or EP with only one good song on it. Considering they remove the need for you to do any "work" involved with pirating or torrenting, it's STILL a pretty lucrative model.

Modern bands don't try to make their money off album sales anymore: the albums are more or less given away, sometimes literally, to build an audience that will evangelize for the band and help market it, creating demand. The band then makes the money off of live tours and selling merchandise like shirts and etc. This is 180 degrees out from the last fifty years of how the record business worked.

But it seems to be working, at least for some bands.

I expect some variation of this model is going to be applied to videos. The immediate easy thing I see is, giving away DVD's for a token amount, and paying for them with sponsorships and advertising on the disks, which only works better for the advertiser the more the disk is copied and shared around. By pricing the original so low a pirate can't afford to waste time cracking and duping it to re-sell for less, you defeat piracy as well, without any technical means needed. But you need to build your profits into the initial burst of prodcution, then basically write it off no matter how long the product remains out there and popular. Taht's hard for some people to take, basically, like having residuals but only for the first three repeats, on something like I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners or M*A*S*H.

If you're loking for other positives in this model, it certainly encourages much more actual production volume, just smaller margins on the individual products.