twopointouch

Via. Freeconomics Part I – or who is paying for your Free lunch? - broadstuff and found somewhere on slashdot.

“You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to their CEO or other high-ranking executive. Corporations should provide as many possible services for free, regardless of the time, capital, and human resources required to develop and run those services or products. Any efforts of corporations to charge money in voluntary exchange for their services or products is to be likened to highway robbery, extortion, or in the case of particularly large corporations, rape. I hope these guidelines have helped.”

I work closely in partnership with a music business site, MusicTank, and while those guys might seem like dinosaurs to the 2.0 crowd, there is one key issue that they are acutely aware of that always gets brushed over in the digital world. How do artists get paid? The idea of concert revenues or merchandise taking over from direct sales of music is bullshit. People will not buy things they don’t want instead of things they do. The same arguments are true of all content producers. This stuff, these people, these tracks, articles, pictures, whatever need to be paid for.

There’s so much inventory on the web - so many zillions of pages and zillions of users - that advertising isn’t working for publishers any more. So who pays, and how? I don’t really believe any of us know yet.