After the age of scarcity
ignoredbydinosaurs.com
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Probably the best quote from the post. Soon the only way of making a living from a creative endeavour might be to be funded by patrons, then releasing your content for free. A generalized Louis CK model if you will.
Funny how that would bring us back to pre-18th century days where patronage was the only business model in town for creative types, with all the constraints that came with artists-patrons relationships.
Except in this world everybody would get to play Medicis or Louis XIV. I certainly hope that "crowd-patronage" will mitigate the limitations of artistic freedom that often came with traditional patronage.
Right now, selling your product to people (who don't get one for being a backer) functions as stage two. But I don't see why formalizing that process would be detrimental (it would also start providing some metrics on "success" beyond "funding success"). Though the issue of who gets to decide if the goal(s) is(are) met is an obvious point of probable contention which needs resolving (backer votes?, panel of experts at the payment escrow service?).
As a potential backer of something, I might like to know that there is going to be a continuing clear incentive on the table to keep the creator working through inevitable obstacles. That might increase the number of times I open my wallet.
And, since the musician/filmmaker/whatever has already been paid, a further stipulation on receiving the rest of the money could be that it's released under creative commons license, or something like that.
Seems workable to me. (Either way I'm confused about the downvotes.)
It wouldn't require that many fans either -- assuming each fan brought 30 bucks worth of merch and donations, you are looking at a middleclass wage at 2K fans. No matter how obscure your genre is, it ought to be possible to get 2k fans.
When I have to be a patron, I can't just lean back and honor good products by buying them. I have to look up names, sample their past work, invest money in projects that might suck.
I'd do everything that investors are paid for right now. Except I would feel I'm wasting my life away because I'm doing all this over €10, not €10m.
As far as the limitations that come with traditional patronage, I'd say the limitations that came with traditional record contracts were probably at least as restrictive since the label was operating under that assumption that this was a business deal at the end of the day, whereas the patron has no expectations for recouping their investment. At least not monetarily.
“Exclusive content” is the same idea: the only difference is that the discounted price is zero.
For physical content, scarcity still sells. Take Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter - selling huge amounts of specially made CDs, books, personal visits, etc.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palm...
The premise of most of them is that innovation its outpacing the hability of the average person to keep him self employable. That will lead to massive unemployment, bigger wealth inequality and social unrest.
[1] Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
[2] The lights in the tunnel. Where will advancing technology, job automation, outsourcing and globalization lead?
Software and virtual goods are getting more abundant and easier to access every day. I think the next big step will be applying those same lessons to the physical world. Freeing ourselves from scarcity.
(yes, I watched a documentary on Ray Kurtzweil recently and may be extrapolating and getting ahead of myself. But that doesn't mean it can't be true)
What RadioLab is trying to do here is using a "free gift" to goose the people who enjoy what they make into giving them some coin.
This is very common in public radio and TV, but usually comes in the form of a free t-shirt or coffee mug. In that case the "gift" has dual purpose - it also functions as advertisement and a physical reminder to go watch/listen to the thing you helped support.
I remember hearing John McAfee discussing trying to come up with a way to sell software, and say something like "here was this thing, that cost absolutely nothing to reproduce and transmit - and so I decided I could give it away for free, and charge for the updates."
Pretty much the Gillette Razor model for the 21st century.
But I like to wonder, are there physical goods that are close to this digital model - are there some things we can make so much of, that we'll never have to really worry about their production? More to the point, are we entering a period where the baseline is that a person who refuses to work can literally not starve to death because of abundance? If most jobs eventually turn to digital production that can be so easily shared like the article suggests, could we ever see a planet where there are simply not enough jobs and that working is optional since you could subsist on free products?
There is no free lunch. You need energy and commodities to get products, and these will be scarce for the foreseeable future.
We irrigate our lawns with drinking water.
We pay farmers to not grow (or to dump what they do).
The greatest medical malady of our poor is obesity.
1 in 50 live on government-provided welfare.
The "poverty line" is twenty times world median income.
Not quite the idealized form you have in mind, but getting there.
The best written one I've ever seen was Benn Jordan's "Hello Downloader", which is included in all of his self-released torrents: http://www.alphabasic.com/Please_read.html
A concert, for instance; lots of musicians make money through performance.
Depending on how crowd-pleasin' your creation is, or how well you've done at finding a crowd, there's a bit of tension possible; a husband who commissioned a Dali portrait of his wife ended up hanging it in his kennels to underscore what he thought of it.