Worth a read: The high price of cheap

[mdlbear]

Clay Shirky's article, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. The basic idea is that the mental transaction cost (among other things) of micropayment systems is going to kill them in the competition with free content. Most content is going to stay free. This is especially true of text, since the value of text increases considerably when it can be found by text engines.

Sorry, folks; artists are just going to have to find some other way to get paid.

Comments

Prediction of the end is... not quite appropriate, yet.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Let's not predict a dire end just yet, without hearing the response to the rebuttal?

http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros.html

There are several points that Mr. Shirky has ignored, as this article points out (such as "it gets more expensive online, via excessive bandwidth charges, to support fame -- thus 'free' content has a more severe barrier to long-term maintenance unless the 'fame' never occurs", and "on news sites, yes, it's a valid argument -- but if you're looking for Sluggy Freelance, would you read Boy Meets Boy instead?"... as well as "1% of computer users (those Mac users who bought OSX) purchased 10 million songs at $0.99 each, even in the face of a service that gave them a good chance of finding the same content for free".)

I haven't built my own opinion yet; however, I prefer to watch the debate a bit more before deciding that either scenario is correct. [I will, however, mention that I believe that many of Mr. McCloud's arguments are correct -- especially the 'subscription before micropayment is like marriage before dating' argument that describes what prevented me from paying for access to the London Times.]

[mdlbear]

Actually, I don't consider the probable demise of micropayments to be particularly "dire"; I favor low, compulsory license fees paid for by a tax or surcharge on network services. Or one could simply regard free music, etc. as advertising for an artist's other products and services.