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

[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.