Better Than Free?
In an age where a major portion of the economy is based in “digital goods,” that are transmitted through a system— the Internet— where they are of both necessity and choice endlessly and perfectly copied, and from which they can never be fully erased, why would anyone pay for these goods? After all, they’re basically free, right?
As a kid I did on occasion copy game software I wasn’t supposed to. As an adult I still have a few tracks in my music library that I’m really not sure where or from whom I got them. And as a software author, my livelihood depends on people actually ponying up for my digital goods. So I’ve been acutely aware of issues of copyright, and the ancient and seemingly endless technical and legal cat-and-mouse games played by producers and consumers of digital goods.
Take Linux for example: it’s a great operating system. It is widely used in both business and academia. It is more stable than Windows. It runs on almost any hardware. And unlike my favorite operating system, Mac OS X, it is free. So why hasn’t Linux taken over the world? The short answer is that although Linux is “free,” commercial OSes like Mac OS X are often “better than free.”
Kevin Kelly, in his article Better Than Free in the latest Edge, points out that not only is the number of digital goods available “for free” rapidly increasing, but so are the number of types of goods becoming digital, and hence free to store and copy. These products include the formulas for drugs and our own genetic codes.
So what will people pay for? Kelly’s article describes eight so-called “generative” qualities that keep people ponying up even when the goods themselves can be had for free. These qualities point to new business models that anyone who makes their livelihood from goods that are digital (or that will become so) should keep in mind. Here are my distilled summaries of these qualities— read his article for more detail and examples.
| Immediacy | “I’ll pay to have it now.” |
| Personalization | “I’ll pay to have it my way.” |
| Interpretation | “I’ll pay to get the most out of it.” |
| Authenticity | “I’ll pay to get the creator’s mark and warranty on it.” |
| Accessibility | “I’ll pay to have someone keep it safe and bring it out when, where, and how I want it.” |
| Embodiment | “I’ll pay to experience expressions of it that are highest-quality, or most unique and rare.” |
| Patronage | “I’ll pay to reward the creator for it, and encourage them to continue creating.” |
| Findability | “I’ll pay to easily find what I want, even when I don’t know what I want.” |
