PATRONAGE
Deep down, avid audiences and fans want to pay creators. Fans love to reward artists, musicians, authors, actors, and other creators with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect with people they admire. But they will pay only under four conditions that are not often met: 1) It must be extremely easy to do; 2) The amount must be reasonable; 3) There’s clear benefit to them for paying; and 4) It’s clear the money will directly benefit the creators. Every now and then a band or artist will experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wish for a free copy. This scheme basically works. It’s an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is definitely worth something. One of the first bands to offer the option of pay-what-you-want was Radiohead. They discovered they made about $2.26 per download of their 2007 In Rainbows album, earning the band more money than all previous albums released on labels combined and spurring several million sales of CDs. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because they gain an intangible pleasure from it.
DISCOVERABILITY
The previous generatives resided within creative works. Discoverability, however, is an asset that applies to an aggregate of many works. No matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen. Unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable. And given the exploding numbers of works created each day, being found is increasingly unlikely. Fans use many ways to discover worthy works out of the zillions produced. They use critics, reviewers, brands (of publishers, labels, and studios), and increasingly they rely on other fans and friends to recommend the good stuff. Increasingly they are willing to pay for guidance. Not too long ago TV Guide had a million subscribers who paid the magazine to point them to the best shows on TV. These shows, it is worth noting, were free to the viewers. TV Guide allegedly made more money than all three major TV networks it “guided” combined. Amazon’s greatest asset is not its Prime delivery service but the millions of reader reviews it has accumulated over decades. Readers will pay for Amazon’s all-you-can-read ebook service, Kindle Unlimited, even though they will be able to find ebooks for free elsewhere, because Amazon’s reviews will guide them to books they want to read. Ditto for Netflix. Movie fans will pay Netflix because their recommendation engine finds gems they would not otherwise discover. They may be free somewhere else, but they are essentially lost and buried. In these examples, you are not paying for the copies, you are paying for the findability.
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These eight qualities require a new skill set for creators. Success no longer derives from mastering distribution. Distribution is nearly automatic; it’s all streams. The Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. The technical skills of copy protection are no longer useful because you can’t stop copying. Trying to prohibit copying, either by legal threats or technical tricks, just doesn’t work. Nor do the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these eight new generatives demand nurturing qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse. Success in this new realm requires mastering the new liquidity.
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Once something, like music, is digitized, it becomes a liquid that can be flexed and linked. At first glance, when music was initially digitized, it seemed to music executives that audiences were drawn online because of their greed for the free. But in fact, free was only a part of the attraction. And maybe the least important part. Millions of people might have initially downloaded music because it was free, but they then suddenly discovered something even better. Free music was unencumbered. It could merrily migrate to new media, new roles, new corners of the listeners’ lives. Thereafter, the sustained rush to download online music came from digitized sound’s ever expanding power of flowing.
Before liquidity, music was staid. Our choice as music fans 30 years ago was limited. You could listen to the set sequence of songs the DJs chose to play on a handful of radio stations or you could buy an album and listen to the music in the order the songs were laid on the disk. Or you could purchase a musical instrument and hunt for a favorite piece’s sheet music in obscure shops. That was about it.
Liquidity offered new powers. Forget the tyranny of the radio DJ. With liquid music you had the power to reorder the sequence of tunes on an album or among albums. You could shorten a song or draw it out so that it took twice as long to play. You could extract a sample of notes from someone else’s song to use yourself. Or you could substitute lyrics in the audio. You could reengineer a piece so that it sounded better on a car woofer. You could—as someone later did—take two thousand versions of the same song and create a chorus from it. The superconductivity of digitalization had unshackled music from its narrow confines on a vinyl disk and thin oxide tape. Now you could unbundle a song from its four-minute package, filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it. It wasn’t only that it was monetarily free; it was freed from constraints. Now there were a thousand new ways to conjure with those notes.
What counts are not the number of copies but the number of ways a copy can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, and enlivened by other media. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. What counts is how well the work flows.
At least 30 music streaming services, far more refined than the original Napster, now provide listeners a spectrum of ways to play with the unconfined elements of music. My favorite of these is Spotify because it encapsulates many of the possibilities that a fluid service can provide. Spotify is a cloud containing 30 million tracks of music. I can search that ocean of music to locate the most specific, weirdest, most esoteric song possible. While it plays I click a button and find the song’s lyrics displayed. It will make a virtual personal radio station for me from a small selection of my favorite music. I can tweak the station’s playlist by skipping songs or downvoting ones I don’t want to hear again. This degree of interacting with music would have astounded fans a generation ago. What I’d really like to listen to is the cool music my friend Chris listens to, because he’s much more serious about his music discovery than I am. I’d like to share his playlist, which I can subscribe to—meaning that I am actually listening to the music on his playlist, or even to the songs that Chris is listening to right now, in real time. If I really enjoy a particular song I hear on his list—say, an old Bob Dylan basement tape I never heard before—I can copy it onto my own playlist, which I can then share with my friends.
Naturally, this streaming service is free. If I don’t want to see or hear the visual and audio ads Spotify displays to pay the artists, I can pay a monthly premium. In the paid version, I can download the digital files to my computer and I can start to remix tracks if I want to. Since it is the age of flowing, I can reach my playlists and personal radio stations from any device, including my phone, or direct the stream into my living room or kitchen speakers. A bunch of other streaming services, such as SoundCloud, operate more like an audio YouTube, encouraging its 250 million fans to upload their own music en masse.