Warren Ellis says it far better than I could ever.
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
This may end up as a dry run for a Brainpowered column.
Bear with me.
I did a Brainpowered a few weeks ago about microcasting —
using the net to aim relatively cheaply produced content at
niche audiences underserved or unserved by what we might
call Big Media. These audiences, often existing within the
loose connections of Dr Josh Ellis’ “taste tribes” can and do
serve the dissemination of the material through word of
mouth and collective net presence.
The trick, of course, is making that earn money.
I know a lot of people who give away their material free, in
the hope that the people who like it will buy it as a data
object, like a CD. This can work very well, of course — if
you’ve got a CD burner, if you have a record deal, if you
have a publisher, whatever. Selling bits — an mp3, a
PDF, a Flash file, a GIF sequence — is something different.
There’s a crucial hesitation point in using a credit card on
the web. It’s not one-click, it’s real money, suggests a
significant purchase and can be a real pain in the arse to
set up, even with middlemen like CCBill. This is why Nicholas
Negroponte spent the 90s banging on about micropayments,
and why Scott McCloud took up his banner. Spending small
amounts of money in a quick manner invites a far smaller
hesitation point. PayPal was one step in this direction — a
quick, simple Internet bank. A pig to set up if you’re not in
America, but it’s doable, and still probably easier than
becoming a credit-card vendor. eBay did a huge amount
to popularise PayPal. LiveJournal, always very aware of
its massively under-30 demographic, made its paid system
PayPal friendly very quickly.
Magnatune is a record label using PayPal. You can stream
the music on their site. Like it? Buy the album as mp3
downloads with PayPal. This system does beg the obvious —
that people will download it and put it on KaZaA, or zip it up
and Bit Torrent it. But you know what? These are bands and
acts that no-one’s ever heard of before. You’re not going to
find them on a P2P service any way other than accidentally,
because you’re not going to be looking for them. Hell, even
if you decide you like the stuff and aren’t going to pay, not
enough people will have them in their P2P folder for you to
lay your hands on them quickly (if at all). It’s a calculated
risk on Magnatune’s part, and I think it’s probably a sound call.
PayPal leads to BitPass, which could be the way of the future.
BitPass lets you buy a token with a one-step PayPal system,
and that token lets you issue micropayment fractions of its
total value. Again, with a quick procedure. Make with the
clicky and you’ve given Patrick Farley twenty-five cents to
read the latest chapter of his crazed Biblicanime spin on
Revelations, APOCAMON.
Twenty-five cents. In Britain, that’s all of thirteen pence right now.
If Patrick Farley had a well-managed internet community behind
him right now, you’d all know his name. Because that, I (currently)
feel, is very much the next step. Because none of these things
will go anywhere without word-of-mouth, or whatever the internet
version is called. Word of clicky, I dunno. This comes back
to Josh’s taste tribes. Not fan groups — simply the net’s ability
to allow people with shared aesthetics to cross networks. This
is the use for friend-of-a-friend networks that Tribe.net fell on —
the ability for people to find intersecting tastes in other users
and create an unlimited amount of small message boards to
serve and connect them.
The currency of the net is conversation. It’s what the
die-hard bloggers live for — counting their Trackbacks,
scanning their stats and checking their incoming links
on Technorati. (Perhaps interestingly, and showing this
message is eating its own tail, bloggers like Glenn
“Instapundit” Reynolds live or die on user donations sent
via PayPal. I just wonder if people really use words like
“pundit” in real life without vomiting.) (Yes, diepunyhumans
features all of those things too. But it requires none of
them. Shut up.)
In the commercial arts, conversation is money. If no-one’s
talking about it, no-one bought it. And if no-one’s talking
about it, no-one’s going to buy it. But if people are talking
about it, more people are going to buy it. It’s the simplest
thing in the world. The hard part is getting it to happen.
When BitPass first came out, a lot of people were aggressively
negative about it. Some people were blindly positive about it.
I didn’t see many people making the only important point —
perfect or not, it WORKS. It works and it can conceivably
help the creative population on the internet. It works and I
can pay for art with it, very easily, in small denominations.
And I want to be able to pay for art because it means people
can make more art. For the first time, the tools, imperfect
as they may be, are there, right there, still being tested,
but really just waiting to be used.
As of right now, there are 5400 people on the Bad Signal.
If all of you went to www.e-sheep.com and paid a lousy
25 cents to read a Patrick Farley comic, he would
instantly become the best-paid serial creator in indie
comics. If half of you went, he’s still be doing pretty
well, probably constituting a pro rate for the work he’s
doing. For twenty-five cents, microcasting work to
an online audience of less than 3000 people would give
him a shot at a living gig. Expand that out. Even
25 cents for an mp3 multiplied by half the readership
of Bad Signal would mean that that musician is
doing better than 90% of professional musicians — that
is, earning more than US$600 a month. Seriously.
In fact, to support four artists you like, all you’d have to
do is put aside an entire dollar a month to buy their
art. And tell your friends.
This could be something.
— W
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