<\/p>\n
Warren Ellis says it far better than I could ever.<\/p>\n
bad signal
\nWARREN ELLIS<\/p>\n
This may end up as a dry run for a Brainpowered column.
\nBear with me.<\/p>\n
I did a Brainpowered a few weeks ago about microcasting —
\nusing the net to aim relatively cheaply produced content at
\nniche audiences underserved or unserved by what we might
\ncall Big Media. These audiences, often existing within the
\nloose connections of Dr Josh Ellis’ “taste tribes” can and do
\nserve the dissemination of the material through word of
\nmouth and collective net presence. <\/p>\n
The trick, of course, is making that earn money.<\/p>\n
I know a lot of people who give away their material free, in
\nthe hope that the people who like it will buy it as a data
\nobject, like a CD. This can work very well, of course — if
\nyou’ve got a CD burner, if you have a record deal, if you
\nhave a publisher, whatever. Selling bits — an mp3, a
\nPDF, a Flash file, a GIF sequence — is something different.<\/p>\n
There’s a crucial hesitation point in using a credit card on
\nthe web. It’s not one-click, it’s real money, suggests a
\nsignificant purchase and can be a real pain in the arse to
\nset up, even with middlemen like CCBill. This is why Nicholas
\nNegroponte spent the 90s banging on about micropayments,
\nand why Scott McCloud took up his banner. Spending small
\namounts of money in a quick manner invites a far smaller
\nhesitation point. PayPal was one step in this direction — a
\nquick, simple Internet bank. A pig to set up if you’re not in
\nAmerica, but it’s doable, and still probably easier than
\nbecoming a credit-card vendor. eBay did a huge amount
\nto popularise PayPal. LiveJournal, always very aware of
\nits massively under-30 demographic, made its paid system
\nPayPal friendly very quickly.<\/p>\n
Magnatune is a record label using PayPal. You can stream
\nthe music on their site. Like it? Buy the album as mp3
\ndownloads with PayPal. This system does beg the obvious —
\nthat people will download it and put it on KaZaA, or zip it up
\nand Bit Torrent it. But you know what? These are bands and
\nacts that no-one’s ever heard of before. You’re not going to
\nfind them on a P2P service any way other than accidentally,
\nbecause you’re not going to be looking for them. Hell, even
\nif you decide you like the stuff and aren’t going to pay, not
\nenough people will have them in their P2P folder for you to
\nlay your hands on them quickly (if at all). It’s a calculated
\nrisk on Magnatune’s part, and I think it’s probably a sound call.<\/p>\n
PayPal leads to BitPass, which could be the way of the future.
\nBitPass lets you buy a token with a one-step PayPal system,
\nand that token lets you issue micropayment fractions of its
\ntotal value. Again, with a quick procedure. Make with the
\nclicky and you’ve given Patrick Farley twenty-five cents to
\nread the latest chapter of his crazed Biblicanime spin on
\nRevelations, APOCAMON.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five cents. In Britain, that’s all of thirteen pence right now.<\/p>\n
If Patrick Farley had a well-managed internet community behind
\nhim right now, you’d all know his name. Because that, I (currently)
\nfeel, is very much the next step. Because none of these things
\nwill go anywhere without word-of-mouth, or whatever the internet
\nversion is called. Word of clicky, I dunno. This comes back
\nto Josh’s taste tribes. Not fan groups — simply the net’s ability
\nto allow people with shared aesthetics to cross networks. This
\nis the use for friend-of-a-friend networks that Tribe.net fell on —
\nthe ability for people to find intersecting tastes in other users
\nand create an unlimited amount of small message boards to
\nserve and connect them.<\/p>\n
The currency of the net is conversation. It’s what the
\ndie-hard bloggers live for — counting their Trackbacks,
\nscanning their stats and checking their incoming links
\non Technorati. (Perhaps interestingly, and showing this
\nmessage is eating its own tail, bloggers like Glenn
\n“Instapundit” Reynolds live or die on user donations sent
\nvia PayPal. I just wonder if people really use words like
\n“pundit” in real life without vomiting.) (Yes, diepunyhumans
\nfeatures all of those things too. But it requires none of
\nthem. Shut up.)<\/p>\n
In the commercial arts, conversation is money. If no-one’s
\ntalking about it, no-one bought it. And if no-one’s talking
\nabout it, no-one’s going to buy it. But if people are talking
\nabout it, more people are going to buy it. It’s the simplest
\nthing in the world. The hard part is getting it to happen.<\/p>\n
When BitPass first came out, a lot of people were aggressively
\nnegative about it. Some people were blindly positive about it.
\nI didn’t see many people making the only important point —
\nperfect or not, it WORKS. It works and it can conceivably
\nhelp the creative population on the internet. It works and I
\ncan pay for art with it, very easily, in small denominations.
\nAnd I want to be able to pay for art because it means people
\ncan make more art. For the first time, the tools, imperfect
\nas they may be, are there, right there, still being tested,
\nbut really just waiting to be used.<\/p>\n
As of right now, there are 5400 people on the Bad Signal.
\nIf all of you went to www.e-sheep.com and paid a lousy
\n25 cents to read a Patrick Farley comic, he would
\ninstantly become the best-paid serial creator in indie
\ncomics. If half of you went, he’s still be doing pretty
\nwell, probably constituting a pro rate for the work he’s
\ndoing. For twenty-five cents, microcasting work to
\nan online audience of less than 3000 people would give
\nhim a shot at a living gig. Expand that out. Even
\n25 cents for an mp3 multiplied by half the readership
\nof Bad Signal would mean that that musician is
\ndoing better than 90% of professional musicians — that
\nis, earning more than US$600 a month. Seriously.<\/p>\n
In fact, to support four artists you like, all you’d have to
\ndo is put aside an entire dollar a month to buy their
\nart. And tell your friends.<\/p>\n
This could be something.<\/p>\n
— W<\/p>\n
———<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxtongue.com\/dreampepper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}