From here:
I will explore the well-known argument that Pandora and Spotify are still quite alive and kicking. I believe that it’s because they offer a service that toes the line between convenience and cost.
This example is especially relevant due to the popularity of torrenting music specifically. One might argue that end users would be “better off” just downloading the music illegally.
Well, perhaps not. Spotify and Pandora introduced a service - finding new music that matches the taste of the user. This could not be provided by simply torrenting, and users would otherwise be spending not money, but time finding new material.
This can also partially be attributed to a glitch in human nature - the fact that humans want to not be in control of listening to music when it’s in the background. Something along the lines of us evolving listening to the sounds of nature and taking solice in the fact that we weren’t in control of whatever was making that sound. I can’t cite this at the moment, but it is an actual phenomenon.
Now, would Spotify and Pandora have been as successful if they were 100% behind a paywall? Probably not. And I’d be surprised if there weren’t companies that went belly-up because of doing just that.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is two things. Primarily that if you can see a need, fill a need intelligently and conveniently, then there will be those who will agree to pay to have that need taken care of.
Secondly that content alone is not the entire story. Who goes to an artist’s webpage to hear music. Nobody anymore. They go to soundcloud, youtube, etc to be able to listen to these things. In the physical world, people don’t buy and have delivered famous paintings and wait for them arrive to admire them - they go to an art museum or they go to a festival.
My original point is that because the technology keeps moving, it keeps the tension alive between free and expensive, so it never stabilizes. In a sense this rewards the innovative and punishes those who can’t innovate or change rapidly.
– Stewart Brand
Forbes, “Information wants to be free…and expensive”, 2009
The SAFE Network is meant to be free to browse. Getting revenue for exposure alone only works in the advertisement industry. And even then the meaning of the word “works” in that sentence is warped.
A subsidation of technology - technology that is supposed to be being forced to innovate - is tricky to imagine, but consider this:
The content is content, and will have the potential to have value forever. With the passage of time, APPs can be easily superceded in both value and functionality - siphoning off precious end users - only now, there is a financial motivation for doing so. There’s now a race to the top - one that has no ceiling.