Pay What You Like for Music
August 31st, 2006 | Published in Miscellaneous | 6 Comments
In the current (September) issue of Wired Magazine, the cover story is about the re-invention of the music industry. How some artists and other industry pioneers are experimenting with giving the public more control, more freedom and supposedly more fun, focusing less and less on selling albums and more on generating interest and thereby support for the artst. I think it sounds great, and it gave me an idea.
Suppose you got a song through a download service, such as iTunes. Suppose you didn’t pay anything up front either, but that you later had, or were simply encouraged, to rate the same song from 1-10 and then pay $0.10 per point given. That way, you would end up paying ten cents if you didn’t like the song (let’s call it to cover the bandwidth used for downloading it) and all the way up to one dollar, if you absolutely loved the song.
Now, I realize that this way of selling music would rely heavily on the customer’s honesty, and I’m sure some would take advantage of it and never rate the music at all. But I believe that most people are good people, who wouldn’t mind paying an average of maybe $0.50 per song, who’d be honest in their ratings and enjoy this way of buying new music.
And what if we take this one step further? Imagine that users, along with the rating, can give feedback to the artist, such as why the song is only rated a 3 or will always remain a 10. This would greatly benefit everyone involved. You could even post the ratings/comments on the song’s download page (with optional moderation from the band perhaps), so other people might get an idea of what the song is like.
Now, with yet another step, it would be fairly easy to develop a feature that allowed for recommendations, based on ratings you’ve given, matched to what others have rated. You could even turn it into a community thing and deal out free songs to the most active reviewers and whatnot. And why not build in a feature that made it impossible to download more than, say, five songs at a time, before you had to go back and rate some. And you could even adjust that number for customers who have rated many songs, so that someone who has bought a thousand songs can download 50 songs before having to rate, instead of the default five. There are plenty of possibilities.
If someone out there would like to turn this idea into an actual project, website or service, please feel free to do so. Just don’t forget to tell me about it, ’cause I would love to sell my own music that way, and maybe even help out in creating this!
September 3rd, 2006at 11:48 pm(#)
hey, have you checked out last.fm? It sends info about what you hear to a database, you can see similar people and groups, etc.
September 4th, 2006at 3:59 am(#)
g : Doin’ it every day!
September 17th, 2006at 9:44 am(#)
[...] Min gode ven, Rasmus Rasmussen, der er musiker skrev for nyligt en blogpost om en idé til betaling af musik: Suppose you got a song through a download service, such as iTunes. Suppose you didn’t pay anything up front either, but that you later had, or were simply encouraged, to rate the same song from 1-10 and then pay $0.10 per point given. That way, you would end up paying ten cents if you didn’t like the song (let’s call it to cover the bandwidth used for downloading it) and all the way up to one dollar, if you absolutely loved the song. [fra] [...]
October 10th, 2006at 2:35 pm(#)
Making people pay to give feedback seems opposite what you’d want.
How about charging 99cents for a song and then giving the user a 50cent credit when they rate the song — regardless of rating, to encourage honesty.
October 10th, 2006at 4:31 pm(#)
Scott : That might indeed be a better way of ecouraging people to rate.
November 7th, 2007at 5:07 pm(#)
[...] og deres betal-hvad-du-vil album (jeg betalte £4), især fordi jeg jo selv efterlyste netop den betalingsmodel lang tid før, verden havde hørt om Radioheads revolutionerende tiltag. Nu hvor der så er gået [...]