First Taste for Free

A couple of weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails "released" an album online for free, prompting me to consider the viability of such an economic model.

First off, we need to note that NIN is (are?) a well established artist. People know their music, like their music, and would spend time listening to their music. And that's the key - consumers would spend time listening to the album. Forget money. Money spent for any particular text does not matter so much in the new media economy. Attention and time matter. Once you build up interest, you can charge for a subsequent album, a t-shirt, a concert, etc.

In today's media economy, if an artist can establish a fan base, they don't have to charge them for every album or every concert. As long as they can maintain some profit margin, as opposed to the huge profit margin they enjoyed before, the artist can make a living. Before, labels and studios had to charge consumers way more than a CD or a movie cost to produce b/c they had to pay for the duds that they churned out (Pareto's principle). They couldn't know which one of their products would be duds and which would be smashes. They also had to cover the costs of developing new talent (equivalent to R&D costs). But I don't think that distributors need to pay for that anymore. Artists can record and film stuff on the cheap, put it out there for free, see if its popular, cultivate interest in the unique output of that artist, and then charge $ for the subsequent output of that artist. You could also whore yourself out to advertisers and make $ off of modestly popular work, but I think the purest model for art/entertainment sales should be: give them a taste for free, then charge them for more once they're hooked (the drug-dealer economic model). Ads just add clutter, and I'm not sure they even work well enough to justify their existence.

Really, the only thing that agents, studios, and labels are useful for is visibility. They can artificially boost the visibility of an artist's output through promotion. But bloggers (gatekeepers, tastemakers) and the transparency of popularity on the web counteracts such promotional efforts. Right now, a small percentage of consumers make their decisions as to what to spend their time listening to or watching based on bloggers or online popularity tracking (that may in fact be affected by promotion). That's right now. But what if the people who paid attention to bloggers and popularity trackers were jsut early adopters? What if, in the coming years, most people took their cues from these sources? Could it render advertising, promotion, labels, studios, and agents all obsolete? I think that it could.

Whenever I raise the possibility that promotion may be futile in the new media economy, I hear a voice saying that promotion is more insidious than I imagine it to be, that its influence is hard to track but still exists. This voice says that anyone questioning the viability of promotion and advertising is hopelessly naive. This strikes as possibly true, but doesn't seem like a strong argument; more like something said by those with a vested interest in defending the business model of advertising and promotion. Its going to get very hard to trace whether an artist or a work become popular due to promotion or organic word-of-mouth popularity based on the merit of the work. However, the internet makes these paths visible, so maybe we could begin to see how effective promotion is when compared to the aggregated tastes of millions of users. If you want to defend the role of promotion and advertisement in the art industry, fine, but back your argument up with some hard data. If you're really about making money, then do it efficiently. Spend your money figuring out what makes a work good or popular and then make it. Don't promote shit that you're uncertain about. To quote Martin Sheen in Wall Street: "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Giving some of your work away for free is, in a sense, the ultimate promotion. Usually, ads and previews for movies are distorted pieces of a larger whole that are designed to make the whole more appealing than it actually is. But if you give away a whole album, a whole season, a whole movie for free, then there's nothing distorted about that.

And yet, it would seem unfair if, say, the creators of Lost gave away most of the narrative for "free" on TV and then concluded it with a movie that we have to pay to see. I see this with online video: its very difficult to tell whether an individual video is functioning as a satisfying media product in and of itself, a piece of a larger work that you could either have to pay for or tolerate ads with (in which case it is just an "ad" for the larger work), or both.

Maybe promoters are necessary, or inevitable. But I certainly don't think that art couldn't be sold w/o them. Artists are engaging in large scale economic experiments, and the results suggest that we should start reconsidering the role of promoters in the art business.

Marketing and Terrorism, part 2: NIN's Year Zero ARG

I'm especially fond of stuff I find on the internet in indirect, multiple ways. First, I saw something on digg.com about the marketing of a new NIN album via strange websites. Then, a student of mine emailed me a story from mtv.com about the websites. At first glance, it appears to be an ARG (alternate reality game) dedicated to marketing the yet-to-be-released Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. Nothing particularly remarkable there. But there are numerous references to bioterrorism. Will this get NIN and their marketing firm into hot water a la ATHF?

What's interesting is that once you get out on the web, authorship becomes so murky that it might be impossible to hold anyone responsible for possible confusion between marketing and terrorism. Whose to say which sites are officially sanctioned and which are not? I always thought of viral marketing as an insidious way of turning fans into unwitting marketers, which may seem harmless now, but in the long run may reduce us to state of paranoia where we spend untold hours and cognitive energy trying to figure out what is reliable information about our environment and what is merely an attempt to sell us something. But this idea of including a controversial topic like terrorism (is it overhyped? is it underhyped?) seems like a new, clever twist. Both NIN and ATHF (purposely in the case of NIN, accidentally in the case of ATHF, I think) are allying their product with one side of this controversy - the leftist position that terrorism is overhyped. If you wear a t shirt with Err giving the finger, or design your own Year Zero bioterrorism website, you're simultaneously saying that you think terrorism has been overhyped and saying that you like NIN and ATHF.

Its tough for me to be objective about this, since I'm a big fan of both ATHF and NIN, and I think that the current administration doesn't understand terrorism as well as it could. But if I take a step back, I realize that ARGs are becoming political, and perhaps involving the authorities in a kind of theater that they're not even aware that they're a part of (a la the "characters" in Borat). I wouldn't say that the motives of the company or the artist are either profit or politics. They're both. Its designed to get you to buy the album, but its also designed to get young people to recognize the manipulative nature of military recruitment.

Since this is open to fan participation, if the fans don't like the music or the direction the story takes, perhaps they can take those in a different direction, though I'm simultaneously skeptical that either a mob-rule story or the stridently political story that Year Zero is shaping up to be (yes, yes, we get it. Bush sucks) will be anything revolutionary.

Again, the problem that this creates, the problem that all contemporary viral or stealth marketing adds to, is an erosion of our ability to communicate with one another about our environment effectively. ARGs are post-modern media's logical conclusion in the era of convergence, and they raise the same question: are they good, b/c they get people to see how most our "reality" is a social construction primarily made up of media texts, or is it bad, b/c it encourages people to doubt everything, to not take anything seriously. While I mull this one over, it'll be fun to see what happens with Year Zero.

Oh, and BTW, doesn't wikipedia kinda spoil the surprise of ARGs? People just aggregate data on that site, so all you have to do is check up on it every so often. It undergoes a rigorous vetting process, much more rigorous than you and your friends, digg, cable news channels, or the New York Times could ever hope for. And it does it fast.