Free?

Yesterday, i just renewed my flickr account for $25/year. Next month, i’ll be continuing my BusinessWeek Zinio Digital Edition subscription. Over the weekend, I was scouring eBay for Wired Magazine back issues that i missed so I can make sure there aren’t any gaps in my library. I’m slowly rebuilding my movie collection with – gasp – original DVD’s (whose price points have now entered the realm of reasonable) and to my uberfavorite films, I’m gradually getting them in Blu-Ray. Even my iPhone – after being jailbroken for a few months – is now purely legit, with apps that i’ve actually bought from iTunes.

Now, while i won’t hypocritically claim that I don’t get a lot of “free” stuff from – ahem – alternative sources, the flip-side is that I’m pretty much willing to fork over hard-earned dough for highly-selective content (more on that later), especially when the content meets my price-i’m-willing-to-pay-for requirements.

This, after all, has become the current fodder of discussion and debate — in the age of the internet, how do you get people to pay for content that they could otherwise just download for free?

I don’t know the absolute answer to that.

But what I do know is this – of all the new music loaded on my iPod last year, two albums came from CD’s that I actually bought from the record store –  U2′ ‘No Line on the Horizon’ as well as Sugarfree’s ‘Mornings and Airports’.

Traditional marketing will say people will pay for value. That’s inarguably true. But then again, i’ve got a lot of other valuable content that I didn’t pay a single peso for. So the answer must be something that pushes the boundary on “value”.

The truth of the matter is – and this is quite corny – what ties together content that I am willing to pay for is something quite intangible — it’s the unexplainable emotional loyalty I have to the content/artists/magazine/movies/etc.

It’s almost as if I’m telling FastCompany, as an example — “Take my money! I want to contribute in my own way to your continuing existence.” Or with Sugarfree — “I respect your music too much to just buy the P35 pirated CD.”

It’s absolutely irrational, I know.

But those who crack this irrationality – this human quirk – will, I earnestly believe, win in this new age of content.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 6:26 am and is filed under Technology & Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.