Prince has done it. Most of the national newspapers seem to do it every day. Give stuff away for free, that is. And not just any old thing. Quality stuff you’d pay good money for in a shop.
The latest cultural philanthropists are Radiohead, who released their newest album as a digital download. In an unusual move for a major band, fans are being allowed to pay what they like. Even bids as low as a single penny are accepted. Other popular artists — like Prince and the Charlatans — are giving away their albums.
The stratospheric rise in internet advertising as well as old-media phenomena like newspaper circulation battles, means “content” is increasingly seen as a tool to be used in a battle to obtain money for other things rather than just as an object for sale.
Along with the rise of illegal filesharing over the last decade, the growth of free content raises the possibility that there has been a sea change in the attitude of the consumer to the items of culture they hold in their hands. Go back a few hundred years and the typical book was an object of extraordinary cost and rarity, where the value of the book itself was bound up with the importance of the information. Now Google gives them away for nothing.
Those who are behind the givaways paint a picture of a win-win situation. Artists reach a wider audience, newspaper and magazine sales rise and the public gets something for nothing. But, some commentators are pointing to change in the relationship between consumers and culture. Philosopher Julian Baggini says it all comes down to one thing — commitment.
“When we pay for something we are showing commitment in a very practical way,” he says. “We put something of ourselves — in this case money — into whatever it is we want. And by paying for it, we are proving to ourselves that we value it.”
At the Festival of Ideas earlier this year a lot of free-entry events were more sparsely attended, compared to the events you had to pay for says Baggini.
“People thought because a particular event was free, it wasn’t worth putting themselves out for,” he says. “The thinking is that having a high financial value creates the perception that something has real value.” The same principle applies to music, he says.
Other experts warn of an associated danger — that as cheap-and-available culture floods the market people will literally be spoilt for choice. A thousand years ago you could only have listened to the minstrels that played in your valley; 50 years ago you could only listen to the records that were marketed in your country. Now, with 160GB MP3 players and digital downloading technology improving, you can own vast selections of music.
“Research shows that when you choose from a very large set of alternatives, whatever you choose will be less valuable to you — even if you choose well,” says Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: why more is less. “This is partly because even if you have chosen X, so you’ll be thinking about Y — did I make the right choice? This makes you unhappy.”
For the proselytisers, the digital age is taking culture back to its roots — something controlled by people rather than big corporations. But for those representing UK record companies free music is a problem.
BBC News
