While the music industry has been on the front lines of the battle to convert freeloaders into paying customers, their efforts have been watched closely by other digitized industries-newspapers, book publishing and Hollywood among them-who are hoping to staunch their own bleeding before it’s too late. In the internet age, selling recorded music has become as much of an art as making the music itself. What’s clear at this point in the evolution of the music business is that there is no clear business model. For some artists, Anderson’s scenario translates into giving away the entire album for free in hopes that fans will pay for concert tickets or limited access to live streaming video from the road. 1įor today’s Napster, that means that along with the unlimited streaming capability that a monthly $5.00 subscription fee buys, the listener also scores five “free” digital downloads with no strings attached.

His article, titled, “Free! Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business,” argues that when digital content approaches zero marginal cost to distribute, the more you give away for free, the more you can sell to the small segment of consumers who are willing to pay for premium content. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Editor-in-Chief at Wired ignited a fiery debate among the technology and entertainment community recently when he published an article touting free content as the key to earning income in the digital age. In today’s economy, how do you compete with free? While it may seem counterintuitive, some experts see consumers’ insatiable appetite for free content as an opportunity rather than a cause for concern. The current economic climate makes music an even tougher sell. It also faces stiff competition while Napster morphed from its lawless larval stage to a dues-paying music service, consumers in search of free content have had their pick of surviving peer-to-peer applications and torrent sites that more than make up for the loss of the original rogue site. Today’s Napster requires a grown-up kind of commitment: a credit card and a monthly subscription. Long gone are the days of free-flowing music from the vine of central servers. If the original Napster was a loud, raucous garage band made up of drunken college students, the present offering is what happens when the band sobers up, signs to a major label, and starts house hunting. At the ripe old age of ten, the current incarnation of the Napster music service scarcely resembles its former bawdy self.

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