The Economics of Free

Trying out the Zemanta reBlog plug-in to share an interesting conversation happening over at Union Square Ventures about the economics of Free:

Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It’s a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift. Until we agree on what resources are scarce and have a framework for how they will be allocated in the future we are not just talking past each other, we are talking about the wrong things

Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it’s attention. avc.com, A VC, Aug 2009

For me, time and attention is the by far the biggest scarcity. I constantly give up sleep to consume more, which means I'm paying a price in health and also making choices on how to pay out the scarcest resource. But how is our time and attention to be converted into value for the content producer? Something I'm thinking a lot about because I'm someone who's constantly looking for "free" alternatives, and working in a business (advertising) that is increasingly underwriting content production.

Download or capture streaming music ( free music )

Today is all about free music two tools were brought to my attention today that make it really easy to download or capture streaming music from Pandora, Seeqpod, Last.Fm, or even a random website that has music in the background.

TechCrunch profiled today a seemingly great new tool called Freemusiczilla that lets you download "download free music from Imeem, Last.fm, Pandora, Myspace, eSnips, Mog, iJigg, Radio.blog.club and almost all social music services" with just the touch of a button. Free music is limited to 10 songs per day, but presumably this will be unlocked with a paid version in the near future.

My friend Dave pointed me to Freecorder today, which enables you to record via a browser toolbar any sound that plays through your pc speakers - i'm not sure of the technology behind it, but he said all sounds are aggregated, so if you receive an IM during a song playing that you're recording, the IM sound will be pulled in. He said it works great, though, and he's using it to record website soundtracks.
I haven't used either of these yet so let me know how they work, and if they live up to their reviews (and please use legally, however that may be).

Atmosphere gives out free album as a holiday present

I've been a big fan of Atmosphere since Benn introduced me to them in college - since then I've seen them and Brother Ali perform 3 times, in Boston and New York City (come back - why do you avoid the city on tours?!). I rarely check MySpace but today work called for it, and I noticed that Atmosphere has put out a free album as a holiday present to their fans. They also apparently release single tracks for free download under the title "sad clown bad _____" where "summer", "fall", etc fit in the blank - check out this page of Rhymesayers albums for links to the tracks. I haven't listened to any of the above yet since I'm at work but leave a message if you do and let me know how it is!

Free TV Online with OpenHulu

If you weren't lucky enough to get into the Hulu beta, the NBC/Fox Corp joint venture which will host free ad-supported television content from the two networks, as well as other partners, check out OpenHulu - you can watch high quality streaming video of all of the shows you can find inside Hulu - a simple alphabetic menu of all of the shows starts you off.  Not all of the shows are there but you can find free episodes of 24, 30 Rock, Family Guy, Heroes, The Office, The Simpsons, and more.

OpenHulu

 

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