Wired magazine’s senior maverick Kevin Kelly has written a justly lauded post about making sense of value in a world in which many digital goods are available free. He describes the internet as a huge photocopy machine which works by duplicating and distributing information endlessly. This makes the value of an original, exclusive piece of digital culture fall very quickly to zero – a problem that the music business, among others, has been struggling with for a while.

This might all seem very academic, but he’s talking about an issue which has hit the media - and the media habits of pretty much everyone I know - with the force of a wrecking-ball. The twenty some-things I work with simply laugh when I mention an interesting article that I’ve read in a newspaper. They sit in front of a web browser all day surfing free new sites, they can’t understand why I would pay good money to buy the print edition of a paper. Why pay when it’s available free?

The quantity of music in circulation available for little or no cost to the user is now quite overwhelming. If you work in a wired-up office where people have iTunes on their PCs, you can legally browse and play music from each other’s libraries, many of which have been beefed up by people ripping their sometimes very extensive CD collections. If you’re not fussed about audio quality there are endless new bands to graze on the web, and when your mate comes around with an MP3 player or hard drive chock full of music, it’s not hard to circumvent that pesky digital rights management software and fill your boots with more music than you will ever be able to listen to. Why pay when it’s available free?

Whatever you may feel about the ethics of file sharing ripped copies of DVDs, I can assure you that quite a few people are doing it, and some of them may live on a street near you. I recently heard a friend discuss the problem of managing his large and expanding digital film collection. He complained that he’d had a copy of The Last King of Scotland for six months and had only just got around to watching it. He’s got loads more films stored on Sky+ box, another 40 stored on his Media Centre PC downloaded from BitTorrent, and his flatmate is a customer of Lovefilm.com, which means he can and does rip each rented DVD before it is sent back to add it to his collection. He is now completely overwhelmed with digital content, and he won’t be making a trip to Blockbusters with his debit card any time soon. Why pay when it’s available free?

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  Michael Parsons

Yet people do pay for stuff, and Mr Kelly comes up with eight reasons why: immediate access; a personalised product; a useful interpretation of the product; a more authentic version of the product; a more conveniently accessible version of the product; a physical embodiment; to act as a patron to the producer of the product; and because it makes it easier for you to find the product in some way. Again, this all sounds rather abstract, but if I use it as a lens for my own digital media consumption, it’s pretty realistic.

I am too lazy and far too ethical to bother with downloading stuff via BitTorrent, and one of the things I love about iTunes, eMusic, and other digital download sites is the instant gratification they provide. Think of a song, click, and you’re listening to it. Accessibility is a huge benefit for which I’m happy to pay a premium. I also use Napster, which is also supremely accessible and which liberates me from the hassles of ownership. It allows me to go from dancing around the living room with my son singing songs from The Jungle Book, to dancing around the living room with my son singing along to a song from The Jungle Book, in about as long as it took to write this sentence.

There are some films that I like so I much that I want to pay for them because I really want the artist to get the money: I cheered on Radiohead for experimenting with a new method of distribution for music, and was happy to pay top whack to the band to download their latest album. Patronage is a real force in the market place. And there are films where I want the full-fat DVD experience because I really do want to enjoy the DVD extras: I want to hear, say, David Fincher talking about Fight Club, and I want to contribute to the halo effect of a film that found its audience on DVD by scoring a copy even years after it was released.

Sadly for producers of content, there is no simple way to work out how to offer content profitably by harnessing these different aspects of the digital content purchasing experience. It’s a painful Darwinian struggle as content providers raise and lower their pay walls on websites, muck around with digital rights management, and gingerly explore the upside down-world of the economics of the free to see what models work.

I’m struck by a couple of things in all this. I can see from my own experience that despite all the panic about doing business in a world of copyright violation and digital theft, I read more editorial, listen to more music, watch more television programming, and see more films than I ever have before. I also have lots more ways to give people money for stuff: micro payments for songs on iTunes, a music subscription service with Napster, pay-per-view films via my cable service, and so on. And I even have a couple of magazine subscriptions, (although the pile of unread Economists in my living room makes me question the wisdom of that decision).

Check out Mr Kelly’s excellent post and see if you agree with his arguments for what might be better than free, but I’d also love to hear from you. Are there any areas of your media diet which have gone completely free, and is there anything you lean forward to pay for with a smile? Enquiring – and worried – content producers everywhere want to know.

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Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

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