Would you give your services away for free?

Chris Anderson’s long-awaited follow-up to the Long Tail has just hit bookshelves. Entitled Free: The Future of a Radical Price the book argues that abundance is causing prices to fall effectively to zero. Here the psychological advantage of giving something away for free actually benefits the producer – through wide-spread take-up that can lead to [...]

Links – 31st October 2008

Rather than a lop-sided list, here is a numbered (but unordered) overview of blogs, articles and tools I have enjoyed over the past few days:
1. Iqbal Mohammed asks a very interesting question: Could price become a skeuomorph? This segues in with an interesting point Matt Rhodes made regarding incentives – it changes the transaction from [...]

Measuring the success of free music

As an addendum to my prior post on free music, Kevin Kelly has posited a “true fan” model. He argues that having a core following of around 1,000 people per artist would bring in enough revenues to sustain a career. Nine Inch Nails appear to have managed this – their run of 2,500 deluxe ($300!) editions [...]

Nine Inch Nails and free music

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mightymightymatze
As the world and his blog is now aware, the latest Nine Inch Nails album has been released over the Internet, in a variety of formats and prices. Rather pointedly, Trent Reznor remarked, “I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference”. However, the most [...]