How will we pay for free?

We want to have a free culture, where we may freely share copies of things like literature, music, and movies, and where we can freely build on these works. We also want to reward the people who create the culture. Well: We want to reward people who are good at it, or show promise. We would be happy if talented artists can earn a decent living at it, so that they can spend their time creating more art for us to enjoy.

(free photo!)

Someone might ask: “How will artists make a living in this la-la dreamland of sharing and cooperation and free love? How are we going to pay people to make all this great content to which you feel entitled?”

Well, I’m not 100% in love with your tone there, Mr. Someone, but one way of paying for free is to go back to the good old days of patronage. Paying artists directly to produce art. But in these good new days of the Internet, we don’t need kings, rich merchants, and other well-to-do types to commission the work. The Internet enables us little folk to cooperate and support creative work. We can be micropatrons of the arts.

Micropatrons, not Micropayers

I’d like to disassociate micropatronage from micropayments. Micropayments have gotten a bad wrap, for good reasons. I don’t want all that decision-making overhead in my day to day browsing, to pay pennies for this or that web page I come across.

However, there are people out there who’s work I support and want to encourage, and I would happily make some kind of micro-arrangement to help fund their work, especially if they agree to publish under a free license. Here’s where we need established ways of exchanging money for art. In particular, we want to aggregate a lot of small payments to commission the work of the artist.

Fund and Release

There are already people making money from free art, and mechanisms to support this. For example, with “Fund and Release,” or threshold pledge systems, an artist will promise to create something for a given price. Maybe a book or an album, but it could be anything. A middleman will collect pledges for the promised work, and when the required amount is collected, the work is released and the artist paid. (Another term for this is the “Ransom Model,” although that sounds rather antagonistic.) If the artist’s target amount is not met by a certain date, the money is refunded to the project’s backers. This allows a potential patron to pledge their money with the assurance that they will only pay for the work if others share in the commissioning, and the work is finished and released.

One site that offers a fund and release service is Kickstarter. I found it in relation to Robin Sloan’s book writing project. I don’t think Robin has specifically promised to release his book under a free license, but in any case, as of today, he has received a total commitment of $10,000 to write and publish a short book. (He has specified a novella length of 30,000 words.)

In reading about the publishing industry, I’ve often seen a figure of $5,000 for an advance on a first novel, and that most first novels don’t earn out their advance. So, Mr. Sloan provides us one example of modern day patronage in action, with good results. (Or at least, comparable results to traditional publishing.) It may be an atypical example of funding and releasing, but then, getting any money at all for a novel has always been unlikely.

Other Ways

I think threshold pledges will grow in popularity and enable compensation for free culture production, but that’s just one of many possibilities. Another common technique is to give away the “content” and sell associated scarce goods, like music performances or personal appearances or limited-edition physical copies of the work.

And there are other models to look at and experiments to try. Different methods will be better suited to different kinds of production. All of this has been to introduce another micropatronage-enabling model currently under development, and one that supports payment for something near and dear to my heart: blogging!

But alas, we’ve run out of time and space today. Please stay tuned for more later about an exciting opportunity to help test a new “paying for free culture” service.

It’s a beautiful day in the network. Won’t… you be.. my micropatron.