
After the age of scarcity - Jgrubb
http://ignoredbydinosaurs.com/2012/05/after-age-scarcity
======
othello
"If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers."

Probably the best quote from the post. Soon the only way of making a living
from a creative endeavour might be to be funded by patrons, then releasing
your content for free. A generalized Louis CK model if you will.

Funny how that would bring us back to pre-18th century days where patronage
was the only business model in town for creative types, with all the
constraints that came with artists-patrons relationships.

Except in this world everybody would get to play Medicis or Louis XIV. I
certainly hope that "crowd-patronage" will mitigate the limitations of
artistic freedom that often came with traditional patronage.

~~~
tomjen3
Isn't 'crowd-patronage' essentially letting the market decide?

It wouldn't require that many fans either -- assuming each fan brought 30
bucks worth of merch and donations, you are looking at a middleclass wage at
2K fans. No matter how obscure your genre is, it ought to be possible to get
2k fans.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I would say it is _forcing_ the market to decide.

When I have to be a patron, I can't just lean back and honor good products by
buying them. I have to look up names, sample their past work, invest money in
projects that might suck.

I'd do everything that investors are paid for right now. Except I would feel
I'm wasting my life away because I'm doing all this over €10, not €10m.

~~~
capsule_toy
Maybe the future value for labels is to collect a subscription fee from
customers and they would do the vetting for you. That's what labels do now but
under this system, it'll hopefully avoid that whole fronting bands money in
exchange for the bands' life thing.

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sethg
Differential pricing is a retail strategy that predates the Internet. If you
want to be one of the first people to read a new book by an author you like,
you have to spend to get it in hardcover; if you don’t like the hardcover
price, wait a year and then buy it in paperback. You can watch a new movie in
the theaters, or wait to pick it up on DVD. Pay sticker price for whatever
groceries you want, or make the effort to collect coupons and buy the things
that are on sale. Etc., etc. It’s all artificial scarcity, in the sense that
nothing prevented a publisher from putting out a book only in paperback from
day one.

“Exclusive content” is the same idea: the only difference is that the
discounted price is zero.

~~~
figglesonrails
Yep, and time and time again has shown people pay for sooner. I really think
people who assume "scarcity" is the only factor in economic models aren't
seeing the whole picture. Exclusivity of group membership (I have a t-shirt,
jacket, etc. with this awesome logo I can advertise my social status/beliefs),
being "first" in a social group, and just plain impatience or apathy
contribute greatly. If everyone was purely rational, I'm pretty sure we'll all
use refillable water bottles, personal water filters, and buy food in bulk.
Assuming the motivations behind every actor in the economy are purely rational
is utterly naive.

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AndrewDucker
This is absolutely true - for digital content.

For physical content, scarcity still sells. Take Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter -
selling huge amounts of specially made CDs, books, personal visits, etc.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-
palm...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the-
new-record-art-book-and-tour)

~~~
eragnew
Absolutely agree. But what if the next big wave is making physical 'content'
abundant instead of scarce? 3D printing, the internet of things, etc. That's
what I'm starting to think about...

~~~
pdelgallego
There are a couple of interesting books about that topic [1, 2]

The premise of most of them is that innovation its outpacing the hability of
the average person to keep him self employable. That will lead to massive
unemployment, bigger wealth inequality and social unrest.

[1] Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating
Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and
the Economy

[2] The lights in the tunnel. Where will advancing technology, job automation,
outsourcing and globalization lead?

~~~
eragnew
I'm starting to think that the key is to help the unemployed, the '99%', the
'others', to learn how to build their own businesses, their own livelihoods.
To stop depending on someone else to provide a livelihood for them. That's
where we're heading, in my view. That's the only way out of the current mess.
Not to get too hippie-ish, but it's about combining self-interest with empathy
for others.

~~~
efsavage
"combining self-interest with empathy for others" is basically the real-deal
Adam Smith brand of capitalism. Not the hollywood/cliffs-notes version we're
living in now...

------
zdw
Creative works have always been purchased on a "Do I enjoy this enough to buy
it?" basis. We're used to sampling art, and it's always been this way, whether
it be via public art, radio, etc., then we go buy it if we like it. The
internet is an evolution of this, but without the controls that distributors
are used to (payola anyone?).

What RadioLab is trying to do here is using a "free gift" to goose the people
who enjoy what they make into giving them some coin.

This is very common in public radio and TV, but usually comes in the form of a
free t-shirt or coffee mug. In that case the "gift" has dual purpose - it also
functions as advertisement and a physical reminder to go watch/listen to the
thing you helped support.

------
etrain
This goes beyond creative works, but to many other types of digital content.

I remember hearing John McAfee discussing trying to come up with a way to sell
software, and say something like "here was this thing, that cost absolutely
nothing to reproduce and transmit - and so I decided I could give it away for
free, and charge for the updates."

Pretty much the Gillette Razor model for the 21st century.

------
digitalsushi
I often daydream about the future of products. I like to imagine what it would
be like without fresh fruit, or water so scarce it's illegal to water the
lawn. I also imagine the model's counterpart, that some things have become
very easy to produce. The article refers to digital content, which can be
infinitely reproduced without burden.

But I like to wonder, are there physical goods that are close to this digital
model - are there some things we can make so much of, that we'll never have to
really worry about their production? More to the point, are we entering a
period where the baseline is that a person who refuses to work can literally
not starve to death because of abundance? If most jobs eventually turn to
digital production that can be so easily shared like the article suggests,
could we ever see a planet where there are simply not enough jobs and that
working is optional since you could subsist on free products?

~~~
ctdonath
At least in the USA...

We irrigate our lawns with _drinking water_.

We pay farmers to _not grow_ (or to dump what they do).

The greatest medical malady of our poor is _obesity_.

1 in 50 live on government-provided welfare.

The "poverty line" is _twenty times_ world median income.

Not quite the idealized form you have in mind, but getting there.

------
T_S_
In this post-material economy, attention is what is scarce. Quality
interactions are scarce. Of course we will are not quite there yet, and the
material economy is becoming more influenced by externalities like carbon
output. Both trends are making it difficult to use the price system as an
efficient means of allocating resources.

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sellandb
I understand what you are trying to say. I am curious though what you
recommend as a monetization strategy if you take that route? I suppose ad
revenue is always the old fall back, but I would imagine that for a lot of the
content out there, that is not free to produce, there needs to be some way to
pay the bills.

~~~
sp332
Well if the things you need are not scarce, then it doesn't take as much money
to "pay the bills."

~~~
corysama
Let me know when you have a strategy to make housing into a post-scarcity good
like software.

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mise
There's scarcity in spending time with a particular person, for example.
Meeting their producers sounds like a good "exclusive" bit of interaction, but
I agree about non-exclusivity of content.

~~~
Jgrubb
Precisely. Great songs that touch people are exceedingly scarce. Recordings of
great songs are not. Same goes for great books, great movies, great product
design.

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WiseWeasel
Convenience is still scarce. Digital content doesn't seem quite as abundant to
less technically inclined people than HN readers.

