Mitch Blum

The reason I chose not to steal Bob’s music wasn’t because I was afraid of getting caught or because I have a huge issue with music “sharing.” I chose not to steal Bob’s music because I wanted to pay for it. I’ve been a Dylan fan for as long as I can remember. I appreciate his work and I wanted to support him. Imagine that.

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The big talk in town this month has been the impending death of The Boston Globe. I even participated in the ironic “blog rally” to save The Globe by throwing some brilliant ideas into the ether. But do I really care if the institution of The Globe survives? I’m not so sure anymore. Now, don’t get me wrong. I do care about the content that The Globe provides. I enjoy local news and brilliant columnists like Bob Ryan. But do I really care about the middle man? How is The Globe, a distributor of news content, any different than the Columbia records, a distributor of music content? They’re both middle men, who make a profit by connecting content creators with content consumers. The unintended consequence of their role as middle men is that they’ve also divorced the content from the creator. The Globe buys content from Bob Ryan and re-sells it to me. My relationship is with The Globe and not with Bob Ryan. A wall has been erected that separates me from the creator. Is that the way it should be?

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In the old advertising-supported model, distributors like newspapers would provide content in exchange for our eyeballs. The nominal fees that we paid covered some costs but the real money was made in advertising revenue. Content was geared and packaged towards the most lucrative audience that could be resold to advertisers. But technology has shattered that model. Monster.com and Craigslist killed classified revenues and media fragmentation weakened the power of the distributors. Free blogging and podcasting platforms opened the door for more people to provide content as a means of creative expression. The good news was that the wall between creator and consumer was starting to crumble. The bad news is that the revenue model was crumbling, too.

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Record labels and newspapers operated on different models but both contributed to the same problem: the devaluation of creative content. Record companies overcharged for music for too long. We all knew that it only cost pennies to make CDs and yet the price remained at $15-$20 for two decades. Consumers resented being overcharged and as a result had no qualms about stealing music once technology allowed for it. Revenge against the greedy distributor overrode any fleeting sense of ethics. Consumers didn’t feel like they were stealing from the content creator but from the distributor they loathed.

On the other hand, newspapers gave away their content for free on the web for so long that people ultimately expected news to be free. They established the value of online journalism as zero. And once something has no perceived value it’s nearly impossible to charge for it.

Music and news – two of the biggest categories of online content – unwitting colluded to divorce content from the creator, devalue the content and create resentment against the distributors all at the same time. They dug their own graves.

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It’s probably too late to save the distributors like newspapers and record labels. And while it’s tragic for the many people that are employed in organizations that distribute content, the death of content distributors doesn’t necessarily signal the death of creative content. In fact, if we can restore the perceived value of creative content and connect creators with consumers then the future of creative content may be much brighter than the past ever was.

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Most creative content providers on the web have the enormous challenge of breaking through the clutter and getting people to notice and sample their work. Getting consumers to pay for it is an even more vexing problem. Twitter might just be the answer to these two key challenges.

The internet made word-of-mouth advertising sexy again. It even got a fancy new name, viral marketing. Every marketing professional knows that word-of-mouth is the strongest and most reliable form of communications. If a person that you trust tells you to try a product or service you are more likely to do so than if you just saw an ad or an in-store offer. Technology made passing content and recommendations along via email, message boards and web sites easy.

Twitter is imbued with features that encourage word-of-mouth promotion of quality content. Getting people to re-tweet links solves the challenge of creating awareness of creative content. Of course the content must be of sufficiently high quality to merit passing along, but good ideas will always bubble to the top of the stream.

But viral marketing isn’t Twitter’s most important feature, nor is it going to help solve the revenue dilemma. Twitter’s most important feature is two-way conversation.

Forget about celebrities that have hundreds of thousands of followers but follow few people in return – they’re merely using Twitter as a broadcast medium. Ignore the brands that hire ghost Twitterers to create the illusion of conversation. If you want people to pay for your content then you’re going to need to get them to want to pay for your content. And this can be accomplished by sincerely engaging with consumers. By having a conversation and creating a relationship. By being a person that sells a product rather than just another product for sale. In other words, by doing it the right way.

I was encouraged the other day to see that the Rifftrax crew was testing a live broadcast for a measly ten cent fee. I like the idea of micropayments for content. Get enough people to pay a token fee for an essay, or a podcast or a vlog and pretty soon you’re talking real money that’s going directly into the hands of the creator, with no middle-man required. It’s a win for the creator and a win for the consumer. The only loser is the distributor.

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Perhaps the death of content distributors isn’t really such a bad thing after all. Why do we need a gatekeeper between the creators and the consumers? Perhaps we need to lose some valuable properties (like The Boston Globe) in order for consumers to start to realize that creative content has value and you have to pay the creator if you want content.

And if that content provider happens to be someone that I have a relationship with then I’m much more likely to want to pay for their content.

(By the way, this essay is the equivalent length of 50 Tweets.)

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