REPLICAS (Hypebot) – Like it or not, free music is here. But how does a business survive when its primary product is available for free? In a must read post on his Technium blog, ”Better Than Free”, Kevin Kelly suggests a new way of thinking about free, as well as, a way forward.
"The internet is a copy machine…Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied."
