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March 2000
Making Your Thieves Work for You
Many creators are staying away from Internet distribution for the single reason that they are afraid of pirating of their work. This I find unhealthy.
In Guy Kawasaki's book Rules for Revolutionaries, he tells of the Grateful Dead back in the seventies. (I don't think it was the Dead Kennedys, though I always mix them up...:) Unlike most bands, they did not take a dim view of pirate recordings of their concerts. They used them to their own advantage. The band went to the length of setting up a special area close to the stage where "pirate" recordings could be made in the best quality. So what happened, did the band go bankrupt because no one wanted to pay for their records now that they could get pirate recordings much cheaper? Au contraire, as the Dutch say, the band prospered because the widely distributed recordings were simply free publicity, and lots of it.
Famous photographer David Hamilton is very worried about all the free copies of his work that floats around on the Net. Yet his web site employs two full-time people plus whatever Hamilton gets. And I know that they do this practically without any promotional work. I ask, where does all this traffic come from?
My own experience is similar: I have consistently very good sales, despite the fact that I use almost no money on advertising. The sales and traffic can only come from word-of-mouth and people sharing the sample content.
Think about it, who takes 90 percent of what you pay for a book or a CD? The artist? Don't make me ROTFL. It is the middlemen. And who cares about them? The audience will always be willing to pay for an artist's product. And if cutting out the middlemen via the Net means cutting prices by 90%...
I think it boils down to a mental attitude. Are you willing and able to give things away without losing sleep?
Let us make a thought experiment (my favorite kind of experiment). Say you have a product, a book, a song, pictures, whatever. Say this is selling 5000 copies, and there are no pirate copies. Nice. Now say that you are selling 6000 copies, and there are 10,000 copies free copies around. Which one is the better scenario? I say that it is the latter. Some may not agree, but I say that if you are so unwilling to let people experience your work for free that you are willing to cut down both your circulation and your income to achieve this, then that is not a healthy state of mind.
It is an old truism that you only get as you give. If you close your mind and your willingness to give, then you close the channels to your audience, and thus your income. The best artists don't do that. David Bowie, for instance, is fantastically unworried about copyright, to the point where he thinks that people making altered versions of his songs and posting them on the Net is rather neat. And I don't see Bowie exactly suffering. He is richer and happier than he has ever been.
I can understand if you have used your life savings getting a book printed (which is no longer necessary with today's print-on-demand), you will get upset if people steal copies of it. But on the net, what do you lose? You lose only download time worth next to nothing.
Another thought experiment: You have two products, A and B. In vision 1, nobody on Earth has a copy of either one. In vision 2, everybody on the Earth has a free copy of product A. Which scenario will have the biggest demand for your product B? (If you have problems as a creator to the degree that you will only ever create one product, I cannot help you, beyond saying that the likelihood of everyone getting a copy of it is rather small, so there will always be some to sell to.)
You will notice that I am not saying "giving is good for the soul" so much as I am saying "giving is good for the soul and your wallet". The more you give away, the more you will sell.
We love our art like our children. But contrary to popular belief, locking up your children to protect them is not healthy for them in the long run. Let them go.
Sincerely, Eolake Stobblehouse
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