The Future of Advertising – A Retrospective #2

This turned up in my tweet-stream earlier

Another creature to emerge from the paleolithic memetic ooze of late-era web 2.0. It’s a little application that allows artists to swap copies of their tracks for tweets.

Of such things I vaguely approve. Nice try etc. I’m also interested in alternative-currencies, and the Attention Economy etc… but there are various parts of this that don’t ring true.

1) free? “Copies” are already free. An artist attempting to attach a monetary value to copies of their recordings makes about as much sense as a restaurant attempting to charge people for the magical aromas people experience as they walk past outside. It’s already free.

It may not have been in the 20th century, and it may be the case that the copyright cartels are trying to manouvre our governments into creating police-state machinery to protect their business models – but these people don’t deserve to live.

And besides… the smells outside the restaurants help lure people in. They’re part of the marketing.

2) So what is being offered here isn’t a “free” digital copy, it’s an opportunity to evangelise – to participate. And that’s not nothing. It’s not something that you can charge for, but it’s not nothing. To the participants, the tools to evangelise with are wonderful.

3) So here’s what goes through my mind when I see this

a) Oh. A thing! Shiny!

b) Looks like an indie muso – I want to like him.

c) Oh… but I’m not going to evangelise about him without hearing the track first… because to me my reputational capital is worth more than the price of a single mp3

d) (goes off to youtube, finds the video) I’ve seen it before – because this guy’s in my tweet-stream?

e) (thinks a bit more and realises that) I wouldn’t use this tool to evangelise in any case because I don’t want to be seen as being the sort of evangeliser who would do it for a bribe. Reputational capital again. You Cannot Buy It.

So no matter how much I loved this song, I wouldn’t use this service because the social-contract that underpins authentic envangelising is broken by trying to attach a monetary value to it… even though the type of money being offered here is in mp3 rather than $ form.

I find this quite interesting because The Attention Economy does actually provide real value – but it’s inherently incompatible with the scarcity-based economy. There are various compromises with varying degrees of ugliness – but bribery destroys authenticity. There is a fundamental contradiction between these two value systems.

The atomic driver behind the attention economy… the most basic motivator, is fundamentally immune to payola.

But he’s an indie artist, and I want to like him so I’ll break the law (or at least do something where I’m uncertain of the legality) and embed his video here

But you know what? I don’t care about the law. The law’s wrong.