Do All Freetards Grow Up?
Hard data is arriving from the Radiohead experiment. I see two lessons here:
Free content does not necessarily kill sales
Fans under a certain age don’t spend money
The unifying them in both of these issues is CONVENIENCE. Piracy is a tradeoff against convenience not money. In my day technology piracy involved long distance phone calls. I know people who didn’t pay for a call for years, but eventually the convenience tradeoff made paying a more attractive choice. The price of a long distance call declined also, which made the decision easier. I talked to someone at CES who told me he was doing focus groups on whether a new music distribution method would be embraced by users under 30. — save your money dude, the answer is no. But these freetards will grow up and become lawyers and doctors and getting busted by the RIAA would be embarassing — and extremely unlikely. If the scheme of distribution is more convenient than piracy, people WILL pay for it.