What's your business model?

Bill Cunningham over at Pulp 2.0 is somebody who gets the whole cross-media thing, and is doing a pretty awesome job of proselytizing the message in his blog.

Today he posted about two opposite ends of the spectrum: on one side struggles the idea that giving away music for free online will hurt musicians, and on the other we find Damon Wayans' idea to create a free online comedy club to showcase up-and-coming comedians.

His basic point is that for years network television has been very successful with a free content model supported by advertising, and by all appearances the same model is the way to go online.

Certainly in my experience people don't seem to want to pay for anything online, and giving stuff away for free is fantastic promotion for the things you want them to pay for. Major news outlets like the NYT have learned this the hard way, initially making all their content freely available, then hiding it behind a pay firewall, and now making it available again. (I wouldn't have been able to link to the story in my previous post if this wasn't the case. Now if only Playback magazine would get their heads out of the year 2001 and figure out how things really work in the digital age.)

The music industry has never been able to figure out online distribution. I can't remember where I first heard this, but it always seemed to me the best metaphor for the music industry: they're like the guy selling water in the desert; when it starts to rain, it's time to find a new business model.

Thankfully I'm of an age where I don't care about new music anymore (it all sounds like crap to me now, which is how I know I'm officially old), and am perfectly happy to listen to the classic rock and 80's alternative I already possess copies of so I don't have to worry about giving any more money to the backwards-looking hamquacks who run the music industry. If Adam Ant, Roddy Frame, or Edwin Collins ever tour again, I'll gladly give them some ticket sale money, but I'm done buying new tracks on CD, MP3, or elsewise.

Now there are cases where people will pay for stuff. Cunningham cites the example of HBO in the TV world, which shows that people will pay extra if the content they're getting in return is good enough. I wonder if it's the case where people have to get tired of the lowest-common-denominator stuff first before the online equivalent of pay cable can sustain itself.

Sanctuary was an example of charging for ultra-high-quality content online, before it got picked up for free broadcast on the SciFi channel. I wonder how many paid subscribers they got? Probably not enough. I also wonder what their cross-media strategy will be; will they still provide exclusive content online, and will they still charge for it?

These are important questions as the makers and distributors of content try to figure out how to make it all work. As soon as someone cracks this nut, watch the floodgates open.

I predict that it's going to happen sooner than anyone thinks.