Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
146
 www.ideavirus.com
The most popular web browsers are free.
The cost of listening to a Beethoven concerto went from $30 (at some fancy theater in
London) to $0 after radio was invented.
The cost of watching a movie on network television is zero.
The mathematics of the ideavirus make it too compelling for the creators of viruses to stay
greedy.
The more people know your virus, the more it is worth!
Thus, if charging people for exposure to your virus is going to slow down its spread, 
give it
away
.
Apple just cut the price of WebObjects software from $50,000 a copy to $699. That’s a
98.7% decrease in the price.
Why? Because Apple realized that unless a lot of people use their software, no one will use it.
Take a look at 
www.mp3.com
. Pick an obscure music category like Celtic. Go to the end of
the bestseller list: there are 1,168 songs listed. These are not illegal copyright scams, where
the music has been stolen by the artist. These are real songs, posted by the artists or their
labels. The whole song… not part of it.
Why would anyone do this? Give away an entire album of music when Bob Dylan can
charge $16?
Look at it from your point of view. An unknown artist 
is
a commodity. An unknown artist 
is
the same as a box of salt. If you don’t know why the artist is unique, why pay?
Look at it from the artist’s point of view. The cost of giving away songs is literally zero. Once
you’ve made a record, the cost of one more copy of an MP3 is nothing. And if it helps you

---

Unleashing the Ideavirus
147
 www.ideavirus.com
get listened to, if it helps you build your virus, then you’re one step closer to no longer being
a commodity!
In fact, many artists would 
pay
people to listen to their MP3 cuts if they thought it would
help them break through the clutter and get famous. Take a look at the Payola section of
MP3.com. You can do exactly that… pay money to have your song promoted so you can
give it away for free.
Of course, once you’re famous, you can go ahead and charge $16 for your CDs.
Or can you?
Sure, there’s going to be room for collectibles. For live events. For autographed guitars. But
once something is no longer hot and fresh and the latest, rarest thing, why wouldn’t the self-
interested artist go ahead and give it away free to stoke the ideavirus for the next release? In a
competitive marketplace where there’s transparent information about who’s listening to
what, the Internet becomes radio. And artists know that charging radio stations is dumb.
This same logic applies to books. And to just about any other sort of digital media you can
think of. Unless there’s an extraordinarily unique property of the media being offered, I
maintain that sooner or later it’s going to be free. The Bloomberg machine used by stock
brokers, for example, commanded a huge price premium for years, because the combination
of excellent data and locked-in user interface meant it wasn’t worth switching. But as the
web replicates more and more of the data available, it’s inevitable Bloomberg’s market share
will decrease—and their prices will as well.
The exciting thing is that people who go first, who put their previously expensive digital
media out there for free, will gain the lion’s share of attention and launch bigger and longer
lasting viruses.
So. Who wants to go first? And who wants to go... last?

---