(no subject)
value and availability and the dissolution of the music industry
if you get something for free, do you value it as much as if you would have had to pay for it? or if something is infinitely available would you value it as much as if you had to go to certain effort to obtain it? if you pay for something, you may have had to do some work to get it, so you might have time invested in it. in this case, say you paid for a cd, you would want to like it to get your money/time's worth. maybe you would find reasons to like it. or if you desired a rare record, and you found it at a yard sale for 50 cents, it is worth much more than that - the time you spent searching for it and the luck you had in finding it. but there has to be something desirable about it in the first place, not just that it is not easily obtainable. a good song is a good song no matter how you obtained it. value can be assigned on how good one thing is in comparison to another. so when something becomes infinitely obtainable, like a free album online, it looses any extra value that might be added by the difficulty of obtaining it and effort put into receiving it. (if work needs to be done to get to it, how much higher is the value, and how much work is worth it?) so what we end up with is the true value (- value stripped of the price of scarcity).
i could go on too many tangents with this, so i'll stop. so should i pay some money and download the new radiohead, or should i listen to it from a friend first? well, i'll hear it from a friend first, because i've never had a radiohead album. but then, if i hear it from a friend, i would probably just get it from them. and i would value it, because i would have gone through the effort of listening to it, and transferring it to my computer. i wouldn't put that effort in if i didn't like it. it would have to mean something to me for me to want to keep it. so, at what point would i send money to the band? i would already have what i value- copies of the songs. i wouldn't want the physical recordings of it because i don't really have a cd player, and any cd's i get would just become mp3s on my computer. maybe i would want to see them live and pay for that. but it really wouldn't make sense to buy something i would already have.
so, anyone who's heard the new radiohead... how is it?
if you get something for free, do you value it as much as if you would have had to pay for it? or if something is infinitely available would you value it as much as if you had to go to certain effort to obtain it? if you pay for something, you may have had to do some work to get it, so you might have time invested in it. in this case, say you paid for a cd, you would want to like it to get your money/time's worth. maybe you would find reasons to like it. or if you desired a rare record, and you found it at a yard sale for 50 cents, it is worth much more than that - the time you spent searching for it and the luck you had in finding it. but there has to be something desirable about it in the first place, not just that it is not easily obtainable. a good song is a good song no matter how you obtained it. value can be assigned on how good one thing is in comparison to another. so when something becomes infinitely obtainable, like a free album online, it looses any extra value that might be added by the difficulty of obtaining it and effort put into receiving it. (if work needs to be done to get to it, how much higher is the value, and how much work is worth it?) so what we end up with is the true value (- value stripped of the price of scarcity).
i could go on too many tangents with this, so i'll stop. so should i pay some money and download the new radiohead, or should i listen to it from a friend first? well, i'll hear it from a friend first, because i've never had a radiohead album. but then, if i hear it from a friend, i would probably just get it from them. and i would value it, because i would have gone through the effort of listening to it, and transferring it to my computer. i wouldn't put that effort in if i didn't like it. it would have to mean something to me for me to want to keep it. so, at what point would i send money to the band? i would already have what i value- copies of the songs. i wouldn't want the physical recordings of it because i don't really have a cd player, and any cd's i get would just become mp3s on my computer. maybe i would want to see them live and pay for that. but it really wouldn't make sense to buy something i would already have.
so, anyone who's heard the new radiohead... how is it?