While the SF Community has been engaged in various forms of Doctorow Wars, the wider world has been more interested in the online sale of music. There are good reasons for more attention to being paid to music than books. Music, after all, already works well in digital form, whereas books do not. And the fortunes of retail music stores have been plummeting much faster than the value of the dollar. Big money is at stake, not just a status war between Cory and SFWA.
The latest salvo in the war was provided by Radiohead, who released an album online for free, but asked their fans to donate money for it. Rhodri Marsden, The Independent’s technology expert, has an interesting column on the experiment. Radiohead are apparently very happy, having netted millions of dollars from those voluntary donations, and yet it seems likely that far more people obtained the album for free than paid for it.
That’s a very graphic illustration of something that has been obvious in online retailing for a long time. Only a fraction (the usual rule of thumb is 1%) of people who are asked to pay for an online service will do so voluntarily. So if you happen to be Radiohead and have many millions of fans then you can sell online and make millions of dollars. If you are Cory and have Boing! Boing!, reputedly the world’s most read blog, as a sales vehicle then you might be able to make many thousands of dollars. If I were to try selling anything here I might expect to make about 3c.
The important point here is that we can’t all be Radiohead, or Cory. Online retailing is the ultimate in globalization. With so few barriers in the market, the top sellers can always get their goods to the customer, and everyone else loses out. Do you think that the midlist is getting squeezed now in bookstores? It will be much worse online. Are you upset at the increasing inequality of wealth in Western countries? Online retailing will magnify that significantly.
None of which is to say that those of us out in the long tail can’t sell online. There will always be a market for minority tastes, and online selling makes it much easier for purveyors of the unusual to reach their market, small though it may be. But that market may still not be big enough to make a living from.
Of course there may be other technologies on the horizon that will make things easier. A working micropayment system would make it much easier to make money from online publication. We’ve only just started to find out what this brave new online world is going to mean for us.