Episode: 1242
Title: HPR1242: What's Wrong With Free, Anyway?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1242/hpr1242.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:13:40

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Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I've got plenty of stuff in the Libra Office series, but this is a little vacation from
that to talk about something else that I think is kind of interesting.
I hope that you will find it interesting as well.
And I'm going to take as a starting point, I was at my lug, and we had some discussion
as we tend to do. I mean, our Linux users group is probably not much different from everyone
else's. You bring up almost anything, there's going to be a lot of discussion.
And sometimes the trick is to just get a word in edgewise because there's three people
talking at once. They all want the floor.
Well, geeks are like that sometimes.
So in this particular case, for some reason we got into a discussion of piracy,
the music industry, bit torrent, etc.
And one of the guys there tried to make the argument that bit torrent promotes piracy
and is harming the industry. And he seemed very surprised that no one in the room agreed with him.
You know, he was saying, you know, we should get a bunch of geeks together and figure out a way
to put a spike in bit torrent because it's evil. And no, it isn't, and no, we won't.
But along the way, we got into a discussion about the music business and how things have changed.
And they really, they have changed, I think, irrevocably.
One of the things we talked about, there would never again be a group as big as the Beatles.
Now, I'm of an age where when I was a teenager, the Beatles were the big thing.
You know, on AM radio all the time. And it was kind of the soundtrack of my life growing up.
But there's nothing like that now. There is no group out there. There's no individual artist out there that is that universally important.
So why is that? Now, you know, I think that one of the reasons is, frankly, most of the people today just aren't that good.
Now, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. But, you know, I still listen to the Beatles. And I will listen to the Beatles to the day I die.
And I just, I haven't heard anything in the current music industry that sounds quite that good.
In fact, when I think about the big acts from that, the Beatles, the who, the Rolling Stones, they just, they don't make them like that anymore.
I think that was just a special time. Now, to me, that's a, it's kind of important. I haven't talked about it much here.
I am a musician. I have been since I was a teenager. And so music is an important thing to me.
I have a newsletter that I love to read that talks about that. It's called the Left Sets Letter, L-E-F-S-E-T-Z.
And it's by a guy named Bob Left Sets. And he's always explaining how the music industry, the music world, it's all different now. It's not the way it used to be.
You know, it used to be that the, the big labels would get a hold of an act and they would, you know, push it and they would get the radio play, all of the air play on AM radio and stuff like that.
And, you know, that would lead to lots of record sales and everything else. It's not that kind of world anymore.
And one of the things he talks about a lot is how the music business is now about the relationship the artist has with the fans.
And it has nothing to do with mass media. There is no mass media that everyone is listening to.
And a big reason for that, I think, is the internet. The internet has killed broadcasting.
There's no doubt in my mind about that. That's not to say that, you know, there are still radio stations out there.
There are still TV stations out there. They are doing broadcasting. But they don't matter that much.
They don't control it the way at one time they did when they were, you know, there was a handful of stations and that was everything. It's not like that anymore.
Instead, we are in a world of narrow casting. And by now casting, you're not trying, and it's probably just as well, because it probably wouldn't work.
But you're not trying to go after a huge mass audience of millions and millions and millions of people.
Instead, you go after your audience, which may be a niche audience, but it's a group of people that want what you offer.
And in order to get that audience, you need to work on your relationships. You have to build a relationship with your audience.
Now, I think one of the most eloquent explanations of that that I've seen is by Amanda Palmer, and she did a Ted's talk.
And by the way, for Amanda's video and for the left sets letter, I have put links in the show notes.
So if either of those interests you, you can look at that stuff up.
But she talks about how she builds that relationship and says that the poll quote on all of this is that the industry is focused on how to make people pay for music.
But she focuses on how to let people pay for music.
Notice how the language changes when you do this and what it implies.
When you talk about making people pay, you're using the language of force.
The language you use with enemies, the language of conflict and confrontation.
Is it any wonder the industry is imploding?
Any business that treats its customers like the enemy is not long for this world.
And isn't that really what the music industry and I think now Hollywood are doing?
They are treating their customers as the enemy.
And I just, I don't see any business model that works when you start with that.
Now Amanda Palmer talks about letting people pay.
She looks at her fans as an ally.
So she's using a language of trust, a language of mutual respect.
Her attitude is if I tell the people I need support to make my music and if they like my music, they will support it.
And it does seem to be working.
Now one of the things people often say when you bring this up is, well that works for so and so,
but it won't work for everyone.
And that's an interesting question.
If it won't work for you, what does that say about your relationship with your supposed fans?
Because there are people that I deal with that I would buy anything they ever put out.
Now how does Amanda Palmer do this?
Amanda, for instance, recorded an album on a music label, industry, standard, traditional music label.
Records the album sold 25,000 copies and was considered a failure.
25,000 copies is not enough if you're on one of the big record labels.
That's nothing.
So they weren't interested. So she left the label.
She started a Kickstarter campaign to fund her next recording project, raised about 1.2 million from whom?
Well, she raised it from about 25,000 fans.
In other words, she essentially got the same group of people who bought her album when it was on the label to fund the Kickstarter campaign.
So she's got a hard core audience of about 25,000 people who love what she does and will support it.
For the record label, that means you're nothing. We can't use you.
And there are rock stars out there that have this big sense of entitlement that they've got to be able to pay for their mansions and their expensive sports cars.
But listen to Amanda Palmer. She's looking at it in a very different way.
She's making an honest living. And this is the niche audience that you get in an environment of narrow casting and not the mass audience we used to get from broadcasting.
So as I said, I'm okay with this because I see this in my own music tastes. There are a half dozen artists from whom I will buy any product they put out.
Possibly you haven't heard of any of them. Doesn't matter. They're not mass artists.
One of them is a woman named Jonathan Brooke just did a campaign on pledge music to raise money for her next album.
And I made my pledge and returned for a CD when it's done. And part of that process is that I'm getting updates and photos and things like that as she goes through the recording process.
And you can bet your life I'm going to buy a ticket to her show anytime she's in town.
Now when I do that, it's not going to cost me a fortune. Okay, I've been to some of the big ones. For instance, about seven years ago, my wife and I got a couple of tickets for the who?
What I got was two tickets that cost over a hundred dollars each and it was so far from the stage I had trouble even seeing the jumbo tron let alone the musicians.
When Jonathan comes to town, she'll play a local club that seats about 400 people. The tickets will cost about 25 dollars and I will be maybe 20 feet away from her.
Or sometimes closer. After the show, she will stay. She will sell and sign CDs and talk to her fans.
Now it's artists like this that I support with my money because I feel a relationship with them.
But by the same token, if they didn't make enough money to keep going, these artists would stop doing what they do.
So my feeling is that I support you and you give me something I want. Amanda Palmer puts her music out on the internet without DRM, but she asks people to pay for it and they do.
Now, the interesting thing is I didn't start this recording to talk about the music business. And yet I'm already about 11 minutes into it and that's all we've talked about.
But what I was really thinking about is that we had something interesting happen in the software area that got me thinking about all of this.
And it has to do with a program that I use a great deal. It's called Google Reader.
Now Google Reader, you know, I read a lot of blogs and that was an essential part of my daily routine was to go into Google Reader and see what was happening on the different blogs.
And then all of a sudden Google said, we're going to drop it. You know, we don't care.
One of the things that I read, you know, a lot of people who used it were complaining and then other people would say, hey, you didn't pay anything for it, shut up.
All right, so I guess there's some justice in that that you can't really force someone to put resources into a free of charge application.
It does make some sense. Google is a very, very large corporation at this point.
I mean, if you, you know, they rank up there in the top companies worldwide in terms of profits, revenues, and what have you.
Their customer base is probably well over a billion.
So, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, these are all becoming really very, very large companies with very, very large audiences, so to speak.
In other words, that's the mass. And the problem is with something like Google is that, you know, they were attracting from what I've heard.
I've heard numbers thrown around anywhere from 10 to 20 million who were using Google Reader. And that sounds like a lot, but it's not for Google.
I think with Google, it's like, if we can't get at least 100 million, it's not worth putting resources into. And just because they're at that scale, I think they need 100 million to make it worth their while.
But let's think about a smaller developer, developer who might be able to get one or two million customers.
Let's say it's a cloud service similar to what Google offered. Maybe it would cost two dollars a month. That would be if each customer put that in, it'd be $24 a year.
And if you had a million customers, it'd be $24 million. That might be quite enough to run a very good RSS Reader service. And it's completely sustainable.
The service would have a predictable income to maintain and develop the product, and they could develop a customer of users who are passionate about the product.
Let me say reasoning would apply to downloadable software, even free software, if you use that term like I do, due to note software that gives you the four freedoms that the free software foundation has published.
But the key is to understand you need to support software that you rely on. If you only want free of charge software, you will probably pay for it with your personal information or by watching ads.
And you will be at the mercy of companies that will drop the product any time it suits them.
I think you will find that this rarely happens in the free software community, as long as a project has a passionate community that supports it, the way Amanda Palmer stands, support her.
So what could that start to look like? I think we have an opportunity to do something different in software from the way we've been looking at it.
I was listening to one of Leo Laporte's podcasts right after the Google Reader thing, and they were talking about different alternatives coming up.
And Leo was going, no, no, no, we must have one giant product that is the standard for the market that I'm thinking, hell no.
That's the last thing in the world we want.
Because that just puts us at the mercy of the company, companies putting that product out. I think for a healthy software system, I would much rather have 20 different products, each one slightly different, competing with each other.
I think that gives us a very different notion of how it works. I'm moving away from this idea that there must be one ring to rule them all, one software product that is the standard.
And I hear people talk about, you know, with Android or with Linux or whatever, fragmentation, you know, there's no standard for all of this.
I think that's actually healthy. I'm glad there's not a standard. Because if there's, if there is a standard, you could suddenly find that the standard that everyone has decided on is one that doesn't fit you very well.
But when you have that fragmented community with a lot of developers, companies, what have you going in different directions, you have much better chance of finding the one that really works the way you want to work.
And I think that's a good thing. But I think it also depends on supporting those developers.
And I'll point to another thing that Google did that in some circles was controversial. And that is they told adblock, you cannot sell adblocking software in the Google Play Store.
And in a number of people got very outraged about all of that. Actually, my reaction was good on them.
Now, what does the software ecosystem look like here? If you are using free of charge software, you are paying for it by giving up your personal information by watching ads.
There aren't a whole lot of charitable groups out there writing software. A better alternative is to pay for the software. Now, frankly, if there's, I might try the free version for a week or so and see if it's something I want to keep.
And if it is, and there's a pay version, I almost always will get the pay version. If $1.99 or $2.99 is too much for you, get a real job, because we're not talking about a lot of money here.
By the way, there's a practical aspect to that. The practical aspect is the free stuff that is ad supported uses up your battery and your bandwidth downloading the ads.
So, you can do yourself a favor that way. But someone is going to say, I want all of this free software and I want to block the ads in a grow-up. I really just, I have contempt for anyone who does that.
Everyone needs to make a living here, including developers of apps. Now, if you have a different feeling about that, I would say record your own program for Hacker Public Radio and present your point of view about it.
I'm sure Ken Fallon would love to have more contributors. But what I think we need to do is we need to start thinking about how do we support the community of developers
that are going to provide what we want. And if we want free software in particular, and again, I'm talking not free of charge, that's a juvenile idea, but free is in freedom.
That I can download the source code, I can distribute it, I can modify it, take a look at the four freedoms. And you'll see what we're talking about.
No one is going to do that if there's no community support around it. And I think we need to start doing that. And I'd like to frankly see a lot of small projects.
Because I think the small project that maybe one developer with 30,000 committed users could be something really interesting.
Because we start seeing more software like that instead of 100 developers and 40 million users. We're more likely with the small software, with the boutique software to find the things that really work the way we want it to.
And I think that could be a very exciting development. So I'm signing off now. And as always, I'm going to remind all of you, please support free software. Thanks.
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