Free Content and the T-Shirt Economy

I read an interesting article recently by Clive Thompson called How T-Shirts Keep Online Content Free.

He talks about the hugely popular Red vs. Blue, an animated comedy series set inside the game-world of Halo. The series was created by four (nerdy) friends, and they eventually made enough money selling related merchandise to quit their jobs and pursue the series full time.

How did they do it? They gave their primary content (the show itself) away for free. Nothing new here, but it exemplifies the new music business. Copies (digital music) are free. Free content is sharable, and it thus has a viral nature. The creators then sold the contextual merchandise  - primarily t-shirts with the most popular one-liners from the show. Context is what you want to sell.

For musicians, context can mean exclusive access to certain recordings, it can be your live shows (or backstage passes), it can be the golden tickets The Flaming Lips are putting inside a limited number of DVDs. Your most loyal followers want and are willing to pay for these kinds of things.

The Red vs. Blue story struck a chord with me because it translates perfectly to what we’ve been talking about here at the blog, particularly figuring out different price points for your products.

Lots of you sent us some great ideas over twitter and in the comments of the article about different ways to accomplish this. Part of it is about repackaging your music in different ways to appeal to different segments of your community. You can’t just release an album anymore. Part of it is about selling “access” to you the musician.

Some of your music should be free to break down the barriers to discovering your music, but it does not mean that you need to make all of your music free. In fact, that’s probably the worst idea. Believe it or not, there ARE some people out there willing to pay you for your creative work - your job as a musician is to figure out what that is. It will take some creativity (lucky for you, that’s what you’re great at!) because this will work differently for every individual artist. Copying success will not guarantee success anymore.

Clive hit the nail on the head when he wrote about why the Red vs. Blue model works:

Their algorithm is simple: First, don’t limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans’ desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

Some of our readers have already started doing this! Some of you still might find it a little counter-intuitive to give some of your work away.

I really think it’s not so much that the market has demanded all of your music be free (this is probably why some musicians feel that giving their music away degrades them). Free music is about discovery. If Red vs. Blue had a cost associated with it directly, likely it would have never reached the amazing popularity it did. Letting the content roam free created some very passionate and very loyal followers. Those people, in turn, were more than happy to open their wallets to extend their Red vs. Blue experience beyond the show itself. Those same people were actively marketing the show to their friends and community for free. That’s right, free marketing!

This is why I have suggested how important it is to identify your core followers and develop relationships with them. As I said in the article Focus on a Few, you don’t need to market to the masses because your friends will do it for you!

What do you guys think? I’m really interested in hearing your experiences with trying to sell “context” or “access” and how it has worked or how it hasn’t.