Keep on rocking in the free world…

For many, the highlight of this year’s Glastonbury festival was Neil Young’s epic 12 minute version of “Rocking in the free world”. The anthemic lyrics certainly seemed to strike a chord with the largely youthful and digitally-reared crowd. All those under-30s in the audience, having grown-up with and grown close to the Internet, are now well and truly rocking in a world that is free. 

Personally today I have already watched some videos on YouTube for free, listened to some music on Spotify for free and read a free copy of the Metro on the way into work. So what’s the catch? Are we really so fortunate in this digital age that we don’t have to put our hands in our pockets and cough up for anything anymore? 

The steady flow of free music, TV, sport and gaming to our screens is so readily available and easily accessible these days that you do start to take it for granted and almost feel that you have a right to consume free content. This mindset is of course bad news for anyone trying to charge consumers directly for such content and it has sparked an interesting debate about whether the whole “free thing” can last. 

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine is one of the leading advocates of the free economy and he argues its case in his new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”. In this controversial new work he claims that information “wants to be free” and that the Internet generation is growing up now assuming that it will be. What Chris suggests is that the 20th Century model of free-ness was offered to consumers ‘Gillette razor style’ (you get the razor for free, but you have to buy the blades) and this has become outdated. The new 21st Century take on this is that you can actually get useful stuff for free (much more useful than a razor with no blades!) but decide to buy a ‘Freemium’ good on top to upgrade the free products. Social games company Playfish (which is a Bite UK client) does this very well with games that allow people to play with their friends over social networking sites like Facebook. You can play the games for free, and they are great, but if you make small “micro-payments” they get even better.

Chris practises what he preaches as well. His book is the first audiobook in the UK to be made available on Spotify and you can of course listen to it completely free!