New Marketing Tactic - Guilt Sells
Magnatune, my favorite record label, has offered pay-what-you-want-with-minimum-limit memberships for close to a month now. I visit Magnatune daily and leech off their MP3 streams while at work, so I figured that I should probably start doing that fair compensation thing.
Their payment distribution scheme has an interesting twist. Half of what you pay goes to artists, and then that half is divided equally among the artists whose music you listened to.
It quickly becomes obvious that this membership system can be a way of paying artists practically nothing, which puts us back in the bad old days: the share for each artist whose music you downloaded is roughly inversely proportional to the number of albums you download.
Now I don’t expect this to be the same for everyone, but this is an interesting way to use guilt on me. As I understand it, artists can see who paid what for which album. I don’t really have a problem with that, but I do have a problem with my name showing up with some ridiculously cheap amount next to it. That, more than anything, feels like robbery.
This, plus my generally positive view of Magnatune, had two effects on me:
- I paid a large amount of money for the download membership.
- I’m not sucking down every album I can find. Actually, I’ve only downloaded two.
Both of these actions are a result of me trying to maximize the factors [amount of money I send to artists whose music I like] and [amount of music I get]. It’s a fun game.
I think Magnatune is banking on this reaction from the majority of their subscribers. I hope it works out for them.