On The Care and Feeding of your Weeds
I know that I have a tendency to run just a little bit behind the curve when it comes to new movements in the industry – this despite the fact that I was a beta tester for BitPass and I am (as far as I know) the first playwright to attempt a BitPass-driven licensing technique for my plays. The fact is that once I’ve discovered something, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s already been discovered and accepted or dismissed by the general population.
Of course, it’s not my fault all of the time – Napster, for instance, didn’t come out on the Macintosh until the RIAA was already sharpening its knives.
But my latest discovery – which you may or may not have heard of – is the wild world of Weedfiles.
Weedfiles, for those of you who haven’t encountered them yet, can best be described as shareware music files. The specially-encoded WMA files can be downloaded and played absolutely free a total of three times, after which you have to decide if you like the song enough to pay for it. If you buy the file (using your handy-dandy PayPal account), then you’re free to play it as much as you want, burn audio CD’s from it, and do all of the fun stuff in general that you like to do with your music. You can even share the music.
Yes. You can share weedfiles legally. And here’s where the fun part comes in.
When the Weedfile gets transferred to another computer, it reverts to its original shareware setting – three free plays, then a pop-up asking if the user would like to buy the song. That means that it’s perfectly legal for you to upload it to your website for other people to grab, or for you to log onto Gnutella, Kazaa, Grokster – or even an OpenNap server (if you can still find one) and share the file. But it’s even more fun than that. Anybody who winds up buying the song you’ve just purchased means money for you – specifically, 20% of the sale price. And it means money for the artist, and for the fine people running Weedshare.
Is it a solution for piracy? Of course not. It’s not going to stop piracy any more than Apple’s iTunes store is going to stop file swapping. But it has an intriguing plan behind it. Instead of just slapping every file with prohibitive copy protection and accusing everybody of being a thief just because they’re sick of absorbitant prices, let’s put the music in their hands. Let’s let them listen to the tracks to decide if they like them before they plunk down their hard-earned money, and then let’s give them an incentive – a real incentive like cold, hard cash – for legitimately distributing the music.
It’s a new form of micropayments that pulls from about every successful concept out there on the web today. It has micropayments – individual files sold at a low cost instead of packages that force folks to buy the whole thing at a high cost. It takes a cue from shareware – you can try the music to make certain you think it’s worth the money. It mixes in the old net standby, the affiliate program – if you like my music, help to distribute it and make a bit of money for yourself. And, to top it all off, it throws in file swapping – allowing fans to share their music legally without having to worry about new lawsuits.
And for those of you prepping short films, the Weedfile system can also work with WMV files.
I like it. Sir Mix-A-Lot (that horny old bastard) likes it. It seems like fun. And I like fun. That’s why I took the time to contact the fine people at CoolerWeed.com and have them turn The Illegal Rebirth of Deep Blue the Kid into a new set of weedfiles, ready for distribution.
Is this how artists will be paid in the future? I don’t know, and I think I’ve given up on trying to guess. But what I do know is that it’s one more round of the conversation – and that’s always a good time.