Mike Arrington is once again repeating his prediction that music will one day be free and un-DRM'd. Recently he's been praising music sites like Magnatune (a record label with DRM-free music and a choice of formats) and AllofMP3.com, which charges $0.02 per MB for un-DRM'd music. But ultimately he thinks the business model needs to shift towards free downloads:

I think music will be free someday soon, and money will be made on special edition cds, dvds, concerts and merchandise. And, labels could make a very small profit by allowing downloads with all the options of allofmp3…sort of a quality guarantee over p2p.

Forget music for a second. I've always thought that all online media should be free and ad-supported. There's also the option to sell physical copies, merchandise (thanks, Cafepress) and services alongside the product. This is a pretty extreme view, I know, but it seems to me that whenever you lock content away behind a pay barrier (or even just a free signup form) you simply encourage people to go elsewhere. Why have a book printed with the opportunity to sell a few thousand copies when you could put it online and potentially reach millions of readers? Once the content is free, you can opt for an ad-supported model and sell print-on-demand copies through sites like Lulu. And once it's freely available, your content becomes an ad for you and your services, justifying your ludicrously expensive consulting fees. Media is not scarce any more - attention is the scarce resource. The danger is not that people will "steal" your content, it's that they'll never be exposed to it at all.

[start rant] And on a side note: Mike Arrington, Om Malik, and Steve Rubel are complaining about sploggers stealing their content. Fair enough - taking content wholesale without attribution is stealing. But the fact is that for every splogger you catch, there will be many, many more who get away with it. Here's a crazy thought: you can't completely stop your content from being republished on the web, so how about finding ways to turn that to your advantage? Let's take another look at Fred Wilson's rules for the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair. 2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart. 3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it. Thanks Dave. 4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

The reason Mike and others lose out to the sploggers is that they're not monetizing the microchunk (ie their feeds). There are obvious ways to do this (through blatant ads or less intrusive affiliate links), but there are also more subtle ways. If the splogger isn't giving attribution, why not put the attribution in there yourself? Why not make a point of linking back to related articles at every opportunity? That way you still get links back to your content whether or not attribution is given. There are other ways to do this too, of course, like putting a "by Pete Cashmore" line somewhere in the feed itself. Or how about mentioning your consulting services, your current project or your quest to find Ruby on Rails developers who'll work for revenue share? The point I'm trying to make is that syndicated content can become an ad for you, your blog and your services. You need to create a system in which you make more money from the splogger than they make from you. What's more, you need to do it in a way that won't alienate your readers - in other words, don't overdo it.

Now I'm not saying that splogs aren't evil in other ways - they clog up search results, create fake trackbacks and generally make it harder to navigate through the blogosphere. Services like Technorati and PubSub will still need to figure out what is original and what is not. And of course there are rumors that Google penalizes sites which contain duplicate content, but I can't find any evidence to support this (do I get penalized when Bloglines reproduces my blog?). My point is that bloggers can't on the one hand whine about how the newspaper industry is trying to package its content and control its distribution while at the same time trying to restrict the distribution of their own writing. Go with the flow, goddammit. [end rant]

Now back to the music. I don't think the music industry is at the same point as the newspaper and publishing industries. People are still prepared to pay for the convenience of a service like iTunes, and ad-supported models for music are very difficult to achieve - not only does music cost you more in bandwidth than text, but you've got the added problem that it isn't easily indexed by the search engines. For mainstream artists, I still feel that the best option is to stick with your record label. But if you're an unsigned band, you should give away your music in an un-DRM'd format and make your money on merchandise, print-on demand CDs (Lulu again), special editions and —most of all— concerts and live gigs.

PS. Sorry for all the bold text - I don't know what came over me. :)

PPS. It's almost New Year! Woot woot!

Update (Jan 1st): I just found out that the splogger who took Mike Arrington's content was not only failing to provide attribution, but also *intentionally removing* all the self-referential links back to TechCrunch. That's totally scummy and I respect Mike for going after him.

The idea of monetizing the microchunk (or putting in your own attribution) only works if the splogger isn't removing the attribution and ads. I'm trying hard to think of ways you could prevent the removal of these watermarks (especially automated removal), but I can't think of any offhand. Any thoughts?