A lot is being said about “free” these days, especially with the release of Chris Anderson’s book on the subject, but ever since I came online I’ve been interested in the economics of free, whether it was freeware, free music, or free information.

Story: I ran a series of free Mp3 downloads back in 2003 at mattborghi.com, and those downloads brought in more hits to my Web site than being featured on the nationally-syndicated space music program, Hearts of Space. To be fair, the program didn’t feature my music, exclusively, and no link was included to my site, but I thought that it would at least have generated some inquiries, and it did. However, I didn’t see nearly the response that I thought I would from that exposure compared to the interest generated by the free monthly download series.

It’s with that experience in mind that I released a variety of my long-form ambient music tracks to be freely available (some of which are from that monthly download series). Here’s the official announcement from my homepage at mattborghi.com:

Freely available Mp3s of long-form ambient works

I have freely released several hours worth of my long form works in mp3 form here, approximately a dozen tracks. Most of these tracks haven’t been available in quite a long time. Some go back as far as ten years and my early Mp3.com page, some were out-takes from records, and the 2003 series was a monthly download series that I did throughout 2003 during a particularly prolific period. I hope to add other long form works over started adding these tracks.

My reasons for doing this are two-fold. First, these tracks haven’t been available in a long time, and to me it makes more sense to put them out into the universe, where people can enjoy them, than let them take up space on my hard drive .

The second reason has to do with my how I measure the success of social media. Social media metrics and measurements are something that many folks talk about, and ponder but I think that good social media metrics aren’t in hit rankings or page views, but rather in how many people you are getting your ideas out to. The more people that download you free ambient music tracks, watch your videos, read your blog, etc… and comment on, think about, bring up in discussion, include in status updates or generally take an interest in your ideas is the best way to measure the success of social media.

I’m actually writing this post out of sequence. I just composed a post based on an article I read at Seth Godin’s blog, here, but I intend to publish this one first, and then follow up with the initital post that I wrote. I’m doing this because writing the initial post, Open, et al… actually got me thinking about what it means to be open. I’ve referred to open source, or the open, egalitarian nature of the Web here, and elsewhere many times over the last decade (yikes, time flies!) and it’s always been a bit of an abstract concept. Tech and Web folks could get the gist of what it mean to use open source software, like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) and others, but when referring to the philosophical nature of open on the Web, as a communications platform, many folks just kind of gave me a funny look. So I started to do some research on the philosophical foundation of open source, with the hope that I find some information that pointed to the open nature of the Web.

Most of the information that I found pointed to open source software, doing a search of open source philosophy on the Web via Google, this wasn’t surprising. However, after some digging, I found this page, Philosophical Tenets of Open Source, and close to the bottom of the page I found what I was looking for, I’ve taken this bit of text from the page:

Open Source Is a Gift Economy

To understand open source, it helps to make a distinction between a commodity economy, to which we are accustomed in a capitalist society, and a gift economy. In a gift economy, gifts are exchanged, forming a bond based on mutual obligation: In the simplest form of gift exchange, when one person gives a gift to another, the receiver becomes obligated to the giver, but not in a purely mercenary way–rather, the recipient becomes very much like a member of the giver’s family where mutual obligations are many, varied, and long lasting. A person may give a gift with the realistic expectation that someday a gift of equal or greater use value will be received or that the recipient will pass on a further gift. In an open-source project, the gift of source code is reciprocated by suggestions, bug reports, debugging, hard work, praise, and more source code.

The commodity economy depends on scarcity. Its most famous law is that
of “diminishing returns,” whose working requires a fixed supply. Scarcity of
material or scarcity of competitors creates high profit margins. It works through
competition.

The gift economy is an economy of abundance–the gifts exchanged are inexhaustible. Gift economies are embedded within noneconomic institutions such as kinship, marriage, hospitality, artistic patronage, and ritual friendship. A healthy Western family operates on a gift economy. In an open-source project, the status and reputation of individuals depend on the quality of the gifts they contribute.

The distinction really is that of the gift vs. commodity economy. It’s funny because as I write this I remember what it was that attracted me to the Web. I was a musician/composer, and I was working on a recording. After having played guitar for years, being in bands, playing shows, and trying to sell music at venues, I saw that the Web had the power to change everything for me as a working artist — the playing field had been leveled. On the Web, in 1999, Mp3.com had just launched, and it was skies the limit for artists to get out their, hang a virtual shingle, and let the world know about their work. However, it wasn’t about huckstering your product and bombarding folks with spam to inform them about your work (though there was some of that); rather there was an openness that permeated throughout this new platform. There were new channels for sharing what you were doing, as well as for folks, from all the over the world, to share with you. I’m sure at some point I’ll go into this story in greater detail, but for now, suffice it to say that the openness of the Web brought me in, and it was the openness and the economy of abundance on the Web that made me want to stick around, even forgoing my musical ambitions to see what a Web-centric world could look like. More to come, on what it mens to be open…