JonBischke.com

One of my favorite albums of the last year or two is Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals (sample their stuff for free on Lala or MySpace). I’ve probably listened to it 50 times in the last six months. As I posted in a reply to Chris Sacca on Twitter today, it’s pure audio caffeine.

A month or so ago I lost the hard drive on my old MacBook Pro. Most of my data was backed up but I wasn’t 100% current and I lost a small amount of data. One of the things that I lost was my download of Feed The Animals. Girl Talk has chosen to go the “pay what you want” route and back when I downloaded I think I paid $5 or $10 for the album.

Today I wanted to listen to the album. Had Feed The Animals been a typical DRM-infested, iTunes download I would have had to ante up again for it. What I probably would have done is just moved along and listened to something else instead. After, who wants to pay for the same album twice?

But because “pay as you want” existed I downloaded it again off the Girl Talk website. And now I am happily listening to Play Your Part (free stream on Lala here). And I’m blogging about Girl Talk. And I’ll Twitter the blog post. And the odds that I’ll go see Girl Talk next time they’re in town just went up.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s a perfect example of evidence for The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free (one of the best blog posts in the last five years). Make it easy for people to consume your abundant goods (digital downloads) and what you’ll find is that people will consume more of your scarce goods (concert tickets). What’s it worth to Girl Talk that I blog about them or Twitter about them? Probably not a ton but in the aggregate a lot of people talking about them adds up. And had they not made it easy for me to re-download their album there’s a blog and Twitter endorsement from me they weren’t likely to get today.

So give some thought to your abundant goods today and how you can make them more accessible. For everyone that’s different and a “pay what you want” model isn’t for everyone. It’s just one example of a lot of strategies that can be used to make it easier for people to consume and share stuff in a way that doesn’t set you back anything at an individual level.

And for goodness sake, go download Feed the Animals already!