I saw something in my facebook feed that I hadn’t seen before: a media player for an entire album. I had a quick listen and really liked what I heard. All the links point to bandcamp, where you can purchase the release.

$5? I clicked buy without thinking about it much.

The payment options are good: I can use a card or paypal, thereby avoiding entering my card details. The price is the same regardless of format. Once I had paid, the download started automatically.

If I had one criticism, I’d say that the price should be advertised in the facebook player: that might have tipped the balance for some people.

Well done bandcamp for designing the player, Asthmatic Kitty for the music and the progressive pricing (and I suppose facebook for allowing this kind of media in the news feed!). If only other labels would wake up to these approaches: it really is about the experience.

I’ve been very frustrated by the glacial progress made in how to financially credit creators online. The music biz is badly in need of an alternative way to show your appreciation for the music you like (one that’s not buying the album!).

Flattr seems to be a good way forward. It works like this: imagine every time you clicked ‘like’ on facebook, a share of a fixed monthly donation was given to the creator. This overcomes the experience barrier that’s held micropayments back: instead of payment forms, a single click will suffice. You don’t even need to care about the amount.

Any money not used from your fixed monthly donation is given to charity. All round goodness! Good to see the pirates are still ahead of industries (the creators are ex-pirate bay).

My personal productivity struggle has been songwriting. I don’t have much time in the day for it, but even 5 minutes can sometimes produce interesting results. Now that I’m rather short of time, I’ve been thinking of ways to use Jerry’s method to make sure I at least do some kind of writing every day.

Today, in about half an hour I hacked something together. I don’t have space for a wall calendar, but I do have some basic php skills and I use google calendar. I took a php application called icalendar and set it to import a new google calendar I created called ‘music’.

Now every day that I do some songwriting, I will put an ‘all day’ event into the music calendar, which will show up in icalendar’s year view (with a mild bit of template hacking). There’s a red dot on each day I manage to get something down.

Clearly, there’s not much to see yet (see below) but I’ll set the calendar as my home page as a daily reinforcement and see how it goes! I thought it was important to see the whole year view, hence my desire to see it in something other than google calendar.

Joshua Porter used some psychology principles to examine how to provide a persuasive user experience. See the slides and audio from his presentation are available, in case you missed it (I’ve embedded the presentation below).

Over the past few years, I’ve been exposed to a great number of webapps+software that had a free version or trial and then offered something extra in the paid service. Most of them were non-essential to my work, but did offer something I enjoyed using, and potentially made me a little bit more efficient (e.g. mindmeister or basecamp).

One thing they all share in common: the paid service or one off price felt too expensive. There are now so many services that I’d like to buy into, that my pricing decision isn’t made in isolation. I find myself thinking: “that’s not too expensive, but if I was only using it occasionally and there are 20 others, it costs too much.”.

The Sign Up Problem

Joshua’s presentation illustrates ‘the signup problem’ brilliantly (see slide 29). Software customers overvalue their existing software (“why should I pay for x new widget?” i.e. hard to persuade) and software makers overvalue what they’ve created (“my widget really IS worth x much!!” i.e. missing out on sales).

I find myself thinking about the second point every time I get to the ‘Pricing’ page of software I might buy. I’m convinced that sellers are missing out on big chunks of sales as a result.

If there’s an ongoing cost, even if its small, I also worry about being tied into something I won’t use much, especially if I’m paying for a few. If I’m buying software at a one off cost, I end up thinking that the price is wrong given the ultra-low marginal cost.

Maybe I’m too frugal, and unrepresentative of the way a lot of buyers think. What I do know is this: when I buy software/services online, its not just about the alternatives to one particular market. I lump together everything I’m spending on these things into one big cost that I (irrationally?) try to keep under control. Therefore, things that don’t directly compete (e.g. basecamp for project management and blinksale for invoicing) end up affecting each other.

Now I know I’ve skipped over operating costs, development costs, and a lot of other factors that influence supply and demand. However, I can’t help but feel that these markets are being constrained by cognitive biases.

I’d be very interested to hear about alternative pricing/incentive approaches to the existing models. This is something I’ve been thinking about in relation to other industries (particularly film and music – MUCH more on that later).

This issue is important to me at the moment as I’m formulating more ideas about how to take the useful things that are out there and explain the benefits to individuals and businesses (see my ‘Geek Habits for non-Geeks’ workshop). The pricing model will be critical to adoption in so many cases, that I feel strongly that things need to change.

Mostly I end up thinking about how to assess how useful something is to a particular individual, and ‘tip’ on this basis. Something along these lines:

“You’ve used our widget for 99 hours this month, we suggest you pay X on this basis.”

“You’ve used our widget to create 50 files, we suggest you pay X on this basis.”

Taking this a step further, you could leverage cognitive bias to get people paying more, or at least more consistently. Social proof is instructive here, and I know its been tried on the independent music scene (wish I could remember which artist tried this…).

“On average, people have paid x per month to use our software. Pay this amount now.“

I’d like to take this last idea into the real world, but I’ll save the idea for another article. Thanks to Joshua for getting me thinking about this!

We’ve started a blog to track our progress, get yourself over there for more info. I’ve detailed the inception of our ideas in a post.

Before I continue, I truly hope that:

1. this idea I’ve just had won’t catch on
2. that its not already in the wild!

During the page load, my browser paused for a moment after displaying the top banner. For a couple of seconds, no other content was visible. Naturally, my attention was drawn to something I’ve never cared for, by virtue of it being the only thing to look at. Now imagine if pauses like this were technically possible (I’m sure they are, and I’ve seen things that are similar but more obvious): could they become endemic?

I should point out: I am obsessed with reducing the amount of advert intrusion in my daily life. I even mute the TV during ad breaks, every time! I believe strongly that advertising/marketing/PR have had an extremely detrimental effect on our mental well-being. Which in a strange way is why I’m drawn to the web: we can choose what we give our attention to.

So why do I point out this tiny moment of my life? Because every time I notice something like this (even accidental), I start to feel uneasy about the ways in which we’re manipulated that we don’t notice. How many am I missing that pass ideas into my brain without my consent?

I believe firmly that if marketing has any fair place in our culture, it needs to be transparent and non-manipulative. What that looks like, I’m not sure yet. Ideas welcome.