Reply To: Strange Business Model
I agree that the product is insanely great, and when people discover JC, they fall in love. The trick is generating traffic to bring people here for the falling-in-love part.
I can't imagine that locking more of the music away as pay-only will make that much difference. If twice the number of people paid for music but half of the potential new fans got turned away because they couldn't get the tunes on their iPod where they'll listen to it all day and tell all their friends about it, that doesn't seem to be good to me. Maybe TAW provided a deep enough stable that it can be the free stuff and everything from now on is pay-only. That lets new fans swim in lots of great music while making them pay for the new stuff.
One of the reasons I've kept up with the WoW videos is because I've got this secret fantasy that one of them will turn into JC's "OK Go" video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINJQ5LRh-0), the one that catches fire and gets him invited onto the Colbert Report and beyond.
I'm skeptical about the gigging thing people keep leaning on. I mean, when JC plays a gig, the house is packed with his fans, right? Well, they're already in love with him, so the benefit seems minimal. I would imagine that the focus should be on exposure to new people, and that means mass media like the Internet, TV, and radio.