Oct 13 2010
Free Choice
Nothing is really free, and it’s definitely not always a choice, as Anderson argues.
People love free things. College students swarm campus events if free pizza is offered. People buy in stock for buy one, get one free. Free makes the market go screwy. But do we have a choice to participate in free? Students can choose not to eat the pizza, or consumers can choose not to buy the deals at the supermarket. Instinctively, it’s harder to make the decision not to engage in free.
It’s because humans have the deep rooted survival instinct. If we don’t buy the sale products right when they go on the market, then someone else will, and we’ll be out of a product. It’s the same reason why people line up on Black Tuesday for shopping deals after thanksgiving. The products aren’t free, but you feel like you’re getting a special deal over everyone else, and thus, ensuring your survival with better products.
Back to choice: the market makes it so we don’t really have a choice. In a roundabout way, Anderson argues that if you aren’t smart enough to take advantage of free stuff, then you’re missing out. Free stuff may disrupt the markets for a little bit, but the markets always stabilize themselves in the end, because people will continue buying the product after potentially using the free sample.
The internet has made free access so much easier. You can download coupons for free stuff almost anywhere. Coupons.com is a good example for discounted brand coupons. There are multiple “laws and locks” that will attempt to constrain the spread of free on the internet, but people are already accustomed to receiving “free”.
There’s no way that these laws and locks will be able to keep people from receiving free stuff. People are not going to give up something they’ve been used to receiving for so long. And, if people like the free sample for long enough, they buy the product in the end.
Pandora does this. You can sign up for free internet radio with an email and password, and you receive 40 hours of free music a month. If you want more than 40 hours of music, you can pay for Pandora One, and get unlimited music with less advertisements. It’s relatively cheap to, for a bout 30-something dollars a year. To the user, it may be worth the purchase, especially if they love the product.
Personally, when I run out of my 40 Pandora hours a month, I use a different email/password combination to log into my other Pandora account, and I continue listening to free music. No way am I paying for music if I know there’s a free version somewhere else.