SUBSCRIPTION MODEL

A podcaster I like is starting to move all his stuff onto Patreon. All the free stuff, free no longer.

I get it. It's a way for creatives to pull in a sustainable income - and the social media revolution of the last ten years has certainly created a need for that.

A lot of his fans were outraged. Why, they asked, should they have to shill out for the stuff they used to get for free? They imagine, as consumers do, that good content was designed for them, and therefore if it once was free, it now should always be. Some accused him of being mercenary, some said he was already wealthy enough, lives in the big house he keeps going on about, and has accrued enough fame over the years that this latest step seems (almost) greedy.

I miss the old days. If you liked an artist, you got on the bus, went to a shop and bought their record from a store. HMV was the establishment of choice when I was of the music-purchasing age - I used to spend ages rifling through the decks and decks of CDs looking for cool stuff by The Beautiful South or George Michael or The Bluetones. That was the only way in the 1990s, short of taping music from the Chart Show on Sunday afternoons.

Similarly, you had to buy a book from a shelf, or a poster in a tube. If you saw a t-shirt you liked, you had to figure out which shop you could get it, or something similar, and you'd have to wander around town on a Saturday until you found it or your feet hurt, or your friends bundled off to KFC.

Patreon's model is that the creator sets levels of engagement for its fan base. Then each subscriber pays a certain amount per month to receive up-to-date content. That way, the creator gets a steady stream of income and the subscribers get the content they desire from their favourites. It works on a balance of trust: belief that the content is worth the subscription fee, versus a belief that enough people will sign in to make it worthwhile doing.

My podcaster for example, has set the basic rate of his podcast at £5.99 per month, presumably believing that thousands of people will not be able to live without his musings and flock over to Patreon, now the only place you can hear it. Meanwhile for £7.99 you can get his thoughts streamed into your inbox in the form of a 30,000 word diary, along with some other tokens like exclusivity certificates, and Q&As, and all new content every month.

I don't begrudge it. I actually think it's a great way for creatives to generate a stream. He's already got over 1500 subscribers, so that's him making at least £9,000 per month. Not bad if you can get it, is it? He is famous though, so you know - not everyone can do that quite so lucratively.

Where I think the subscription model falls down is that it removes all the people who are sort of lost in the middle. We're not super-fans who can afford a subscription, but we're not indifferent either. We enjoy the work in passing - we'd spend £12.99 on an album we can listen to again and again... but we wouldn't necessarily want to know why the band had to travel to Barcelona to record it, or want to pay to find out which of them like which colour Skittles. What we need is access to some of the stuff but not all, just enough to keep us fans and maybe tempt us to sign up in future. I would have made a shorter podcast and kept it free if it were me, I think.

On the other hand, on the side of the creatives, it's easy to see that there are some massive companies out there who pull in billions of dollars for creative content they've only provided a platform for. Their contract with the consumers is that we can have access to everything... for a small fee. Their contract with the creatives is that the artists get the crumbs of the profit and not much more. Don't get me wrong - I totally get why sites like Patreon exist.

It does remind me of the age-old balance that anybody selling anything must know: if you can convince someone that a trade of items is better for them, when it's actually better for you, you've got it made. Basically that's always been sales and marketing, hasn't it? Ever since Ug The First gave Oofbert two rocks in exchange for a crop of barley.

The technology changes, the unscrupulous convincing gets smarter, but the principles are still the same. 

The question is for me, if I subscribe to Patreon, will I walk away from the deal feeling as though I've got a bargain, or will they? And at the moment, to be honest, I can live without it.