but I like quality more.

To me this is all part of the overarching problem that the latest generation seems to have given up on the idea that they should be better, more knowledgeable and more proactive than their parents. I thought the point of evolution was to improve our collective lot by raising the bar. What seems to be happening is that technology is being used to lower the bar. Everything is more accessible and we have more choice thanks to technology but at the same time it is engendering the idea that because it is easy to access and easy to use the ultimate logic of that technological process is to make it free. I can get all the music I want for nothing on Spotify so I might as well get a free opinion about what I'm listening to, or better still not even bother with an opinion and just go straight to the source.

It's not really about making it free, it's really about being lazy and, through instant access and instant choice, getting away with being lazy.

There is the old adage that cream will always rise to the top. In the context of music journalism I always thought that journos were like the "separators" used in the manufacture of real cream, an important part of the process by which the punter differentiates quality from quantity, hype from truth and music from muzak. But separators cost money.

All those harrumphers who said a few months ago that if they had to pay for stuff then they wouldn't bother, will be changing their tune soon enough. They'll have no choice.

Everyone said the same about Sky, but 10m subscribers and counting prove otherwise.

I don't see why everything should come for free. It's a lovely idea, but it'll cripple you in the long term. This we're learning the hard way.

The only thing you can guarantee in business is change.

While I do have concerns about how the media will cope with the change and how everyone will continue to make a living. We as punters are paying for computers,broadband,concert tickets at a price which used to pay for a weekend away,cable tv subscriptions etc etc. If we are getting away with not paying for some of the things we used to then I'm sure it will all balance out in the end. I'm sure artists of today and especially yesterday would rather have there material available to a mass audience rather than stuck on a shelf gathering dust somewhere. We will need to ride this wave and find ways of making it pay in future. Get your thinking caps on and make your own future. I'm sure you will.

I can't help thinking there's a lot of lane changing going on. Naive youthful idealism, faced with the apparently limitless possibilities of the internet, has come up with methods for stealing any stuff that can be digitised, both en masse and without (much) fear of being caught. Having done that, some have monetised their endeavours - the 'odious' Scandinavian Pirates et al - by using advertising to pay for the kit and the bandwidth. Youthful rebellion has taken a leaf out of the capitalist manifesto and made a business out of what, in an earlier generation, might have been a few phone freaks whistling down the wires.

In the meantime, the old boys of the 'Have a cigar' media empires have carried on pumping out recycled content in ever more imaginatively packaged forms and coining it hand over fist. Being exploited ruthlessly never went down particulalry well with any age group, and this current generation of digiterati have more clout, thanks to their connectedness and their technical nouse, than any previous one. So they've made a fashionable virtue of 'getting stuff free'. The hacker mythology has provided a role model for the connected wannabe.

Ye olde guard have finally started to rumble that their business model doesn't hold water any more. Simultaneously, the iPod generation have ignored any responsibility they might have for collateral damage, and have scared their seniors rigid by helping themselves to content by the gigabyte without recourse to anything as inconvenient as conscience.

The old school moguls do not, even now, understand the challenges they face in a digital environment. The T-shirted, pony-tailed upstarts at least think they do. One wants to charge for everything, one wants to give everything (that belongs to someone else) away for free. Impasse.

The fact remains that there is only value in having something for free, if that thing has quality. Free crap is still crap. The Sky is full of it.

The Spectator, until this week put all its content online. You could read the magazine from cover to cover without paying them a penny.
And now the penny has dropped: if you want people to buy your content, it’s daft to simultaneously offer it for free. People have always skimmed newspapers, picking and choosing which bits they read and at the moment they can cherry-pick the stuff they’re interested in, either print it out or read it onscreen, and pay nothing for it. It’s insane.
The Word is a good example of how a publication can have a very strong, brand-enhancing online presence without effectively giving its core product away.
Back to the Speccie. You can no longer access the content for free, but you can buy an online subscription that gives you access to it. The pricing seems a bit odd to me: an online subscription costs £67.50 for the year, £15 more than a subscription for the 52 copies of the magazine, although I don’t think suscribers to the print magazine get access to it online too. (There’s also a Kindle subscription for $4.99 a month - given that it’s just text and cartoons it’s a relatively Kindle-friendly publication I suppose).
All the “content” is available online once it’s out-of-date, i.e. a week after it’s come out.
Perhaps newspapers would be wise to follow suit.

There will always be room and revenue for hacks and writers - as a writer with form and talent you will have an income, no doubt about that Andrew. Whether there will be enough new music to write about is another question...

I think the threat you perceive will be an opportunity for magazines and newspapers online. Already, almost without trying, Word has developed a largeish and loyal following for its blog and podcast. "Monetising" (urggh) the web has always been the big challenge but if big fish (Murdoch) introduce payments which become a norm, then it will be easier for smaller fish (Word) to follow suit.

Mr Hepworth & Ellen could venture into areas they'd scarcely have imagined in their Q days, such as filming (or at least audio-recording) interviews which may be sold via the Word website. You can become a quasi-record company by putting together compilations from various artists (ie those working for themselves, as trad record labels no longer exist) and charging for download. We would be paying for your judgement not the music per se.

went up to a quid last week, and I'm still buying it. Anyone tried to run Guardian Unlimited on a laptop while sitting in the bath? That whole electricity/water thing makes me kind of nervous....
But more than that 2, sometimes 3 other people in my work also read my paper (yes, they get it for f***) and one of the reasons is that my workplace puts a limit on the amount of internet time you're allowed online. Whereas you can riffle through G2 at leisure, annotate it with a pen and of course, from the male point of view, pop into a cubicle with the sports section at about 10.45....

Thanks for this Andrew, It's about time someone said it. I used to work for a music retail chain that went belly up, so I then worked for a Record Company, who have recently 'restructured' and so once again find myself out of work. How about we all get free groceries and clothes, what's the difference?

I blame the supermarkets for spoiling us and having us buying stuff and getting freebies we tend not to use. Mind you that's like subscribing to a magazine at a reduced rate for 12 months or more; who knows if it's going to be as good in 6 months time.

It is all about competition and who is going to jump first. Just like banks wanting to bring back banking charges. They all want to but they don't want to be the first. Besides, someone will maintain the status quo and get all the disaffected customers.

If it is good enough people will pay.

What we have gratefully accepted as legally "free" (Spotify, Google, Metro, online newspapers etc) is paid for by advertisers pushing goods and services at us. So, in theory, we paid for it when we bought other stuff.
OK when consumer spending is buoyant. Now money is tighter and advertising revenues thinner the "content providers" are banking on punters being prepared to pay. Yeah right!
Free means the consumer places no value upon the product, once you give something away you lose the ability to place a price on it. Unless you can add new value - it will be interesting to see if Spotify's premium for iPhones will take off.
But we do pay - indirectly - in my household containing three adults we collectively pay about £100/ month to ISPs, mobile networks, TV licence etc. Seems to me the "content providers" need to be getting their fair share from the "infrastructure providers".

PS had to smile at Andrew's closing bus analogy. In giving bus travel free to all over 60s HMG have similarly destabilised the economics of public transport outside London.

buy a lot of your post (no pun intended). Not everyone who plays music wants to be a "become a well-rewarded professional". There's a local jam night where i live and the people who turn up to play just want a good time and show off a bit. they know they'll never make it they just dare i say it love music and yes it's free. What about people who work for charity organisations what are they in it for ?. There's people in the world who like to give away stuff with the sole intention of making people happy i know it sounds strange but it's true. Anyway if you don't want any of those cd's under your desk i'll have them. I'll even pay half the postage.

I agree with much of what Andrew says, but not with much of how he says it. Italicising real jobs and failed business model like that implies that both are knee-jerk stupid clichés that people who should know better trot out instead of thinking. But the rise of the Internet has meant that many business models are failing, or at least they are lurching, moribund towards... well, somewhere. Time will tell.

But, as the great philosopher Adama taught us, all of this has happened before and it will all happen again. Andrew suggests that only the professionalisation of culture can assure quality and, by extension, that de-professionalisation will inevitably result in crappier culture. Yet even Mozart and Beethoven had to buckle down and knuckle under by taking presumably grim and unsatisfying real jobs to pay the bills: helping the talentless daughters of the local gentry to boost their marriageability by teaching them to bang out a few parlour tunes on the piano - not very rock 'n' roll, that, is it?

Uniquely among artists of all kinds, rock musicians these days seem to believe that they are entitled (this italicising business is addictive) to earn their living exclusively from expressing themselves (there goes another one) by strapping on a Fender Mustang and mussing up a bad haircut. When did you last hear a sculptor, performance artist or poet whingeing about having to find a day job to keep the bailiffs at bay?

Musicians, if they're good enough, can perform live. If they're better than good enough they can do session work. Or, regardless of how good they are, they can just play in their spare time because they love it. Would Aretha Franklin's singing have been granted less cultural kudos if Atlantic Records had never plucked her out of that church to turn her into a "professional"?

Music, journalism and, yes, probably music journalism too are in a chaotic, inchoate, headless-chickeny state of flux and have been for several years now, during which time people have got used to getting their music and their news for nothing. But - and this is an essential point that Andrew doesn't mention - those same people are now spending more money on leisure products than ever before; they just happen not to be spending it in record shops or at news-stands. Instead, they're shelling out on live concerts at 50-100 pounds a pop, signing up for a premium digital TV service or plumping for the latest must-have video-game title. Last year the soccer simulation FIFA O9 not only outsold Viva La Vida,the last album by probably the world's biggest band, but it also costs three or four times as much.

We tend to assume that recorded music as a commercial proposition and a professional sector is somehow important and worth saving because it's always been such a central feature of the culture that we identify so closely with. We are the pop-record generations. But, in the grand scheme of human things, it's actually an anomaly - no more than a 60-year blip in 35,000 years or more of music-making. Of course it won't die - sheet music hasn't died - but some dramatic downscaling (another word that Andrew would probably, quite rightly in this case, italicise) won't, ultimately, do our culture any harm at all. Yes, a few people may have to look for another line of work (tell it to the miners), but it'll take a hell of a lot more to "kill music" than free downloading.

We take things for free when they are peripheral to our lives.

Twitter is free. It's a marvellous service, but you don't have to pay for it. Would you still use it if Biz Stone decided the free version was no longer sustainable? You might be prepared to pay a small amount to use it if you had to, but I'd guess you could happily live without it if the price got too high. Your overall output might be that little bit less rich for lack of it, but not so much that you would take a sizable hit. Same with the other free tools you use - for example, YouTube.

As a magazine I'd guess that you use a lot of Adobe Software. I would presume this is worth buying because though it's expensive, there's nothing better at doing the job. There are free and cheap alternatives, but they're not really up to snuff. So while Photoshop doesn't bring money in directly, not having it would impact on the quality of your output, which would affect your income. So it's worth paying for because you rely on it.

You pay for what matters. The other stuff you'll use if it's convenient. That applies to you and it applies to us.

Everyone who regularly contributes to this blog regularly dips their hand into their pocket and buys the magazine. We buy it because we are music geeks, and nowhere else do we come across writing as informative, eloquent and witty on a subject that matters so much to us. So we give you our money in return for the best magazine around, and it's a very fair deal as far as I'm concerned. Would I like it if somehow it was free - of course I would. But I understand why it isn't. So if I want to read quality writing about quality music, I know my side of the bargain is to shell out.

And there's this weird bi-product where we enjoy the magazine so much that we write for you for free on here. We help build the content of this site, not because we get paid, and not because we think if we write well on here, we'll get a job out of it. We do it because we have something to shoot our mouth off about and you've given us a platform on which to shoot it. I for one am very grateful.

But we all know the real stuff is in the magazine. The podcast, the blog, the Twitter feed - these are wonderful marketing devices that remind us how much we enjoy the magazine. I'm sure they are fun to put together, and I'd guess, though they cost good money to create, they are cheaper to produce than pretty much any other form of advertising you might otherwise take out. But they are peripheral for all of us - yourselves included - compared with the magazine itself. If you didn't think they help sell magazines, they would be gone in a shot. If we had to pay for them, chances are we wouldn't bother. But as things stand, the cost to both you and us balances out with the benefits we get from them, so we all continue to invest in them.

Free stuff is great when it works for us. But you can't always rely on it. If we want to guarantee reliability and quality, we cough up, and anyone with any brains does it willingly.

I think a lot of the problem is that I get the feeling that a lot of people are now expecting all media to be free as long as they've paid for the medium. People will willingly pay hundreds of pounds for a computer but be unwilling to pay £10 for a brilliant application. I like to think that the future can consist of a happy balance between free and paid for. If people just want lots of music and aren't fussed what it is then they can get a lot of it for free. If they want specific stuff they have to pay for it. I use a mix of freeware and shareware on my PC depending upon how much I use it. I don't do enough word processing at home to justify buying an office suite so I use Open Office. I do however do enough graphics manipulation and web page authoring to happily pay for some decent software despite perfectly adequate (but not as good) freeware being available.

... why is everyone so broke?

...while I'm prepared to go along with the premise of this thread that free doesn't necessarily equate with good and regret the proliferation of so-called citizen journalism and the notion that anyone would want to waste time that they'll never get back reading interminable, solipsistic blogs, there's a dichotomy here between paid content and sharing. Although JohnW mentions share and freeware, no-one has discussed open source, a concept that seems to me to be entirely philanthropic and without which the browsers that we take for granted would be so much less. I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson's axiom: 'He who receives ideas from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.'

... on newspaper circulations in London since the freepapers came along?

My hunch would be that the red-tops will have suffered most because they're in the same celeb/sport/gossip arena as the freebies, whereas the broadsheets might have held their ground more.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that people will always pay for quality - what I look for (and get) from Word (mag, podcast & website) simply isn't provided anywhere else, free or otherwise.

As an aside, have The Management ever considered only making the podcast & website available to readers/subscribers?

I really liked the Paris Angels well "perfume" anyway.

To paraphrase John Perry Barlow: expecting to control access to content once it has been uploaded to the Internet is like trying to get a teaspoonful of red dye out of a swimming pool.

You cannot uninvent Bit Torrenting, you cannot prosecute every filesharer (or hope that DRM and three strikes provide a solution); railing against the Pirate Party will get you precisely nowhere, you might as well go start an argument with 4chan. Yes, Chris Anderson is a complete arse but he is probably a prescient one.

It matters not a jot what the majority of the massive thinks about these issues, the eventual outcome will be decided by the attitudes and expectations of our children toward the consumption of culture (and the collective concept of culture itself might be something very different in five, ten, twenty years time).

Let's hope that Quality wins.

PS: a good console or PC game might take a team of one hundred developers upwards of a year to create - that's why they are more expensive. I can still pop down the road to my local market and buy them for ten renimbi and play them in my 'chipped' X-Box.

Ain't unadulterated capitalism a bitch when everyone has equal access to technology/knowledge?

As a regular Word reader for some years now, I have noticed one thing that the Word doesn't suffer from that all other magazines do -or did prior to the arrival of readership blogs - and that's repetition.
In the 90's I used to notice how all mags -FHM, GQ, Empire, Mojo, would start to repeat themselves after a period of about 18 months. I ultimately concluded that this was due to a lack of input from the readers.
The Word blog generates new avenues of thinking and broadens out the base of interests that the editorial staff can be assured that subscribers are interested in. For that reason alone, it can be seen as a worthwhile business investment.After all content is what the mag is about and we've witnessed numerous occassions where blog entries have been the inspiration for articles in the magazine.

- Oops Wrong Thread

Having read the orignal article in the magazine I broadly agree with the sentiment, you should pay for things of quality, but thought the case was somewhat over stated. 'Media types' do tend to over egg their significance to the wider world and believe we would be 'poorer' for their absense. I'm not sure this is correct; ultimately we would still have opinions of what we do and don't like, we would share our tastes and generally make up our own minds over matters of quality (or otherwise). I do find the idea that only journalists (etc) are qualified to arbitrate over what is good, bad or indifferent just plain wrong. I appreciate that there are many mindless, witless blogs out there but there are also lots of terrible critics/columnists who add little to our culture or knowledge base. You could argue that, if anything, the latter are more damaging as they have a credible platform upon which to spout their inane ramblings. If The Word (or any other of my favourite titles) were to fold, I would be saddened but I would get over it. The world would still turn, I would still buy & listen to lots of music, read books and generally enjoy the arts.