Goodbye Web;
Hello People-to-People
Hello People-to-People
ADVANCE NOTES: They said it would come. We wrote about it back in '95 and '96. It’s royalty-based picture-selling. No, not royalty-free, but Royalty with a capital R. The Napster case, currently in the news, reminds us that selling direct to
We all know that big business dictates to musicians what music they should be writing and performing. Ask Sonny Bono and Cher, The Beach Boys, and Courtney Love. Unless musicians cooperate with the big label companies, who control the purse strings, they have little chance of enduring in the mainstream of commercial music. An upstart rarely goes to the top of the charts without an infusion of promotional dollars from big business. The overall result is mediocre music that the gurus at the big label companies believe appeals to the masses, the common denominator.
Too bad for creative, inspired music that never sees the light of day. With very rare exceptions, stifled musicians either bow out of the game, or make compromises to toe the line of music company executives.
Move over executives. The Napster case wants to speak. If you’ve followed the news, you know that the big label companies have brought an Internet law suit against the San Mateo, CA company, Napster, which distributes software of the same name that allows users to download MP3 music files of popular music (and music by unknowns trying to break into the field) from other people’s hard drives. As early as October the case will go to trial, and no doubt eventually end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
What’s so important about all this for stock photographers?
Even if Napster loses its case, this distribution process paves the way for an entirely new delivery method for photographers, artists, game makers, musicians, and writers, who have historically been at the mercy of middle-men to promote and distribute their work. It’s called peer-to-peer. Your hard drive to my hard drive, without going through the Web.
Here’s how it works. To get the creative work you are looking for, you circumvent the usual distributor (label company in this case) and download the music file you’re looking for from the supplier's hard drive. In our case, as stock photographers and photobuyers, it would be an image.
At first glance, you might think that Napster-sparked free trading of music files would cause a serious reduction in retail sales. On the contrary, it turns out to be a catalyst. Studies show that music sales have never been better. After Napster is reduced to a common sense Internet company by the courts, it will no doubt evolve to a company that will promote new artists who have consented to their music being traded on-line.
Could this work in our industry? The marketing part already has. Stock photo agencies such as Corbis and Index Stock Imagery, thatpractically give pictures away through royalty-free distribution, have found that the system both encourages on-line purchasing plus educates buyers in image utilization and graduating to higher-ticket image purchasing. Usage, the saying goes, begets more usage.
But wait, if we give our photos away practically free, won’t that discourage photographers from making images in the future? If you’re not motivated to create, you won’t create. It’s common sense.
This is a natural reaction. Every time a new technology has come along, the purveyors of the former technology get up in arms, trying to prevent the new from destroying the old. Whether radio (it was going to destroy newspapers), TV (it was going to destroy radio), cable TV (it was going to destroy network TV), or VCR’s (they were going to destroy movie theaters). These media have learned to live harmoniously side by side, and everyone has benefited.
The Internet has opened the window for us to cease viewing business strategies through traditional, old-think lenses, and instead see all kinds of new possibilities. The Internet’s peer-to peer possibilities open new distribution doors for creators of all
For stock photography freelancers, the system could work like this. Software known as “digital rights management systems” will soon become available that will allow a photobuyer to enter your computer’s hard drive, search for specific pictures, download them, and purchase them. The fee may be low (like with RF photography) but the volume will be high (several visitors a day). The bottom line will be that pictures that otherwise would languish in your files gathering dust, will generate activity and sales for you.
The peer-to-peer system probably won’t do away with the big boys. They themselves could evolve into a pay-per-use or subscription-based model. They would share the revenue from sales with their photographers.
Both models could survive. The conglomerates could enter into general vertical markets themselves. The Napster system would open a new door where the conglomerates would continue to produce and sell their generic images. The vertical (specialized) market where most individual freelance photographers would reside, would be too spare for the big conglomerates, and not as lucrative for them as the commercial stock photo market. This would open new possibilities in specialized markets for freelancers who weren’t part or who didn’t wish to be part of a stock photo agency of the past. Stock photographers would deal directly with buyers.Internet technology today is too powerful, too ambitious, for lawmakers to regulate freedom of exchange of music, images, and graphic files. Eventually the dust will settle, and individual freelance stock photographers are bound to come out in an even better position than was available for them in the last century.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes.
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 Kerry Kolb |
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