27th
I paid $0 for the new Girl Talk album. Here's why.
After loving Girl Talk at the APW Festival I wanted to pick up an album of his. Grant posted one of the songs off the new album and I loved it as well. So I searched Amazon and iTunes for the new album, but it wasn’t available in either of those places. I eventually found it through Girl Talk’s MySpace page
Girl Talk is offering the new album in a name-your-own-price scheme ala Radiohead. Sweet! I have been saying for a while that if albums were $5 instead of $10, I would buy more than 2x the albums I buy now. I clicked the link and grabbed my credit card, ready to pony up $5 for the album. That’s when I hit this:
The external link looked extremely shady. It lived at an IP address without a domain name. It even had the word “illegal” in it! Being the confident web surfer that I am (being on a Mac helps) I clicked on.
There was a tiny form at the bottom of the page where you enter your price:
The page was not secure:
I sat there for a while thinking about what to do. I did believe that this page was legit. But entering my credit card info here gave me the creeps. I eventually entered $0.00 and was taken to a page with links to the mp3 file.
The moral of the story here is that artists (really all content producers) need to be smart and think about commerce from beginning to end. Girl Talk is clearly ahead of the curve in offering his album at a name-your-own-price plan. But he did not follow this through to the end and present a safe environment where people can feel secure in buying it. Maybe partnering with Amazon or TopSpin, etc would have helped him. I’m not sure. But he did lose out on $5 at least from me.
ps - for those that think I was wrong in downloading the album for $0, right after that, I bought 2 tickets to go see him live at Terminal 5 on November 15th.
pps - after I bought the album, I entered $5 just to see what would happen. It had instructions to send money via paypal. Oh well, maybe next time.