It's great to see people beginning to talk about how 'value for value' as a new economic model for the web works. i.e fans can pay creators directly with SAT's. i.e wallet 2 wallet. (W2W)
Below is a snippet of the transcript from last week's Buzzcast where hosts Alban Brooke, Jordan Blair and Tom Rossi discuss Adam Curry's new music podcast - Boostagram Ball. They also discuss how Podfans is making it super simple for fans to pay creators but also how it enables creators to manage their podcasts, reward other people who help make their podcasts using splits e.g editors, producers and also reward their "superfans" who are most active.
Tom
Yeah, one of the things that you can do with the value for value tag in your RSS feed is you can, on an episode by episode level, you can dictate who gets what for that episode. So a musician could, for example, have their music played on his podcast and now whenever anybody streams sats to that particular episode, they're listening to it really. Then that content creator gets paid for it. You can boost it. I really like this song. You can boost it so he can highlight musicians, and the musicians can get paid for their work, which is really difficult to do outside of some type of micropayment solution like what we've done with value for value. So that's one application of it, but they want to expand it so that any band could go create an RSS feed with their music and they could distribute it to their fans, and now whenever they release a song, they're just getting paid based on the sats that are getting streamed to them.
Jordan
That's exactly what Sam Sethi is doing with Podfans. He's making it easy for people to set up that split. You can do it by episode. He showed this to me and I was just fascinated by it. I could literally split up the income that I get with my editor so she could get a share of it. I could split it with the people whose soundtrack I use throughout my episode and I could split with those musicians and he also had it so I could set up to split with my super fans and sort of gamify that support. Yeah.
Alban
I'm thinking now it sounds like oh, what's in it for the artist to not work with a label and not get paid for their music in the traditional way and instead just kind of release it almost for free and just hope that people will give money back. But this has been around for nearly 20 years now. I remember I think the first band to do this was probably Radiohead with an album called In Rainbows, and they just put it online and said there you go, take it and pay what you want. I don't know. I mean, Tom, you've probably seen this at like Christian concerts, maybe back in the 2000s, like they have the CDs out there and they'd be like pay what you think is appropriate, we just want you to have it if you want the music. And more and more bands are doing it and I think the reason they do it is because they make so much little money on the actual sale of the CDs. Now when it was CDs they did, but now the streams they're making so little. They're like I make all the money on the tours and the merch anyway, like I might as well just give this part away for free and then monetize the real monetization side. So you know, I could see it working. It's cool, it's a fun way to do it and I just commend Adam again for like going on this limb. I think I would not have the patience to be like I'm going to do a radio show podcast where I do music, I kind of play the DJ and I only pick music that's submitted through these you know new directories. There's no way I could do that and not do it well, but also
Alban
I'd have the patience. So it's very cool to see him blazing this new trail again.
Tom
Yeah, right, that's what's funny. It's the new trail again, right that he's doing something similar to what he? Did with. Headbangers Ball, yeah, but now he's doing it in a whole new medium. Going back to Podfans too, I think what Podfans is doing is really cool as well, because they're bridging the gap from both sides of making it so that it's good for Jordan to be able to go in and manage her podcast, but it's also good for listeners, and so listeners can go in and support podcasts. Simply making that transaction it's just so hard. I mean, Fountain is probably the most mature in terms of streaming sat and taking advantage of podcasting 2.0 stuff, but it's still pretty daunting. And so Podfans and what Sam's doing will hopefully be the next iteration of continuing to try and make it easier and attract different audience. That maybe wouldn't do something like Fountain, but they might do Podfans.
Jordan
Yeah, I'm somebody who gets easily daunted by these new concepts and learning new ones. I mean, look at me with Twitter slash X. I struggle so hard on that platform. I struggle with things that are a little bit complicated and I really enjoy when people like Sam or like Buzzsprout take a concept that is really complicated and technical and daunting and streamline it to be very friendly and approachable and easy to use.
