The Beauty of Free.

When you hear the word free, a mountain of ideas, thoughts, images and memories come to mind. Is it going to be cheap? Is it really free? Is it really that good? Can this really be true? And the most important question of them all is what’s the catch? However regardless of what, every single person, in one way or another has participated or associated with the word and or action of using something free, doing something for free or obtaining something free. The very idea of free has business’s scared of losing profit, however there have been certain cases where having something free can contribute and maybe even highlight success and profit in whatever “product” your selling. Now I put the word product in quotation marks because this by product, I mean from music to movies to video games to many different forms of media. Yet to truly understand this, I believe revisiting the first form of free media could better help us understand why the idea of free is so profitable. Radio was the primer free media. During 1925 there wasn’t much use for radio, however that all changed with time, and more so because it was something free, that someone no matter status could listen too. At first there was a problem in having radio free, simply because nobody knew how or who would pay for it, nut the limitless potential it had (and still does) ended up in using an advertising style and became very profitable. After its first victory with radio, the Free Model was well on its way to conquer many other Medias, from music, literature, games (both video and board), and television. And just the man, animals and life, the concepts behind free evolved. The most significant evolution in the field of free was the internet. The content and supply of media has been and continues to be in an overflowed state. The beauty of the internet is that there is no end of supply and with accordance to the massive demand from the public, free just keeps getting better. The other side to this is that advertisement is in abundance, from ads on sites like face book to pop-ups, television commercials radio broadcasting, billboards and such, because a lot of these ads are presented in a free medium the product being advertised gets wider audience and can have the chance of making a lot more money. Free services are another strong point in the free model. Such examples are the Sony Playstation 3, is gives players the option of playing on the internet for free, the only thing you need to do is buy the game console and whatever game you want, however you don’t even need to buy a video game to use the online services that the Playstation 3 brings. The iPod, android and other smart phones offer applications for free download that help sell the phone and at the same time is full of advertisement which helps sell whatever is being advertised. Speaking of apps, thanks to some programs like Frostwire, Limewire and so on, music has become a luxury that anyone can afford and listen too, whether you’re ripping it off the internet of listening to it on YouTube. This incidentally has been the cause of another way to download music call youtubemp3, which allows you to download the music from the YouTube website for free, which has been a hinder on some musicians. In this age and day, is a generation of kids, people growing up and living on a free model. If you want something, I can almost guarantee they have it somewhere on the internet. The Free Model perpetually allowed itself to advertise itself. Some musicians have taken a positive spin on this and actually released music for free, as stated in Caramancia’s article, whether you get it for free or not there’s a way to still make money off of the free model. Publicity and advertisement (as well as some sales were the results of musicians like Mac Miller, Wale, J. Cole and drake allowing their music to be free.) Subscriptions is another way of making money as stated in Andersons reading, games like Club Penguin is free, yet if you want to hook up your fly igloo pad you need to poor cash into it. As a children’s game, parents will mostly not hesitate to spend money, now multiply that by the large fan and subscription base and in no time flat you’re in the millionaires club drinking rich champagne with Charlie Sheen. Another aspect that is touched upon in the Anderson article is the concept of freemium. Freemium is when you first get a few pages from a book, levels and content in games for free. After that it’s up to you if you’re going to continue buying, playing reading whatever product you have received for free.