For your consideration

The message is clear: consumer wants cheap, bundled or "feels like free" access first, and will only then consider going further.

Just laying out some perspective here. I've been using Bandcamp for years, and think STEEM fits their philosophy. First of all, let's study their website:-

Their tag line comes to mind:-

"Discover amazing new music and directly support the artists who make it."

In essence, it's discover amazing new content and directly support the artists who make it. This is quite exactly like Steemit, just with a different frame and application of technology. Consider a Steem upvote - it's the same for every user. Any upvote will generate $0.00 or more, depending on the user's voting influence. Now, consider a typical Bandcamp Artist's track sales page:-

_{Take a look for yourself - http://music.businesscasual.biz/album/chillwind}

Notice right away - "Buy Digital Album" and "Name-Your-Price" right beside it. When you click on it..

It's $0 or more too. Not all artists will do the same, but a good chunk of music on Bandcamp are free, or pay whatever-you-like models. Gain access to some added convenience if you pay a certain amount. This will be the future, in my opinion. Music-making (or generally, any kinds of content) is gonna be in most of our "DNA" as tools, knowledge, and community become more connected and shared / accessible. This is partly evidenced by a growing market in digital and mobile music production applications.

But of course, premium music exists too!
https://series200.bandcamp.com/album/human-story-3

Now, consider the following:-

• Most people will get FREE content if they can access it. Free flow, free access markets will always exist. That will involve just about 100% of the world's population. Everybody who pays for content even has their own flow of FREE content, and everybody who wouldn't pay for content can be made to pay (or vote) if the service is more like access to a pool of products. Believe it or not, the REAL mainstream market segment is still largely untapped in today's world. Subscription based models like Spotify are at ~50 million subscribers in 2017, making about ~5 billion in revenue for rightsholders. Netflix / Spotify are great models going the right way.

• Imagine 7 billion users by 2025, each contributing a minimum $5.00 all-year for ALL of their content consumption. That's a simple $35 billion per year! Around Bitcoin's market cap recently in June 2017. Can Spotify / Netflix model pull this off in scale? Maybe, maybe not - but it doesn't matter, they're profitable enough for the market segment they're getting. But let's go BIG into the billion market. If you strip away the need for a focus like Bandcamp, even Steemit as a blogging platform by itself can already be used to support any artists. But I think it would help with perspective if we can somehow make use of Bandcamp's philosophy on art / artists in some of the Steem-centric apps.

• So provide free access first - something in which Steem / Steemit is already good at that it even works to onboard the unbanked / undocumented. There are plenty of ways to generate value and have users fork out money if they want to. Value is multi-faceted, and users will pay for many different reasons. Check out the image below:-

_{Image courtesy of https://rossdawson.com/}

It needs to be made clear that I'm not only talking about a place for artists to store their digital works like LBRY - something which could work very well as a backend solution. However, Bandcamp is more than that a simple storage and distribution platform. To learn more about their magic sauce, head on to https://bandcamp.com, particularly:-

• https://bandcamp.com/artists
• https://bandcamp.com/fans
• https://bandcamp.com/labels

This is definitely not a market for the Kanyes and Biebers, but the point is to tap into a market that uses free stuff anyway. Let's make that free stuff accessible with an added upside of convenient support through microtransactions. There will be ways to encourage the purchase of STEEM for access to a great Bandcamp-like ecosystem for all sorts of content.

_{Image courtesy of http://www.futuristgerd.com/}

If you take a look at blockchain solutions for creators like Ujo Music and such, they're great and innovative, but will ultimately fail to tap into the market of billions of users, going against the grain of a universal consumer behaviour. Vote-for-access may be the far better activity for onboarding. In that sense, I think big parts of the creative industry will eventually need to learn and adapt. I'll end this post with a Gerd Leonhard's presentation about The Future of Music (or most types of content) back in 2013:-