Ad based Facebook music downloads

[ryan123450]

Anyone go to Free Music Tuesdays from Free All Music on Facebook? Generally a charity or issue awareness campaign pays Free All Music each Tuesday to give people the oppurtunity to watch thier 30 or 60 second ad in exchange for a free and legal MP3 from a major artist. Budwieser also gives away one free MP3 through Free All Music once a week in exchange for a 'like'.

Another similar company is Guvera which now has a Facebook ap as well. Major brands give away legal MP3s in exchange for a chance to advertise to you. Guvera seems to be in a bit of a slump right now, but over the last year I've got hundreds of free and legal MP3s from them.

I'm hoping this is the wave of the future. Anyone else ever "bought" music this way?



Mods: I tried to bring this up before and everyone thought I was pushing some illegal file-sharing method. Now that this has spread in popularity, I'm hoping someone will believe me and not shut my thread down again. Please check it out on Facebook before assuming I'm pushing something illegal.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I'm hoping this is the wave of the future.

You're in luck. It is.

What you described sounds plausible and far from illegal. I don't need to check anything out to believe you. Big brands like Budweiser are increasingly using their marketing budgets on campaigns like you've described. They also get a lot of juicy targetting data on customers, for not much money.

All categories of digital media (music, games, movies, TV shows) will be increasingly purchased in the way you describe. The content will be free and the business model will be based on ads, corporate sponsorships and virtual-goods add ons (microtransactions), and maybe to some extent, subscriptions.

Even pennies per person (for ads and virtual goods) can really add up when you consider that the internet has no barriers to reaching a global audience, and even if the American middle class is collapsing, in the global population, millions if not billions of people are becoming middle class for the first time, and the big brands are racing to lock in their preferences when they think about what brand of beer to buy for the first time in their lives.

It's the proliferation of internet use into the billions that's driving the new business models. Most people will get everything for free. But even if a few people pay, and only pay a little (such as virtual goods microtransactions), that's fine. The free riders are no longer a problem if they allow you to be open and accessible to a massive potential population. And that massive population can further be monetized by giving major brands access to them.

The way you can tell the media companies that "get it" is that they're structuring or re-structuring their businesses to be piracy-proof, in that what we've thought of as piracy is their business model. Their content becomes the freebie that attracts a huge audience to the brands that underwrite the content, plus if you can create a community and get even 5% of that huge global audience to purchase virtual goods, you're talking serious money. Facebook, Google+ (if it takes off) and online and social media game business like Zynga are the places to watch for the emerging trends.

None of this is alien. It's the TV business model, where Proctor & Gamble might sponsor a whole TV show or run ads during a show. It's being restructured so that it can work effectively on the internet. Because of the interactive component, online marketing can be vastly more effective in influencing consumer behavior than in a one-way medium like TV. Giving consumers something that gets pirated anyway, in exchange for their information and their goodwill, is a great way to do online branding.

 

[Kelso]

Exactly how intrusive is the Guvera fb app? One of the permissions it requires is to post as me to my facebook page.

 

[23skidoo]

Exactly how intrusive is the Guvera fb app? One of the permissions it requires is to post as me to my facebook page.

That's a deal-breaker right there in my opinion.

Alex

 

[ryan123450]

But if someone is giving you free music- in this case about 4 dollars worth- why wouldn't you want to tell others about it?