Jazz Odyssey

Starting in the late 90s, many of the annual digital music conventions such as Webnoize or Plug-in were filled with chatter about making the experience of consuming digital music “feel free” (an expression is generally credited to long-time digital music advocate Jim Griffin). This was an acknowledgement that music can’t actually BE free, but a listener should experience it that way. The classic example is listening to the radio…FM radio listeners don’t pay a fee every time they turn on the radio, nor do they get a bill at the end of the month for what they listened to. But there is a payment mechanism built into the business structure of radio that provided compensation for artists whose music was being played. So the music wasn’t free, but it sure felt that way.

This morning, Disney has made an announcement that it will begin a 2-month trial to make some of its most popular programming (including “Lost” and “Desparate Housewives”) available as free streams from ABC.com. The streams will be supported by advertising embedded in the programming which cannot be skipped by consumers. Once again, the experience to consumers will “feel free”, with the advertising revenue going to support the appropriate rights holders.

This is an interesting experiment and a bold step by ABC/Disney. It will be interesting to see what the impact is on viewership, whether there is an impact on sales of this content currently being sold by iTunes, and what the impact on physical DVD sales will be. It would be interesting for a company like Media Defender or Big Champagne to track what (if any) impact this experiment will have on BitTorrent and Usenet traffic for this programming.