Up until fairly recently, we consumed many goods and services bundled together. Your airline ticket price included a meal and checked luggage. Your cable bill included hundreds of channels. A newspaper subscription offered content from many journalists. But changing economics and technology have made bundling less necessary and attractive—at least in the short run. A bundled service offers lots of variety for a fixed price, but you end up paying for things you don’t want. Now, when we book flights online, we can see other airlines’ prices for identical routes; an airline can appear more competitive by breaking out different services. Streaming platforms mean that we no longer must pay for cable channels we don’t watch. And now, members of the media whom colleagues deem “problematic” don’t have to tolerate a hostile newsroom; they can send out an email newsletter or broadcast a podcast to their audience and collect money directly.
I don’t think that unbundling is the endgame in music, journalism, or punditry. Yes, we have pretty much seen the end of bundling music from physical forms, such as a vinyl record or a CD. And we are pretty near the end of the unbundling of the written word from physical forms, such as magazines and newspapers. But as Allison points out, only a few high-profile writers can expect viable subscription revenue in a totally unbundled world. If nothing else, what Clay Shirky called the mental transactions costs make people unwilling to pay for all the content they might like on a case-by-case basis.
Instead, I return to a prediction I made twenty years ago.
For an economic model, I continue to recommend the idea of “clubs.” A club would provide content aggregation, recommendation, and annotation services. Journalists would be paid by clubs, rather than by individual publications. For a consumer, joining a club will provide access to value-added services relative to online content.
Where we something that most closely resembles the club model I had in mind is in the video streaming world. Netflix, Amazon, etc.
If my prediction eventually holds, most writers, will not be able to make it on their own. Instead, they will be bundled together, just not in the traditional magazine or newspaper format. I think that once the club model gets going, the superstars will be recruited by the clubs for competitive purposes.