This Sculpture Contains $5,000,000 in Illegally Downloaded Files

Ever so slightly off-topic but still very relevant is this “sculpture” by Manuel Palou.

Via: Rhizome

Yes, it appears to be your bog-standard 1 terabyte Western Digital MyBook, except that is not what makes it worth so much. It is the content stored on it that is so “valuable”.

While some over on Reddit were questioning its artistic merits (of which there are very few), this “art” should nonetheless serve as a bit of a reminder that content should not be valued at how much you wish to sell it for but how much the customer is willing to pay for it. Just because something is sold at a price does not give it “value”.

The picture also serves as a bit of an eye-opener as to how much content people can store at home these days. Way back when, you could maybe spend $10,000 on a nice record collection but you’d have to give up most of your wall space, or your basement. Now I can store the entire published works of fiction from 2003 to 2011 on my bookshelf and still have more than enough space left for much much more.

Content creators (animators included) MUST keep this in mind when posting stuff online. The internet immediately increases the supply of your product to near infinity, and as any economics professor will tell you, as the supply of a product approached infinity, the price people are willing to pay approaches zero. Embrace this by giving people a reason to give you money. Remember, anything that’s scarce is valuable, anything that’s physical is scarce.