Categories
aside

The correlation between familiarity and value

John Per­ry Bar­low, dis­cussing the Grate­ful Dead's meth­ods of engag­ing its audience:

What peo­ple today are begin­ning to real­ize is what became obvi­ous to us back then — the impor­tant cor­re­la­tion is the one between famil­iar­i­ty and val­ue, not scarci­ty and val­ue. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make some­thing, the more valu­able it becomes. In the phys­i­cal world, that works beau­ti­ful­ly. But we couldn't reg­u­late [tap­ing at Grate­ful Dead] shows, and you can't online. The Inter­net doesn't behave that way.

From Man­age­ment Secrets of the Grate­ful Dead, in the cur­rent Atlantic.