TRV$DJAM discover that tweeting is the new micropayment

Never did I think that my love of all things Travis Barker would find there way on to the pages of the Ryan*MacMillan blog and yet it is with great pleasure that today I can! The reason? Well, Travis and his pal Adam Goldstein - a duo better known as TRV$DJAM – famed for their live drum and DJ sets in clubs across America, have adopted an ingenious method of distributing their new ‘Mixtape’ via Twitter.

The method works thusly: rather than paying to download their mixtape, fans are instead able to ‘pay’ for the new mixtape by tweeting said purchase. You can see how the mechanic works here, on their website. In short one clicks on a link and it takes you through to a page on Twitter which enables you to send a Tweet out saying the following:

Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella 09″ in exchange for one tweet! http://twitter.trvsdjam.com

Utter UTTER genius!! Word of mouth marketing at its unparalleled best! Essetially what TRV$DJAM have done is turned Twitter in to a micropayment model in which fans pay for content by advertising the content to their network. And what’s better they do it readily and happily because they get to show allegiance to the artist(s) that they love, help promote them to their whole network AND get ‘free’ content (in this case a brand new mixtape – a very brilliant mixtape).

I showed Leo this and as well as being impressed he pointed out that there are a number of ways to look at this, from a monetary (or value) perspective.

Suppose that the TRV$DJAM mixtape retailed at £10 (the price of an average CD in your highstreet), and suppose that I have 100 followers on Twitter. If we suppose that the mixtape has an inherent value of £10 then my tweet must have been worth £10, for as TRV$DJAM say on their site “pay your tweet, download the album”. So for the sake of argument lets say my tweet was worth £10. Since I have 100 followers, the cost per impression of my tweet becomes 10 pence.

Drill down further and we can begin to assign a value to the cost per click.  Say 10 of my followers click on the link and download the mixtape, well we can very quickly suggest that the cost per click of my tweet was £1.

Of course by my 10 followers clicking the link and in turn tweeting to ‘buy’ the mixtape we can begin to think about the value of my reach versus someone who’s tweet only results 5 of their followers in turn re-tweeting. Very quickly the numbers can begin to make your head spin but I hope you can see what i’m getting at – there is a lot of ways to think about the value of these ‘purchase’ tweets.

What becomes apparent as you play around with these values (once you’ve assigend an assumed monetary value to the ‘free’ download) is that everyone ‘pays’ the same amount regardless of whether they have 100 followers or 100,000 followers and yet arguably someone with 100,000 followers who tweets the purchase-tweet is more valuable than someone with 100 followers – that is to say that given a choice between 100 impressions or 100,000 impressions we all know which we’d prefer (if we take relevance out of the equation because technically yes the person with 100 followers could generate more clickthroughs than the person with 100,00 followers).

This is a genuinely fascinating micropayment system and one that I think we will see an awful lot more of in the future. The danger will be, of course, that as this model becomes more popular it will quickly slide from being a cool exercise in word-of-mouth marketing to all-out spam. Enjoy it while you can, folks!