FREE tickets!

Web guru Chris Anderson will be talking about the free thing and other online matters this Thursday morning at the ALOUD Business Forum. Anderson will be interviewed by Kai Ryssdal from Marketplace. It's at the downtown public library (breakfast: 7:30 a.m. to 8:15 a.m. and Business Forum from 8:15 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.).

Our friend Ted Habte-Gabr has made 10 tickets available to LABO readers. Just drop me an email if you're interested. Anderson is making the rounds to plug his new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," which Malcolm Gladwell just reviewed in the New Yorker.

The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things "made of ideas." Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: "In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win." To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and "yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online."