Feeling the Need to Comment

Yesterday I noticed a new comment left at Worship House about our new Easter video, "The Cross: A Curse For Us?" The comment comes from Gary Buck, the Worship Pastor at Petra Christian Fellowship in New Holland, PA. Here's what Gary said:

"I like the video, but I really don't care for the narrator's voice."

Doesn't seem that bad, right? But the issue of the purpose these comments serve runs deep. Ask yourself how you would feel if the narrator's voice were yours. And then ask yourself how Gary would feel if I came up to him after a worship service and told him that I really enjoyed the music, but I didn't care for his voice. He would be wounded as I am wounded by his comment. Gary is certainly entitled to his opinion, and I certainly have my own opinions and sometimes I don't "care for" things. But there is a time and place to share your opinions and we need to think seriously before we open our mouths in public places and pass judgement.

There are all kinds of comments left about videos on these sights and Gary's certainly is nowhere near the worst I've seen. I've seen people say downright mean things about others videos like "don't quit your day job," and Gary's comment is not nearly that bad. People might say that I'm being overly sensitive, or that it's to be expected when you put something out there like we do when we make videos. And they would have a point. My point is that we, as Christians, need to heed or at least give pause and think before we speak. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" may be cliche. It may be trite and overly simple and not always true. But in Ephesians 4:29, Paul says "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." Now I'm not sure if what Gary said is unwholesome, but it certainly isn't helpful and I can't see any benefit in his or other negative comments left on sites like Worship House and Sermon Spice.

Most fans paid $0 for Radiohead Album. This according to an AP Business article I came across at Brietbart.com. Google radiohead rainbows and you'll get hits on other articles about the same. The stats say that a little over 60% of the folks who downloaded the album opted to pay nothing, while about 38% of the folks paid an average of $6 each. So , a majority, when given the choice, chose not to pay anything, even though what Radiohead was doing was so great, so cool, so revolutionary. But with all the worldwide publicity they got, and at $6 a person for the remaining 38%, and with the site getting 1.2 million visitors, I'm sure they're glad they did it nonetheless.

I've been following all this Radiohead stuff, trying to figure out what to make of it. Just to catch you up on a few things you might not know about the whole affair.

• Radiohead, in a move that was considered revolutionary decided to bypass the record industry and release their album themselves, telling fans they could come and download the album from a special site and pay whatever they like, including nothing.
  
• The tracks up for download were not high quality audio files. They were low quality/low bitrate/whatever MP3s.
• In conjunction with the downloading stunt, Radiohead offered a collector's edition release of the album with all kinds of extra goodies for something like $80.
• A couple of weeks after making the album available online, it came out that Radiohead would be selling a CD at Big Box retailers like Best Buy come 2008. And no, the CD, with the high quality sound files, would not be pay whatever you want. This angered some folks and they began to say that the whole download the album thing was just some kind of publicity stunt and it wasn't entirely sincere and, with it on its way to the shelves of Best Buy, it was no longer revolutionary.

And now, here we are. 1.2 million people visited the download site. 38% of the people who downloaded the album paid $6 on average. 62% of the people opted to get it for free. What's all this mean? I'm not sure. I've thought about all this in relation to the way that we sell videos. It would be cool to try something like this with our media library, for a short period of time, see what kind of results we got. See what people were/are willing to pay. But we wouldn't get the press that Radiohead got to drive traffic to our site, we don't have nearly nearly as many fans or potential customers, etc, etc.It's not apples to apples when you compare us to them. But it does cause you to think. And so it goes.