There is a lot of focus and discussion around the $1.50 figure I mentioned, and perhaps I was wrong to include it in the post. The $1.50 is not the point. I would pay $1.50. I gladly pay for Pinboard, Newsblur, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, and many other online services that provide exponential value to me. And, as I mentioned in the post, I am more than happy to pay $10 a month for SoundCloud b…
But your $10/mo and my $10/mo aren't enough. It seems like the web-o-verse has spent the last twenty years desperately attempting to figure out how to charge money in a way that enough people will shell out the necessary cash. For the most part, it's been a failure. Most people seem uninterested in paying directly for digital content.
Any service built upon user-generated content -- like SoundCloud -- has an even worse path. If you charge from the start, you put up a huge barrier that will prevent people from ever using your service. But if you start changing after you've gathered up steam and have an active community, people will feel betrayed -- like you were just baiting them into using your service so you could pull the old switcheroo and force them to pay to access the community they built.