[Silhouette]

The thing is, if it was as simple as you make out, iTunes would never have worked, no-one would be running massively profitable stock photo sites, etc.

High quality fonts are difficult to make, but I suspect enough people who know enough to take advantage of those good fonts appreciate that and would be willing to pay for them in return. (I have put plenty of my own money where my mouth is on this point.) As a consequence those who use premium fonts well would wind up with better looking sites, and the foundries would wind up with more money.

If those foundries paid attention to other markets, everything from software to music, they could surely find a far more lucrative business model than the mess they've created now where everything is available but most of us can't buy it for most projects. But first they have to get the basic fact that most creative industries have realised by now: in the age of the Internet, when copying is free, the market will not accept your masterpiece at its traditional price, but a lot more people might buy it for a lot less money due to some combination of convenience and sense of fairness.

Funnily enough, services like Typekit almost seem to be aiming for that model, except that they've kind of got the worst of both worlds: prices so cheap for the average small/non-commercial site that they aren't really worth much in aggregate, but legal terms that mean they can't be used for a large proportion of otherwise potentially lucrative commercial sites.

[tptacek]

Digital distribution of music has been catastrophic for music labels. The foundries are doing OK today. Why would they embrace a new model?

[Silhouette]

I don't think it's fair to compare record labels and font foundries. The labels are basically glorified middlemen, and they're middlemen who had been overtly price gouging for many years before the Internet came along. The foundries typically are the original sources of new fonts and do actually pay real money to the staff who work on them.

Even then, I think you're overstating the case for the music labels.

> Digital distribution of music has been catastrophic for music labels.

They bitch a lot, but Big Media still seems to make an awful lot of money, despite obvious competition in the Internet age from both less than legal alternative channels for the music and from other ways people can spend their leisure time and money.

Considering the amount of rip-off pricing that was going on prior to the Internet age, the fact that the Big Four still make as much as they do today is remarkable. And that's on top of Apple, Amazon et al making a fortune off it as well, which obviously cuts into the profits of the record labels themselves, and on top of all the other smaller players like Spotify who are redistributing music via different channels.

Digital distribution has been catastrophic for bricks 'n' mortar music stores, but that's about the only group that has lost out disastrously AFAICS. The rest is just a bunch of middlemen who don't create anything themselves finding that their services aren't as valuable as they used to be.

> The foundries are doing OK today. Why would they embrace a new model?

Because otherwise competition from cheap/free fonts and the illegal black market in pro fonts could seriously hurt them. Unlike Big Media, most/all of them are far too small to actively hunt down sites using their work illegally and take the necessary action to get some money out of enough of those sites to survive.

Or if you prefer a more constructive view, because they could make $#!%loads of money selling web fonts, probably at far higher prices than they are making for the equivalent usage via services like Typekit, if they stopped worrying about the people who are going to rip them off anyway and catered for the people who are willing and able to pay them hard cash they won't otherwise get.

[tptacek]

I didn't make the comparison, you did, so I'm going to refrain from pursuing this thread.

I think foundries are as likely to lose money to web fonts as make it, because the people who truly value distinctive typography already pay for it, and the mass market uses Papyrus and Comic Sans.

[Silhouette]

> I didn't make the comparison, you did

My comparison was not between foundries and music labels, but between selling fonts and selling music, stock art, etc. The point wasn't who was doing the selling, it was that you can do just fine selling at much cheaper prices to a much wider audience, and that such a model fits the reality of the Internet much better.

> I think foundries are as likely to lose money to web fonts as make it, because the people who truly value distinctive typography already pay for it

But prior to the web font services, there was no way for people to give money to the foundries to use their fonts on web sites, even if they wanted to.

And for those projects where an ongoing rental payment is not a suitable pricing model, there still isn't, which means the foundries aren't even accepting money from people who do value high quality typography and would happily pay for the chance to use it. I just don't see how that makes any business sense at all.