PaidContent get excited by freemium proponents using, erm, a freemium model

There's a 6.04am publishing time on Helienne Lindvall's piece on Doctrow and Godin for PaidContent, so let's be generous and assume she was still half-asleep when she wrote it:

A friend of mine recently tried to book Seth Godin for a music industry panel and was told by his speaker agent that he charges $150,000 to come to London from his home in New York. And, like pretty much all these “gurus”, he demands a first-class round-trip flight ticket to boot. But if they let him do it via video link from his hometown it would only cost $15,000 plus expenses, said the agent.

So what kind of valuable advice would you get for that tidy sum of money? In his interview Music Vs the Music Industry (his advice applies to just about everything, he adds) – Godin says: “This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible … If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible.”

Um... yes, and? That's what the Freemium model is, Helienne. You give away content for free where it makes sense, and charge what you can when you're able. So Seth Godin makes a lot of his stuff available for free, which builds his reputation and saves him having to chase people making infinite copies online, and means he can charge a lot for the non-replicable stuff. That's his idea.

Is "people apply their model to their business" really a scoop?