A few years ago, I went to see a free comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe and laughed for an hour. Free comedy shows are neither new nor unusual at the festival, but naturally there was a sense that the hottest tickets, the best shows, were the ones for which you had to pay.

Trotting up to a free gig felt like more of a risk. Most Edinburgh comedy shows take place in small rooms and sometimes you have to pretend to be in stitches just to minimise the social awkwardness of it all. The ones who charged were surely making an intrinsic promise that they would be worth it.

The reason I wanted to see this comedian was that I had, at a previous festival, paid to see her perform at the multi-roomed Gilded Balloon, one of the “big four” Edinburgh venues, and I had liked her style. To me, she was a known quantity and I was sorry that her career seemed to be going backwards.

Within the first five minutes, it was apparent that something had changed. She was even funnier. The punters who had wandered off the street to take their chances cackled away, their low-to-zero expectations comfortably exceeded.

So when the comedian proffered her bucket and asked us to “pay what we think the show is worth”, I threw in the standard Edinburgh ticket price. The crowd was modest, but few, if anyone, shuffled past with sheepish reluctance to pay even a pound for a show billed as free.

Voluntary donation

It is, on the face of it, an example of a successful voluntary donation model. The free fringe venues do not charge for their hire, making money only from increased drink sales, and the performers keep the contents of the bucket.

The audience, too, is winning, especially as more and more comedians – the awards-garlanded, the gloriously reviewed – have migrated to the free venues.

And yet the free fringe has blossomed precisely because something has gone wrong elsewhere. Comedians who spend a good part of the year crafting honed, themed, inventive shows go to Edinburgh in August and pay the venue operators room rents so high that even if they pack in audiences, they end the month in debt.

The comedian I saw was one of many who had made a positive choice not to “pay to play”. But other aspiring ones were submitting to the heads-you-lose, tails-you-lose-harder economics. The bigger, paid venues attracted a heavier footfall and offered a greater shot at fame. For many of those whose faces were on posters around the city, the festival was an expensive exercise in hope labour.

“Hope labour” is a gem of a term to describe an insidious trend. It applies to any work done for little or no payment in the (vain) hope that one day it might lead to actual money or a job. It is particularly prevalent in the media and entertainment sector, and in any business rumoured, often falsely, to be glamorous.

Once it becomes normal not to pay for content, the next stage in thinking is the pay-to-play model, where any company with a “platform”, whether it’s a theatre venue, a publisher or a music service, not only doesn’t pay the content provider, but charges them for the privilege of their endorsement, their platform.

Bonanza

In this world, all content is really a form of self-marketing and “exposure” that will deliver some future, unspecified bonanza for the person creating it. It’s definitely not work that generates an immediate income for someone else. Today, brands pay to appear on media sites and television channels. But if brands will pay for this, then why not individuals? The media could so easily become one big vanity gallery for hobbyists, amateurs and the rich.

The rest of us could turn to Kickstarter to survive. Strangely, though, it often feels like it’s the big companies, not the little guys, that have their buckets out, like plaintive buskers on the cusp of being drowned out by competing noises. From news groups with paywall phobias to open-access sites that depend upon the unpaid, there are efforts to get users to cough up – but, you know, voluntarily. Only if you love us. Don’t you love us?

It’s an approach to survival that involves mass-scale guilting, or at the very least concerted conscience-pricking, and I’m not sure that’s either sustainable on such a wide scale or very nice for anyone.

The internet’s culture-of-free does what it can to make both individuals and businesses forget that the inability to charge may be nothing more than evidence that someone bigger than you is bullying you off the main drag. And there’s nothing less funny than not getting paid.