The event will be held at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester this September and is called "Priceless Classics". Instead of paying £10-£40 members of the audience will be given the opprotunity to book tickets for free and pay what they want after listening to beautiful classical pieces from last three centuries.
We are very glad to hear tha pay what you want business model is used not only for reading but also for listening to Bach, Handel or Mozart. In his comment to The Telgraph's article our founder, Michał Kiciński, wrote:
In the old days, the bards played the ballads by the fires and listeners rewarded them afterwards. The more beautiful and moving the story was, the more they gratified an artist. Money or gifts were not just a charge for commodity but an expression of admiration - directly, from hand to hand, without institutions in the middle which controlled them and took most of author's income to cover the costs of their functioning or their greed and arrogance. The human bonds between storyteller and their audience were lost in what we call civilisation progress.
"And what if they will not pay?" I heard so many times when creating my 'read first, then pay what you feel it is worth' eBookstore OpenBooks.com. I believe that people are good in general and only those who are capable of stealing themselves suspect others for wanting to do so. If one imagines others to enjoy the book and cynically not use "support the author" link, they are the one who would do it themselves. We treat our users fairly and we hope that in return they will also be fair to us and to the authors.
“If there’s a possibility to pay or not to pay, the choice is simple”, some said. But look, people freely pay more for fair trade coffee or the products certified to be pain-free for animals. They just want to be sure no one suffers because of their choices. People voluntarily use charity surcharges in online shops, seen and gratified by no one, just to make someone’s life better.
So far over 150 authors have been brave enough to join our (r)evolution with 313 of their books. So I’m not the only one who believes that yes, we can and change we need.
