Dare Obasanjo points out that "making it up in volume isn't necessarily a great idea:

As a business, increasing your market size is nice but maintaining your profits is even nicer. If you have 200,000 customers and make $80 profit per customer, would you be interested in doubling your customer base while making $20 profit per customer due to lowering your prices? The point here is that simply increasing the size of your market or the number of your customers does not translate to increasing the business's bottom line.

This is worth pondering, too:

The experiences of the software industry seem to contradict Mike Masnick's diagnoses and recommendations for the music industry. Giving away your most valuable asset and hoping to make it up by selling peripheral services and add-ons is more likely to destroy your company than become your redemption.

The bottom line is, giving away your crown jewels may make you feel better, but it will also impact the size of your paycheck - and probably not in a positive direction.

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