Barter: getting something for a song

Last month we had a young production assistant working with us, and we got him for a song. Literally. You see, we bartered music for work. I love it when barter functions in the modern world…

James Lawrence, a Nova Scotia Community College student, was working on his radio drama called The Pocket Watch, and he needed some music. He found stuff he liked at Firstcom.com – an online music source that Journeyman uses. But he couldn’t license individual tracks. They recommended that he contact us — the only production company in this area that licenses their music. And they told us it was totally cool to use our license for his project. Of course, downloading 9 tracks eats into our allotted license; and since James is a self-described poor student, we said “come to work for us for a few days instead of payment.” … he gets some work experience, we get some extra help, he gets his music, and his radio drama wins some awards. Everyone’s happy.

Earlier this year we did a project for John Ratchford, a photographer from Sydney, Cape Breton. He wanted to create a 30 minute educational DVD on how he built his market, and our quote was a little rich for his budget, so we agreed to take some of his photo services as partial payment. To wit — the photo of Oren and me on the Journeyman homepage.

I even bartered this week for software usage from the president of Norada, the developers of the online Project Management and Customer Relationship Management productivity software called Solve’360. I had emailed them to let them know that I was checking out their product but was concerned that I found quite a few typos and spelling errors in their web copy. This drives me crazy when I see people marketing their stuff, but not thoroughly proof-reading — it makes me question the accuracy of the product or services being sold. After a fairly good-natured thrust and parry between me and their company president, they are offering me extra months of free trial on their software in exchange for pointing out some of the errors. They have nothing to lose really; I’ll likely get hooked on the software if it’s good.

Barter is about flexibility, right?… I’m currently finishing off a yoga video for a local yoga teacher (Maxine Munro – one of the best in Halifax), and I’m getting tons of yoga classes in exchange, and also just finished yoga teacher training through her studio. This is all through a cash-less exchange of services for services. My hamstrings are thanking me, even if Revenue Canada is not.

I don’t think barter exchanges can be touched by Revenue Canada. I could be wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure it legally cuts out the middleman also known as the taxman. Not that this is saving me a whack of money. But there is always some value-added joy when we “stick it to The Man.”

Admittedly, barter can lead to misunderstandings when the deal changes. The yoga video started out to be one project idea and it had to change when one player changed her mind about participating. That made for some delays and trouble shooting in the production. It gets us into a grey area as far as the original barter deal goes. But it’s still working.

I’d be interested in hearing other stories of barter in the professional realm. Is barter a good thing? Do you do it? Or is money actually the simplest barter system of all?

- Mathew

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