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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — First, a little confession.

While this story pretends to be about things becoming free, that's only in the sense of free samples; buy one, get one free; bare bones for free in hopes of selling the deluxe version; free but with advertising. You know the drill.

But now free is the new black — chic, essential, even sexy.

A few years into this young century, every mouse click makes clearer that some things will be free whether the folks who produce them want to give them away or not.

Music. Software. Books. Or, for instance, this article (at least on the Web).

Some marketplace analysts — most prominently Chris Anderson in his latest book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" — suggest that even as digital technology and the Internet shrink the price of many forms of work to free, free can also offer a new way to turn a buck.

"People are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the concept of $0.00," writes Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine.

"It's driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero," he writes. (The digital version of his book is free. The bound version will set you back $26.99.) "This new form of free is based on the economics of bits, not atoms. ... The bits economy is deflationary."

At the heart of his argument is one of the most reliable adages of the Digital Age: The time-tested Moore's Law that accurately predicted that the cost of computer processing will drop by half at least every two years.

That means computer processing, bandwidth, data storage and, Anderson argues, anything "made of ideas" becomes ever cheaper. So inexpensive — a single transistor in 1961 cost $10, enough to buy almost 2 million transistors today — that he thinks we might as well "round down to zero." Or free.

Google and Microsoft, the rival giants birthed by the computer processor, seem at war over who can give away the most: operating systems, Web browsers, office software, e-mail, Internet searches. The one that gets people to take the most freebies could dominate your desktop.

To be sure, free is to the digital universe what water is to restaurants.

The posting and viewing of YouTube videos. The operating system on your Android-based cell phone. Scores of apps for your iPhone. Software programs for slide shows, for your taxes, for your games, for Internet phone calls. Almost endless storage space for digital photographs, text documents or self-referential minutiae on Facebook.

"The notion behind free is that companies can create a demand for their product by giving it away," said Chris Kuehl, managing director of Armada Corporate Intelligence in Kansas City, Kan.

Kuehl's business has done just that recently, giving away three market analyses it values at $5,000 to the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association.

"We'll do work for clients gratis on the assumption that they'll find it so helpful that they can't live without it," he said. And, in fact, he said the strategy landed Armada paying work with the association.

Anderson's book argues that free is rapidly becoming the default price of virtually anything that can be reduced to 1s and 0s in a computer and replicated endlessly on the Internet.

Old-school folks talk derisively of a mostly younger set that insists, in the words of "Whole Earth Catalog" creator Stewart Brand, "information wants to be free."

The right-to-free argument sometimes boils down to two points.

First, it would be undemocratic to let money determine who can read or listen to or play with the products of the mind.

Second, people are bound to pirate digital goods and services anyway, so better to use free to lure customers to things that you can coax them to pay for.

Snapfish will let you use space on its computer banks for your photographs because it thinks you'll turn to it when you want prints. Adobe gives away free picture-editing software in hopes you'll buy its more sophisticated version of Photoshop. So-called netbook computers are given away for 99 cents — not quite free, yet — if you'll just sign up for a $60-a-month wireless Internet service. Virtually every newspaper posts its work on an open-access Web site so it can sell ads.

"It's relevant in a digital world because it's easier to distribute things for free and make them available to everyone," said Ethan Whitehill of the Kansas City branding and communications firm Two West Inc.

The push toward free, inevitably, has brought up worries about whether it can cover the payroll.

Are newspaper subscriptions hurt because the Internet is free? Will product placements ever be lucrative enough to finance a Judd Apatow movie if someday all films are hijacked by pirates? Will large numbers of music groups ever be able to trigger enough concert and T-shirt sales that they'll be able to give away their songs for free, like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails?

Traditionalists note that when customers can't be forced to pay for such things, then it will quickly prove harder for producers to churn out quality or make a living.

"When things were the cheapest, men were the poorest," said future presidential candidate William McKinley 120 years ago. "Cheap merchandise means cheap men, and cheap men mean a cheap country."

We've, um, advanced from spats to Twitter and from cheap to free. Yet the same anxieties about how to earn a wage vex us.

In studying media firms, analyst Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester Research has found deep divisions within companies about what to do. Should they keep their Web sites free to give advertisers a bigger audience, or tuck their content behind pay walls to make readers into subscribers?

"The digital environment makes it more difficult to support large businesses" and the polished content they're accustomed to providing, Epps said. "Consumers aren't willing to pay as much for content that's divorced from a physical environment" — a printed magazine or DVD. "And advertisers aren't willing to pay as much for advertising online. ... Media companies are going to continue to get smaller."

She also notes that while things are moving toward free, others have moved away. Few thought decades ago that people would pay for cable TV when they could watch network shows for free. After Napster showed how file sharing meant access to almost unlimited music, Apple persuaded people to pay 99 cents a song.

Sometimes free flat out doesn't make money.

Malcolm Gladwell, who chronicles trends in his books and in the magazine The New Yorker, noted in a critique of Free that YouTube is wildly popular without being profitable. The very videos that attract huge traffic — your cat using the toilet or pirated clips from movies — are also the sort that advertisers shy away from.

Yet those same popular works of amateurs and thieves also demand the most YouTube resources. Anderson argues that the cost of hosting those videos is next to nothing, while Gladwell says next to nothing "multiplied by 75 billion is still a very large number." In fact, YouTube owner Google no longer breaks out the financials for YouTube. But in 2006, when those numbers were last public, it lost $276 million. Some speculate that number has almost doubled.

Before publishing his book "Predictably Irrational," Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely was part of the all-things-should-be-free movement. He wrote at length about how, he said in an interview, "free is a fundamentally different amount of money than a penny or a dollar."

Then his book was pirated, with both text and audio version swapped widely on the Internet.

"I don't feel quite the same about free anymore," he said.

But then he heard from one of his pirates, swapped thoughts on the illegality and formed a relationship. It may be fodder for a future book.

"I'd like to find some other model," Ariely said.

Other, he said, than free.