Hi all,

Over the years I can think of few topics that have been so debated on SoS fora as the question of whether it is better for musos w/o labels or promotion support to

1) Put their music (some or all) out for free (on their own websites, or on 3rd-party sharing sites , or ....) on the general principle that any audience is better than no audience, and after all we make music to have others hear it more than we make it to make money from it (of course, the ideal is both, but sadly we do not live in an ideal world....)

2) Put all their music behind a pay-wall of some sort, with perhaps an Itunes-like "30 seconds are free" for people to audition, on the general principle that if the creator of a piece doesn't value it, why should anyone else?

Reading many, many such threads, I thought that the consensus here was that it was a mistake to give it away. Of course, many of those who were most insistent on this point seemed to be making money from the music biz, either as creators of tools/software packages, owners of small but successful labels, etc., none of whom would prosper if the trend toward *high-calibre* free music continues apace.

But then I read a current thread on "How to Keep My MP3s Off Filing Sharing Nets" (or words to that effect, I'm paraphrasing) and was surprised to see many people sticking up for position #1 above. THe issue, apparently, is less settled than I thought.

So I thought I'd start a thread specifically devoted to issue: To Free or Not to Free?

(BTW: I haven't made up my mind on this after ten years of thinking about it, and I'd like an answer soon given that I've got three or four albums finished sitting on my hard disk a/o my own private website and would like to do something with them before I die or the record industry dies, whichever happens first!

CHeers,

d

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"Patsy had the drug tolerance of Keith Richards and the moral rectitude of Brian Jones." - Dr. Walter Bishop, "Fringe"

Edited by dubbmann (09/06/12 04:22 PM)

Quote dubbmann:

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after all we make music to have others hear it more than we make it to make money from it

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Really? I would say my principal motivation is personal gratification (from creating my music) rather than being especially bothered if others hear it or not. By which I mean wider audiences. Peer approval and respect are important, yes. But I do not seek approval beyond that small group or people I know and regard as musical peers. I wouldn't expect it either because I've never run with the herd or tended to espouse popular/populist opinion. That's just me. I mean I wouldn't turn it down! But I'd never expect it.

I doubt there is a right or wrong answer to 'free or not to free'. Its for each of us to examine our motivation. Some people seem to need public approval so badly that to them it seems obvious to give it all away (regardless of the likelihood of being slagged off and certainty of being exploited by some social media site). Other's don't. I agree the money isn't really important beyond the dignity of recovering production costs and as a tangible affirmation of the music's worth. Revenues derived from live performances are another matter and seem to be equally as volatile as record sales. But that gets complicated if you're partly promoting your work and selling CDs at gigs that you're giving away elsewhere.

For what its worth I'm at a similar place to yourself. Two or three albums worth in the can, which I'm proud of. Twenty or thirty albums worth I'm not proud of! Not sure if the right moment to publish my best work is going to happen in my life time. Although I suspect I'm slightly more ambivalent about that than yourself. My most recent thought is that most of the people who expect it for free are under 25. Certainly under 40. I'm 51 and I do not expect that demographic to be very interested in my music in the first place. So pragmatically my vote goes to 'not to free'. People who are likely to be interested in my music would expect to pay. But don't charge too much either. More like a token just to prove people really wanted the music. It doesn't really bother me if its a cover price or an honesty box or a request to make a donation to some cause or other that I have elected as the beneficiary. I've always been very disinterested in money. But I do become enraged when I see someone ripping off someone else, which is what file sharing without the IP owner's permission is. So I wouldn't actually want my music to be available to a community of people who think that's ok. I neither want nor need an audience like that.

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Strictly project and just for fun

It clearly has to be a compromise. If you don't let some of your music out the door without charging for it, no-one's going to know about it, but most people will want to at least try and cover production costs. It's the same on any level I guess. The current SOS describes how Jan Kybert mixed Paul Weller's 'Around the Lake' three times on a £100K+ Duality desk until they regarded it as "a pivotal track on the album - so much so that Paul released it as the first song off the album as a free download". He'll be hoping to sell a few copies of the other tracks though.

Quote Frisonic:

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Quote dubbmann:

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after all we make music to have others hear it more than we make it to make money from it

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Really? I would say my principal motivation is personal gratification (from creating my music) rather than being especially bothered if others hear it or not. By which I mean wider audiences. Peer approval and respect are important, yes. But I do not seek approval beyond that small group or people I know and regard as musical peers. I wouldn't expect it either because I've never run with the herd or tended to espouse popular/populist opinion. That's just me. I mean I wouldn't turn it down! But I'd never expect it.

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frisonic,

i'm stuck on this point myself, having argued in another thread precisely your point that creating music as an end in itself was thoroughly defensible, above and beyond whether the music was ever intended to be shared with another person. (it was actually a really charming post from an older gent who recovered from five years of cancer treatment and had built a small studio in his garden shed where he went to noodle around and write his toons. someone had criticized his actions as being pointless unless he wrote his music w/t intention of others eventually hearing it. that's when i chimed in with pretty much exactly the point you made that i've quoted above from your reply.

i'm almost exactly in your situation as well (50 years old) - few/no expectations of a music career but with (i hope) a small competence at my type of music - fingerstyle guitar and krautrock-inspired electronica (not necessarily together ;-). i don't hit open-mics much if at all, and yet, while i've uploaded a fair number of pieces to my own website, i've not done anything to publicize it (such as include it in my SoS signature line instead of the off-beat TV quotes i tend to use), in part because i can't decide whether to say "sod it all" and just leave the full tracks up there (MP3s, not WAVEs) or go the "Itunes" route of including snippets and say 'no money? no more!' to anyone who might stumble on the site. the latter route, of course, entails more website development work (adding an ecommerce widget that can take credit cards, ....) and i'm trying to figure out if it's worth doing it. hence the decision to 'crowd-source' the decision, as Internet marketing gurus would put it, and start this discussion thread.

btw, to those of you who use aggregators to get your toons into Itunes, etc, has the move paid off in sales and exposure (at least to the extent of justifying whatever you had to pay the aggregator?) inquiring minds (still, apparently) want to know ;-)

cheers,

d

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"Patsy had the drug tolerance of Keith Richards and the moral rectitude of Brian Jones." - Dr. Walter Bishop, "Fringe"

If I might stick my oar in with the thoughts of someone 20 yrs your junior and with every intention of making both art and money... I might add:

1. There are no bad reasons for making music. All are valid, all should be welcome. And that includes people who are *only* in it to make money. (Although to be honest, the more people I speak to who work in stock music, "manufactured" pop lyric writing, or other potential candidates, the less I believe that there is really anyone who falls into that category).

2. I would go for the idea that whether the world accepts you as an artist, an amateur, or a greedy rascal depends on how you present yourself to the world, rather than on the actual content of your music. If you want people to take your music seriously as art, then tell them it is art. If you want to be just a guy in a shed, then tell them you're just a guy in a shed. I don't believe that people can process music without a context which allows them to listen in a certain way - is it muzak? is it a heartfelt song? - it's up to you to provide them with that context, by behaving in a certain way towards your music yourself.

3. As an example of this - if you want people to take your music seriously, then ask for money. For start, if you want to make money, you're going to *have* to ask for money (!), but to some extent, if you tell people you're an artist and then you just give stuff away willy-nilly, you're also sending out mixed messages and devaluing your own work.

4. There is a lot of scare-mongering about piracy: I posted about this somewhere else, but as somebody with a fanbase mostly comprised of people with good taste and decent minds ( ), and who falls below the mainstream radar, I tend to find that people quite like to pay. They like what we do... they want to support it. I trust them on the whole.

To address a couple of points head-on

Quote dubbmann:

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the latter route, of course, entails more website development work (adding an ecommerce widget that can take credit cards, ....) and i'm trying to figure out if it's worth doing it.

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It's p*ss easy, though. you don't need a widget that accepts credit cards, you just need to sign up to (in my case) bandcamp and let them do the credit card stuff. Then you just need a link in your website. I don't really ever post my stuff up here but in this case I'll direct you to my band's website: HERE. Once you're on the main page, if you click on STORE it takes you to bandcamp... it's all pretty seamless.

Quote dubbmann:

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btw, to those of you who use aggregators to get your toons into Itunes, etc, has the move paid off in sales and exposure (at least to the extent of justifying whatever you had to pay the aggregator?) inquiring minds (still, apparently) want to know ;-)

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Yes it does - particularly if you go with someone who charges a one off fee. I went with Emubands, purely because they are based nearby, across the road from the studio we use, but I can't fault them. We've covered the fees, and it makes a big difference to how seriously the press will take you if you are on iTunes. It provides no exposure itself though.

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Anto mo Ninja, Watashi mo Ninja

Quote dubbmann:

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Quote Frisonic:

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Quote dubbmann:

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after all we make music to have others hear it more than we make it to make money from it

---

Really? I would say my principal motivation is personal gratification (from creating my music) rather than being especially bothered if others hear it or not. By which I mean wider audiences. Peer approval and respect are important, yes. But I do not seek approval beyond that small group or people I know and regard as musical peers. I wouldn't expect it either because I've never run with the herd or tended to espouse popular/populist opinion. That's just me. I mean I wouldn't turn it down! But I'd never expect it.

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frisonic,

i'm stuck on this point myself, having argued in another thread precisely your point that creating music as an end in itself was thoroughly defensible, above and beyond whether the music was ever intended to be shared with another person. (it was actually a really charming post from an older gent who recovered from five years of cancer treatment and had built a small studio in his garden shed where he went to noodle around and write his toons. someone had criticized his actions as being pointless unless he wrote his music w/t intention of others eventually hearing it. that's when i chimed in with pretty much exactly the point you made that i've quoted above from your reply.
cheers,

d

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I remember that thread. I found it very humbling and inspiring at the same time, as I expect did you. I also remember being astonished at the insensitivity and narrow mindedness of those who were castigating the guy for not feeling he had some duty or other to share his work! Anyway, I thought I'd share this quote with you from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3:0 blog, which I stumbled upon today: "art is something you do for yourself, a craft is what you do for everyone else". I can think of a few threads in these fora to which that might have made a valid contribution but it does just as well in this one!

I'll be watching other people's contributions to this discussion with interest.

F

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Strictly project and just for fun

I remember that thread too. I don't remember what I said there, so apologies if I repeat myself!

I guess I would quite like to make some money from my music, and indeed from about 1985 spent 10 years trying to hawk it round. I tried every combination of cassettes, replay-paid envelopes with introductory letters and on rare occasions telephoning if I could find a number. Mostly I heard nothing. Occasionally I got a terse 'Not commercial' or 'Not suitable for our portfolio'. Eventually I gave up and with hindsight suspect that a major stumbling block was a lack of 'presence'. Someone quietly working away in a home studio was not going to be easy to promote - even if they were brilliant. These days, that may no longer be true.

However, in the mean time I continued to compose, and sometimes to remix older work. I got a lot of pleasure from this in itself, so was less bothered about getting out there. Since then things have changed yet again of course, and now with my own website I am getting a reasonable number of hits, and just occasionally an email from someone saying how much they like my music. Oh what a warm glow of satisfaction that brings!

I'd still like the recognition of people actually wanting to pay for my work, but I don't want it enough to go to much effort above and beyond the actual music making. Does that sound strange?

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It wasn't me!
(Well, actually, it probably was)

When thinking about this I'd approach it thus, ask yourself:

Have you tried and exhausted the conventional routes to getting backing from the biz?

Have you tried and exhausted the unconventional routes to getting backing from the biz?

Have you tried and exhausted the endless slog of touring the toilet circuit and building a following for years?

Have you tried tapping your network of contacts you built up and failed to interest them in your music?

Have you tried to sell your music independently for a time and sold bugger all?

I'd say if the answer is 'yes' to all of these, then I reckon you have nothing at all to lose by putting at least some of your 'best' music out there for free consumption by anyone who's interested, which won't be many.

People tend to be only interested in music by artists they've 'heard of', seen live, advertised, or playing on the Telly/radio. To get to that level takes massive financial investment beyond the reach of most independent musicians, regardless of how good their stuff is or talented they are. Trying to interest someone in buying something they haven't heard of, or had pushed at them, is extremely difficult. In which case the 'give it them for free in the hope of hooking a few' strategy might be the only option available.

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