Why You Should Never Pay For Music?

Posted on 21st Aug 09 by Nine White Lines | 9

You’re in a band. This statement is either true or it is false. For the purposes of this piece, let us imagine that you are a recording artist and the statement is absolutely true.

So right now I bet you’re thinking Radiohead fucked you. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know they fucked you over big time. Not with the release of In Rainbows and it’s “pay what you want” model, but with the appearance of Amnesiac on (the notoriously malware infested, hence why it’s not directly linked to here) emp3finder.com at the end of February 2001 – a full 3 months before the album’s legitimate release date of June 4th and less than a year after the Metallica-Napster controversy (April 2001).

It will never, of course, be determined if it was Radiohead themselves who leaked the record, but considering the distance between the leak and the official sale version, someone very close to the band would have had to have been involved. Word spread quickly and files circulated at almost the same speed. It’s no coincidence Napster recorded its highest number of users (26.4 million) the same month. Had the band made a penny for each download from that amount of users, their earnings would be the equivalent of 13 years’ minimum wage within a week of Amnesiac being exposed and they would have been regaled as marketing genii. It’s not hard to see why they offered In Rainbows in its pseudo-guilt format. Without specifying numbers, it was confirmed that, despite the possibility of receiving nothing at all, In Rainbows made more money for Radiohead as a potentially-free download than Hail To The Thief did as a CD which you had no choice but to pay for to acquire it legally.

Music is about promotion nowadays. Nobody will look and listen if you don’t give them a reason to

Independent music isn’t dead, it’s a comatose vegetable on life support, with no hope of recovery and a flatline imminent. As Trent Reznor also helpfully points out, you are not Radiohead. So where does this leave a band who hasn’t made it yet and has nothing but a fistful of tracks to speak of? What gives all the non-Radioheads out there the right to charge money for music when one of the biggest acts in world can say “give us money if you like, we don’t really care”?

It’s already been well documented that even if you get picked up and signed, barring a Cornetto’s chance in a smelting factory of becoming hugely famous, you’re fucked

Plenty, actually. Rationale? “How can I make more music if I don’t have any money?” is reasonable. Tradition? After all, pretty much every single record in documented history has had a price tag up to now. Integrity and a sense of self worth are really what’s foremost in this equation. You’ve poured your soul into these recordings and your body aches because of it, spent a few lost weekends and more of your student loan than you’d care to admit to the folks on a guy that makes you sound reasonably good, but you tell him it sounds “fucking awesome”, because you’re not an experienced engineer and who are you to say otherwise? Spend a little extra on packaging and you’re ready to go. After all that, you’re must feel as if you deserve to get some money for your strife. But you aren’t as big as Radiohead and now your production definitely doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as theirs. Plus, your packaging sucks because it’s all you could afford, yet you’re still charging more for your works than they are for theirs. Each CD in Tower, Road, Freebird, or any of a number of stores that stock independent music around the city and the country officially costs between €0.99 and €29.99 more than In Rainbows did. You really have to ask yourself “why?”.

It’s already been well documented that even if you get picked up and signed, barring a Cornetto’s chance in a smelting factory of becoming hugely famous, you’re fucked. Again. So for this reason, I won’t go into further details here. You should already know by this point that you’re not going to make any serious amount of money from music. Any credible money artists do make is from live performances which, again, probably aren’t going to pay off so well unless you’re firmly established or have tapped into the public’s vulnerable lobes with Derren Brown-like menace.

If you’ve ever exposed your songs to the internet, then your music is available for free, right now, whether you say so or not. Even if you can’t find it yet, expect it to be there soon. What’s more is it’s probably illegally there. You’ve definitely heard of sites like rapidshare, megaupload, megashares, yousendit, netload and several dozen other sites which allow for the easy up-and-download of album-sized files over the web (legal or not). It’s only a matter of time before a website is set up specifically for the legal transfer of free albums and anthologies across the world (rapidtunes? musicshares?, youheardit?) and will eventually be accessed more frequently than iTunes for that reason. Its slogan might even be “like downloadmusic, but €1 cheaper”.

So I invite all musicians, bands and artists reading this, signed, unsigned and otherwise to pre-empt someone else making what’s yours available at no cost. Stop making criminals out of your fans and those genuinely interested in hearing what you’re capable of. Voice, here and now, your love of the modern age and your readiness to embrace the internet for the attention-grabbing, career-making tool it can be by publishing a link to a free download of your musics. And don’t stop at that, post it on your twitter, your myspace, your facebook page, your linkedin, your last.fm, your youtube and muzu channels, your local forums, iLike, DIGG, Reddit, Wikipedia, torrent sites and anywhere you can. Make Thom Yorke and his merry fellows think “wow, someone else can do it without our tremendous safety net!”.

Because music is about promotion nowadays. Nobody will look and listen if you don’t give them a reason to. The world is a place where more and more people are looking at fewer and fewer things. Your audience isn’t looking out for you, so you have to be on the lookout for them. I don’t condone setting yourself on fire and jumping up and down while ablaze in your band’s name any more than I suggest whoring yourself to every blog, site and radio station that exists. That’s not the right way to do it, because the result is that you’ll be regarded as what you’ve become: an attention-seeking whore. If I knew the right way to do it, I’d happily share it.

Though I leave that up to your best judgement, because music IS promotion nowadays. It’s not just about music anymore, and that’s why you shouldn’t pay.

Tags: Derren Brown, digg, downloadmusic, facebook, Freebird, ilike, iTunes, last.fm, linkedin, Megashares, Megaupload, metallica, muzu, myspace, Napster, Netload, radiohead, Rapidshare, reddit, Road, steve albini, thom yorke, torrents, Tower, Trent Reznor, twitter, wikipedia, Yousendit, youtube