19 Mar 2009
Filed Under : Music
Posted By : Emma Forman | Comments : 3
to pay or get them free?
what do bands think about making their tracks available for download - do you guys make them free or do you like to make 'em pay? I like freebies so tend to try keep my stuff free
pay for them and put the cash into the website, its the nwb helping the bands to operate and gain gigs,
I've been on Myspace for years (and the original mp3.com) and would rather give it away. I think the days of selling albums are almost over (as I predicted in my newspaper column eight years ago!!) Its good, as it encourages the artist to get out and play...I said there'd be a time when albums were recorded to give away at concerts (fair enough its vaguely included in ticket price) and its virtually here. If McFly are giving away their latest album with the Daily Mail, that says a lot about recorded music these days. I've bought cds by local artists, but only when I've seen them at a local gig, and really only as a souvenir. Lets face it, a band can do really good home recording now for very little cost..why not just knock a few cds out and give em away to a fanbase? They'll appreciate it more than you charging them a tenner for it. I once got a £5000 loan to put a cd out of local acoustic artists (it was quite a lot of money then, certainly to me!) but I wouldn't do it now. Try actually selling a thousand cds these days, its virtually impossible unless you have a big record company backing, or unless you're gigging 7 nights a week. We had fifteen artists on our 'sampler'...it got rave reviews in Big Issue and NME, plus I was pushing it on local radio and press/internet, but I don't think we actually sold more than 200 between us (and thats 15 people gigging quite regularly). There's pay for download sites of course, but why should anybody pay to download one of my tracks (no matter how good I think it is) when they could download,say, a Bob Dylan track or whatever?? There's a lot of music out there these days (a hundred years worth in fact) but I think the age of the 'recording artist' has gone for good...probably started terminal illness with the sale of the first cd recorder...give your stuff away, you'll make more fans...try selling it, and you'll see just how few people in the world (even your home town!!) have even actually heard of you, never mind wanna spend their hard earned cash on you....recorded music is almost worthless!
I must admit that since I made my tracks free on lastfm I've had a pretty big increase in my number of listeners so personally do think that it does pay to give away free stuff. I got into KT Tunstall's music beacuse she was offering free download...liked it enough to go out and buy the cd
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