Selling Music Is A Waste Of Time
The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog has an interesting post about Mike Skinner of The Streets, and how he’s giving away music on social networking site Twitter:
He’s giving away new songs using Twitter because, he writes, “all this trying to sell you music … wastes valuable time.”
A new study out of Norway suggests Mike’s business model may be a good one, for it shows that people who download music for free (legally or not) are 10 times more likely to pay for music than people who don’t. This seems to make digital bootleggers the music industry’s biggest customers. All the more reason for labels to stop suing them?
Freakonomics seems to be blurring causation and correllation.
Those people that download music from the Internet are 10 times more likely to buy music, not because they’ve downloaded music from the Internet, but because they’re already hardcore music freaks.
Freakonomics also seems to want to draw conclusions from musicians that are outliers.
Like Trent Reznor, Skinner is an established artist with a large fanbase, so what works for him may not work for new artists, indie or mainstream.
Nobody knows yet what the new model will be for music exposure and distribution. It’s going to be happening over the Internet, though.
Comments
People who download music I've noticed are usually the biggest music fans I know, often having huge record or CD collections. Sometimes things are just out of print or hard to find or prohibitively expensive in legit formats. So this really makes sense to me. Thankfully, I think the music industry is, for the most part, done suing its customers. It was a PR disaster for them and they know it as well as anyone.
As for artists giving their music away, I'm all for it and I'm glad to see bigger names who don't need to do that doing it in various forms. The thing is, though, that a lot of people are missing the point when they say what works for Trent Reznor and Mike Skinner might not work for the average underground musician. Trent Reznor and Mike Skinner can sell music. On the other hand, at this point, I can't imagine it being an effective business model - especially for independent musicians - to not have as much of your catalog as possible available for free. Streaming at least, downloadable preferred. If you want to get people to come out to your shows, and you're not an established act, it helps everyone when you do that. It helps the promoter know what they're booking. It helps the fans to know what you sound like and what you're doing. It helps you because you'll have fans you otherwise wouldn't coming out to your shows and buying merch. Or, if you do choose to sell CD's or records, you might even have more people buying those after hearing them.
At least, I hope I'm right. Every song I've ever written is available for free in various places.
A very sad fact of life I guess. The internet has killed recorded music.
The very thing that we thought would give every home recorder/bedroom songwriter their big break has now cruelly snatched it away from them.
I guess the gigging artists just need to do more gigging, and the songwriter just carries on as normal promoting themselves through the old established channels?
Valid points but I still can't see it.
In the days before...(I know and accept we've all got to move on) you would have radio instead of streams.
The difference there was that you eagerly waited for your song to be played, each time getting more excited before you finally decided you needed to buy, so you could hear it whenever you wanted, and play it until you got fed up.
With the free music online...even just streaming...you get to that stage without parting with cash. You can listen as many times as you like.
Even if it hasn't killed recorded music outright it's strangled most of the life out of it.
Now I'm talking purely from the perspective of a songwriter here, but I can only see the music industry getting cheaper and cheaper. Great news for consumers but rubbish for writers.
Look at Amazon. What is going to motivate/cultivate new talent when songs are being sold for so little...and can be streamed at top quality for free?
What exactly is the way forward?