Is Music Free If We Like It Or Not?
My musings on this began by reading an incredibly helpful, intelligent, and insightful forum post by Trent Reznor in the Nine Inch Nails forums titled my thoughts on what to do as a new / unknown artist. Mr. Reznor gives his honest advice, neither moralizing about the state of the industry nor blowing marketing smoke up the ass of wide eyed aspiring musicians. Since Ember After is fairly unknown, I read his missive with interest, looking for any gems I can use. There was nothing particularly “controversial” in his remarks, but one quote did get me thinking:
…music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact – it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now).
Needless to say, as a musician this is quite disheartening. Even those of us who build our own capable home studios still incur many thousands in costs when we release even an “under the radar” indie album: incidental costs, mastering costs, artwork, manufacturing, distribution/shipping, and so on. Even those of us who have no illusions of stardom hope to at least cover our costs—our goal is to keep making music, but if the choice is making an album or making the rent…well…
But while what Trent says makes sense for known artists, what about truly unknown artists? We have sold less than a few hundred CDs at this point…surely there is no demand for illegal downloads of our album Grasping At Straws, is there? So I did a search for Ember After on some sites that facilitate illegal downloading. Here’s a snapshot of what I found:
Needless to say, I was shocked. I had to do a double-take, and a triple take. At no point had anyone in Ember After ever packaged our album as a .rar file even to give to each other, this was clearly packaged up by someone else, and distributed at large. My thoughts jumped between various implications of this:
• First of all, I wondered if this truly meant that rather than hundreds, over fifteen thousand people had listened to the album. Realistically, probably not. Some downloads may have been automated, people who just collect anything new and trade it for movies, games, porn, whatever. Some was probably downloaded just to host on other pirate sites. I’m sure the same person/group had multiple downloads, etc. Never the less, if only half of that number heard the music, that’s an immense amount more than I ever anticipated.
• If as few as ten percent of those downloaders (either number, the full 15,000+ or 7,500+) had actually purchased the album instead of copied it illegally, that would have covered our costs. But they didn’t…and we didn’t.
• Should I take this personally? When you’ve put years of your life, creativity, blood, sweat, and tears, strained relationships and pinned hopes on your art, its hard not to…
• Does that mean that there’s a market out there for Ember After merchandise, live performance, etc? Unfortunately, since the downloads are anonymous and random, I have no idea. Even if only a few thousand of those people actually enjoyed the music enough to consider paying for a t-shirt or club show, they are very likely spread all over the world. But I can’t know for sure.
Trent Reznor was right. No matter how unknown you are, if you have music out there on iTunes, Amazon, etc. then it’s been distributed illegally. We did a fair amount of promotion, and were disappointed with the sales, but it seems the number of downloads may suggest we were more successful than we thought…The listeners we attracted, however, didn’t pay us for our music.
So what is the logical next step? It’s very tempting to get extremely disheartened, to feel robbed. But another way to look at it is that the potential audience is larger than we’d thought. Rather than focus on the fact that they won’t pay for music, there is an opportunity to brainstorm about what they might be willing to pay for, and how we can deliver that.
The Misery EP that we’ve been working on for most of a year now is finally only a couple recording sessions from being finished. And with it will come a total website revamp, and a new promotional push. Now is a good moment to really take stock of the current climate for selling and distributing music, and try and figure out how best to make use of our limited resources to give—and maybe even sell—people the fruits of our creativity and labor in a form that will be meaningful to them, and hopefully rewarding enough to us to keep going.
This was a wake up call for us. But now we’re fully awake…