Music Should Be Free

Music should be free. There I said it. Here’s why.

Marketing, medium and manufacturing changes are at the core. I am going to touch on how an artist can and probably should make money these days. Why the perception of the value of recorded music is fundamentally a mistake and what has changed about manufacturing to change the way we make money.

Marketing Your Music

As a musician that NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD OF, I see my primary goal as promotion. I look at my music as a marketing tool. There are 3 parts to the new music marketing system, recorded music, live music and adapted music.

Live Music

When I get up to play, I am advertising that I am a musician to the people in the room. My goal is to get them to recognize me as a musician and lock them into the next step of my marketing, making contact. I am looking to put together a band. For non-musicians, I want them signing up for my email list. If they like my performance, they might be interested in going to another one. The email performs another job, getting people to my web site. I have advertising here and I may be able to make some money that way. At the very least, they become regulars here which is cool with me I like them stopping by.

Recorded Music

Recorded music is probably the MOST CONTROVERSIAL part of my position. OOOH controversy. Recorded music is not a product but an example of an experience that they can have in person. Remember, the goal is to build a market for yourself. The market is your fans. The cost for a major band like Metallica to produce an album is the same or cheaper than the cost of a superbowl ad. Superbowl ads are given away. They are used to build brand. Major companies pay millions to produce superbowl adds so they can get their product in front of the eyes of the public. A recording does the same thing, it gets your music to the public. Recording music today costs far less than it used to and bands like Metallica spend so much money on recording because they CAN, not because they have to. Jim Morrison recorded LA Woman in a bath tub with carpet hanging from the walls. The expensive part was the specialized equipment. Equipment we no longer need. The same equipment we use to play live, we can use with a computer to record at home.

Because of this cost advantage coupled with the portability of the end product, it is ideal for promotion. Attach it to an email and send it to all those people on your email list. Offer it as a give away when they sign up for your email list. It is a small file and can be emailed, shared and reproduced easily. It is viral marketing at it’s best. You record it with a short introduction to you and the song and hope that everyone gives it to everyone else. The more it’s shared, the better. The better it is and you are, the more it spreads, the more people hear about you and like what you have to offer, the more fans and therefore potential income it can generate. You can make more money by giving away your music than by selling it.

Adapted Music

If someone likes your song and does it themselves. This is a whole different creature. This is where copyright is a good thing. If someone benefits from your original work you should get a cut. When you start out though, it might be good just to have the recognition. “This is a song by XXXXX.” can have more value than them paying you to sing your song.  Depending on your level of fame of course.

The Mistake is the Medium

Record companies are promoters. They market musicians. Their goal is to make money from musicians popularity. I won’t run down the different costs of a music CD but the Record Company makes far more than the musicians, manufacturers or anyone else involved. That is how they make their money. Musicians on the other hand, make most of their money from performing and selling other merchandise. Record Companies make their money from album sales. When people share, they don’t make money. The reason it is such a problem for them now is because it is so easy to share.

Sharing music used to mean having a recording and a tape deck that could reproduce that recording. It meant the individual needed infrastructure that was specialized in order to share. That isn’t true anymore. Even so, sharing music has been commonplace since the 70’s. Most everyone had a home made cassette recording of an album. We listened to it until it wore out or got recorded over. It’s how we decided if we wanted the album or not. We made copies of our favorite songs and shared them with friends without fear of prosecution. File sharing is the same thing

How Did the Record Companies Get So Confused?

About 100 years ago, sound recording was invented. It gave people the ability to hear performances recorded by anyone, anywhere at any time. The medium was exclusive though. It wasn’t easy to reproduce recordings. Record companies filled that niche. They recorded and mass produced copies of performances that they then distributed everywhere they could. Some performers they paid, others they didn’t. They weren’t selling the music, they were selling the medium it was recorded on. They would manufacture more of the recordings that sold well, made new recordings of the performers that people liked and searched for new performers to produce and sell. In order to make sure that no rival companies could take their market, they had performers sign exclusive contracts. Eventually, they got to the point where they controlled popular music by promoting their artists and locking out others.

They got in a lot of trouble for doing this in the 50’s.

This system didn’t change until the 70’s when home recording equipment began to significantly drop in price due to advancements in technology. It was all over for them even then. They just didn’t know it. They also had by this time confused the medium with the information on it. They now believed that they sold music when in fact they sold vinyl and magnetic tape. Time was against them though. It was becoming easier and cheaper to share music.

When digital recordings appeared in the 80’s it was over for them. The information had been separated from the medium, but they saw was increased profits. It was so cheap and easy to put the information on the CD. All that was left was to be able to transport the information without having to get up from the chair and the internet was just around the corner. It allowed people to share that information without having to leave your seat and you could do it with many people at once. We didn’t need a dedicated medium any more.

The record company had outlived its usefulness.

Manufacturing Technology

While Manufacturing technology has screwed the record companies it has empowered musicians. Manufacturing has changed the way we make money. It costs less to produce products and has also made it so we can produce more scalable quantities. You can produce very small quantities products to sell to clients. you can print out heat transfers and iron them on to shirts to sell at your next concert. You can make, shirts, stickers, posters and CDs in the comfort of your own home on your computer. You can set up an online store that sells them as well. If you sell anything online, you can run off a copy and ship it in an afternoon. That’s good when you have 10 people a gig buying your stuff but what about if you get popular and have 50 a gig buying? Mass manufacturing is cheaper and more scalable too. At 10 a night, you can produce shirts at home for about $5 an item. When you have 50 a night, outsource to a silkscreener for about $5 a shirt. It’s true across the merchandising board. What’s really nice about it is there are lots of guys out there who have low cost setups that would be happy to do it for you for a cut of the profits so you don’t have to worry about it yourself.

Fans

Music should be free. You can’t stop it from being given away and why would you want to. It costs very little to produce and the benefits gained far outway the costs. It probably costs less then those little advertising cards you put on car windshields to promote your concerts. The best way to build success as a musician is to build a community of fans. Fans will come back over and over again and provide help and support over and above the money they spend on your merchandise. They promote you in ways you never could. These are people that care about you and what you love to do. Give them the tools to spread the word about you. Reward them for being your fans. They will reward you many times over for it.