Pay What You Like: The Victims
With In Rainbows topping album charts on both sides of the Atlantic, the next generation of music distribution and pricing appears to have arrived. Band, new label, distributors, shops, fans: everyone, it appears, is happy.
But while Oxfordshire's favorite sons celebrate, one of the architects of another online musical experiment is figuring out whether he's succeeded or failed. Writing on the Nine Inch Nails website, Trent Reznor explains how a similar exercise in customer pricing has produced quite different results.
Reznor produced Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of NiggyTardust, and with neither man signed to a label, they decided to follow Radiohead's lead. They made the album available in a free 192kbps MP3, and higher-quality MP3 or FLAC (CD-quality) files priced at a modest $5. After a couple of months online, over 150,000 people had downloaded the LP--almost five times as many as bought Williams' last album, apparently vindicating the decision. However, less than one in five opted to pay.
This still equates to $141,610 of income, but studios, musicians, sample clearance and web hosting costs take the lion's share of that. It's not clear whether the pair are out of pocket--Reznor says only that "nobody's getting rich off this project"--but both are certainly being paid for their six months' work at an hourly rate after expenses that makes McDonald's look an attractive alternative. This is depressing news for anyone concerned with music, be they fans, artists, record business executives or people in music-dependent industries, such as ISPs and other distributors.
Without funds, music will atrophy. While web gurus contend that "free" music benefits creators by bringing in new fans, Williams' and Reznor's experience proves otherwise. It's only big b(r)ands with established fanbases who can command the column inches and word-of-mouth buzz that make these kinds of experiments viable. There will always be people making music cheaply, covering their costs with t-shirt sales and money from the day job, but this is only a long-term cure for the music business's ills if fans will be content to listen to demos rather than properly recorded albums.
Yet, while fans seem to be the villains of the Reznor/Williams piece, the record industry is ultimately responsible: it has been the prime mover in driving down the value of music. After years allowing CDs to be given away free by newspapers and magazines--years simultaneously spent repackaging music on cheaper, less emotionally resonant formats and refusing to pass any cost benefit on to fans--the industry has learned how quickly the buying habit can be lost.
Few will shed tears for the corporate decision-makers in the Big Four: but a generation of artists are being cast adrift. Established big names will be OK--they can go it alone; newcomers content to build slowly with minimal investment or return will likewise continue much as now. But unless audiences accept that artists deserve recompense for their work, and ways are found to pay musicians regardless of how fans get to hear their music, the prognosis for every other artist will remain bleak.
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