Heh. I wrote the following post as a comment in response to this post over at Blogspot, but every time I try to post the comment, I get an error, so I'm just going to post it here.
The article is pretty good (go read it for context, you lazy bastards) and is in regards to the eternal question being passed around right now, which is, "What is going to happen to music now that we're almost finished burying the putrescent remains of the decaying corpses of what used to be the major labels?"
Which could now be conceivably rephrased as this simple question:
"Um, I'm a so-called "musician" who pirated my entire CD collection for free off Napster/ Kazaa/FastTrack /MLDonkey/Emule/WhatEver, and I think digital distribution is *really great*, and m4j0r l4bels suXX0rs d00d!!!, but, um, guys? I just realized that we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot here - because, check this out - if we don't pay for music anymore, and neither does anyone else we know, tee hee, because we all steal it off the interwebs (because we're so smart), well, uhhh....
How the hell are we supposed to expect anyone else to pay us for our music, again?!?"
(And, *seriously*, people. You know exactly what I mean. If you're a musician and you pirate* other musician's works, for whatever reason, well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and just hypothesize that not only are you not really a musician, but also, you aren't really bright enough to pass Logic 101, are you? But I digress...)
I don't know.
I'm a struggling musician in Minneapolis, and let me tell you, I *mean it* when I say I'm struggling.
There is such a huge glut of entertainment of all kinds, both legal and pirated and semi-legal right now, it's almost impossible to grab people's attention long enough to convince them to check out my new album.
Seriously, people are soooo wrapped up in checking their Twitter/MySpace/Facebook profiles right now, so that they can download/stream the latest YouTube/Hulu/SNL Digital Short that's making the rounds, so that they can email links of it to everybody and their mother (literally) so that pretty soon, we've all seen the exact same bunch of "viral sensations" and it's just kind of sad that I'm having trouble convincing even long-time friends that my new album is worth checking out.
(Hell, I'm so delusional that I'm even trying to get people to pay $5.00 for it.)
And setting up an online music shop, although sweet in theory, hasn't really proven to be the panacea people seem to think. I speak from the jagged edge of *real*, honest-to-goodness "I've seriously done that" experience here. Jack Merlot's Online Music Emporium & Curiosity Shoppe is my band's recent effort to make our music available for people to purchase online, and I'll tell you what, we've had lots of people come by and kick the tires, but it seems like they stick their noses right up in the air at the very suggestion that maybe they ought to be interested in giving us five dollars of their hard-earned money so they can obtain our latest release.
I mean, what's it going to take? Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions (the site's only been online for a couple days now, I admit, I probably shouldn't chalk it up as a failure just yet), but it's really hard to figure out just what it is that people are going to care about enough to actually part with a couple bucks.
And I don't suffer from any illusion that I'm a typical musician here... There is *no* way that most musicians in my shoes could set up their own e-commerce shop, unfortunately. Setting up our store was a *major* investment in time and money, and maintaining it isn't going to be a walk in the park either. It takes time to produce high-quality MP3 versions of songs, time to create the artwork, time to write all the liner notes & lyric sheets we included in the zip file.
It takes time & money to pay for hosting, domain registration, bandwidth, email/technical support for the non-technical consumers of our music ("OK, I paid for your album at your website, now how do I download and open up the zipfile and add it to iTunes?")
It takes a hella lot of time and money to set up a *secure* store, too, with a real SSL certificate to assure that people's credit card numbers are safe.
What I'm saying is that maybe twenty years ago people needed a major label to fund their recording sessions, mixing, mastering, studio time, artist development, etc. And maybe the conventional wisdom today is right, and recording artists don't need more than a MacBook Pro, a $100 USB condensor microphone, a crappy old banjo, and a pirated copy of Logic to record their album. (and maybe I've got two ravens, seven aces, and a royal straight flush, squared.)
But *nowadays*, even though the conventional wisdom is that "Musicians don't even *need* a major label anymore what with MySpace and such", well, I gotta say, that's a load of purest bullsh*t.
What musicians are going to need is funding to cover all the aforementioned costs, from recording, to mixing, to mastering, to hosting, to e-commerce, and right now, I don't really see the general public caring about music enough to foot the bill for your average musician's online (or offline) music venture.
Let me clarify my perspective based on what I know about setting up my own music store online:
If I wasn't subsidizing the entire gambit with all my scratch-off winnings I made playing pull-tabs** at Mortimer's, and if I wasn't completely comfortable with the concept that I might not make enough money to break even, there is absolutely no way I would have been able to set up our new site. The fact that I have balls big enough to actually try to charge for my band's hard work probably speaks more to my megalomaniacal tendencies than to anything else.
I mean, seriously, my band makes music because we it's a labor of love, but, for crying out loud, musicians gotta eat, too. (And pay rent, and car insurance, and health insurance, and the beat goes on...)
** This is a creative fiction designed to entertain you without actually telling you how I'm funding any of this.
(I personally think it's funny that I wasn't able to respond to the post with a comment. Lucky for me that I have this website set up so I can post whatever I want right here, right? I mean, it'd be a shame to have to rely on Blogspot... or Blogger... or Facebook... or MySpace... or...)
