Should you give your music away ?

[SlavikSvensk]

I think there are a few problems falling in an "all free" system :

- Labels make their selection and try to ensure a certain level of quality, that's their work and they have to do it well if they want to sell. Will quality remain if labels no more exist?

- In fact I think quality tracks would still exist, but that leads me to my second point : how will the djs find the music they like? will they have to go from myspace to myspace to listen to three or four tracks each time, making a prayer and hopping each time that they will at least find a nice track? When I see the time I spend on juno to find so few tracks I really like, I can't imagine what it would be if everyone would distrubute his music (even fo free) by himself....

- Last but not least, and that's the logical conclusion of what I've said above, that would be very hard for new artists to get their audience. Now labels can find new artists and bring them to light through websites that reach a large audience such as juno, chemical and so on...
without those interfaces new artists would stay in the shadow.

this is where i was going too. right now techno is in danger of becoming an oligarchy, where a very small number of established artists dominate the business side of things. while getting music to fans cheaply or even for free is great, if it becomes widespread, the digital labels will die. if they die, then the ability to reach a certain level of exposure will be completely in the hands of the 'techno aristocracy.'

like them or not, labels provide an essential service in sustaining some semblance of economic viability to techno beyond the stadium packers.

so yeah...henry please give some stuff away but please don't stop helping out the little labels!

[TechMouse]

When I was younger (and poorer) I used to spend most of my money on vinyl and pretty much download everything else. My rationale at the time being "I'm spending more money on music than most people I know, and it's going in at the grass roots level where it will do the most good". I would occasionally buy a high-quality audio file if I was planning to burn it to a CD to play out or something, provided it was DRM free and good quality - I had to ask for my money back a couple of times because a file was really dodgy.

Now I'm older and I have a bit more free cash I've started paying for things I really like. I discovered gofasterstripe.com and started buying some really good comedy DVDs. I've bought several digital albums this year already (the DubFX album, Insides by Jon Hopkins and Caesura by Helios) plus loads of individual tracks. I shelled out for my copy of Ableton. I even bought the full version of WinAMP (why not? I use it every day and it costs next to nothing). I also bought A Midsummer Nice Dream by Ochre on vinyl because Chris repressed it and it only cost £5.

I think my point is that people who really love music are always going to spend as much as they can reasonably afford on it. Those that don't probably don't love it as much, and you can't let those people drive your decision.

I think the donation model is great, but I would occasionally back it up with a value added product - e.g. a vinyl or CD (or DVD) in nice packaging with good artwork and <insert something else novel here>. That guy that gave away a free noise making circuit in the package of the CD was on to something.

[vegim]

while getting music to fans cheaply or even for free is great, if it becomes widespread, the digital labels will die. if they die, then the ability to reach a certain level of exposure will be completely in the hands of the 'techno aristocracy.'

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