Should you give your music away ?

[a X cell]

I took this question out of BOA to talk about it on some boards. I got some interesting answers.

Those are all good possibilities. However, I think this is the kind of thing that will work best for established artists with a dedicated fanbase, which is the case for both Radiohead and NIN. This probably won't do much for relatively unknown up-and-comers. Word of a "free" Radiohead or NIN album spreads like wildfire in all kinds of media. Word of a free Omni or {insert relatively unknown producer here} album probably won't get that much exposure.

While I am all about digital distribution (and even free music sharing to some extent), I can also see one of the downsides of it today. Music today, being either dirt-cheap or freely available (through legal or illegal means), has become a disposable commodity. Today, the "life expectancy" of a good electronic dance music track has dropped significantly from a few months to a few weeks. I think that the price of music, while not being the only factor, has something to do with it. Back when I was playing only vynil, paying 15$ for a track + B-side, that track could remain in my crate for months and sometimes one or two years if I really thought it was awesome. These days, with the same budget and the quantity of music coming out, a good track is often only played a few weeks. There are a lot of aspects to "this problem", but I believe that putting a price on your music, for some reason, seems to give it more value to a lot of people. That is unfortunately the way things are today.

That leads me to a question I ask myself.
We all talk about NIN/Radiohead/Electro right now for this matter. Let's get to the point : this is pretty much easier to get your music known by any means (free or not) when you're already established.

Let's take my case. I'm making some Experimental 135bpm-ish Techno. The only labels I could release on are : Naked Lunch AND Impact Mechanics since it's pretty much the sound that looks like mine. Unfortunately, I get no news for them since... I'm a no-name into this ocean of no-name who postulates for the label. So yeah, what to do now?

1. Give away my music for free but at the same time, struggling on publicity since the internet is fulfilled by music made in an hour by a 12 years old boy (been there, done that) or else, not getting that much of attention like Omni said.

2. Keep sending demos of my EP to labels... but which ones?

Your opinion on this one?

[lunatrick]

personally I'm happy to pay for downloads, it's cheaper than vinyl anyway, and I don't want some dodgy copy, but the proper file in high quality. I think giving 'some' music away free is fair enough but to give everything away free seems a bit like paying to publish your own book really, a bit of a vanity project. If people won't pay for it then is it worth releasing?

There's got to be some mileage in releasing back catalogues, I'd certainly pay to download the whole hydraulix library, amoungst others.

For new comers it's bewildering really.....the latest release pages on beatport for just techno run into the hundreds. hundreds of pages of shite. I think juno and beatport should be just as selective as if they were paying up front for the vinyl.

Does anybody know how the download sites are doing? 909london for example, surely they must be generating some money?