A subway musicians gives some tips to the music industry
A subway musician gives some tips to the music industry. [Via the Accordion Guy]
I'm not exactly the type of person that feeds the music industry leechs's. Not because i download files, but because the music i usually listen has already been played one or two one decades ago, so it has been already all bought. :-) Mostly 70's and 80's.
But i think both the artists and the fans would love to eliminate the middlemen, and give most money spent on music to the artist's themselves. I've seen it work (a lot of years ago, before the Web was hip) and i bet this could scale.
When the greatest band ever (when i was in college i pulled 3 all nighters in a row in order to finish an operating systems project, so i could watch a Carter USM concert in a city 200Km where i lived) broke up, Fruitbat (AKA Les Carter) decided to edit and promote his band Abdoujaparov. In the begginning he went for the honor system, he put on his web site an MP3 version of the album (i think it was .WAV, my then computer didn't had enough power to play MP3's :-)), if you wanted a CD version you would send (in advance) cash for it. When a certain threshold of money was reached he pressed a bunch of CD's (if my memory doesn't fail the threshold was 3500 british pounds) and sent them by mail (i don't have the memory of CD Burners back then). The CD's had the same quality (the box and cover) of the ones published by the members of the recording industry, just a lot cheaper.
I got my CD (copy number 523) a few weeks (probably a month or two) after i sent the money. It had the following note inside the CD, hand signed by the author (verbatim):
"I hope you enjoy this CD, it is the first of many from Abdouaparov, with any luck. It has been brought to you completely without the help of the Music Industry, so a big thanks to them ;-) The shareware idea worked out really well and i will continue to do things in this way! Look out for the next release in March
Love fruit bat"
While searching for links for this story i found this quote on Abdoujaparov web site.
"As always, funds for the pressing were raised by offering the songs for download as MP3 files and asking for a shareware (or try before you buy) fee of £4. This system has worked amazingly well in the past and I will continue to release stuff in this way as long as you support it."
It seems his system worked for all this years,and is still in use. Four quid seems an amazingly low sum (compared to the industry prices), and yet it must be enough to live a good life. We are talking about a band that was born in 1998, it has self sustained for 6 years using shareware. Nice, good for them. Will have to check what they have been up too for all this years.
I wish more bands did this. The fans would pay cheaper prices and would know for sure the artists got the money they well deserve.