Here’s a very relevant related article…

When you have enough for an album. Release high quality versions of the songs. Your die hard fans would appreciate a sonically pleasing song.

Free giveaways is a marketing technique but ultimately you have to sell something.

Like the free carpet cleaning – but in the end you would have to pay to have addition rooms cleaned. At least you would see that you will be getting an excellent job done.

But I use to buy downloads from the real player store before I knew about about file sharing – they have 30 second samples of music – usually that was enough for me to make a purchase.

Getting the whole song is like getting the milk so why buy the cow?

Then you are also trusting that most of the people downloading will say “hey I’ve downloaded enough of this bands music for free its time I buy the album.”

Analogy: If a new restaurant gave out all of their food away for free day after day – why would a customer come in and say let me pay for this?

Of course the name of the restaurant will be buzzing – Free food but one day they will have to make money even to continue to give away free food.

If an artist spends money and records in a studio,pays session musicians,mixes the song, and masters it – this can be
expensive on a per song basis.

On the other hand if the artist does all the work on their own then production cost is less and giving away all their music makes sense.

here’s a comment from digg for you…

It’s funny, When big names like Reznor, Joss Stone, or radiohead speak in favour of filesharing, the antiP2P crowd say: “They’re just saying that because they can afford to, think of the smaller artists!”

When smaller artists do it, they say “I’ve never heard of them, so who cares what they have to say.”

It was that reason I purchased a couple of albums through Amazon. When I take my son to Disney this summer I hope he’s playing a show in Orlando, as I would go and pay to watch him play.

Regardless of the scale of success. He’s gained a fan. +1 is better than 0 or -1.

who???

last fm plays, most popular track last week, 58

big time

We got off track in our discourse. My blog is about artists doing the work they do and having to give it away for free, and finding ways to expose the artists who are doing exemplary musical work in all styles and genre. My initial entry was 11 paragraphs. We have been going back and forth (I really did enjoy it) about the last paragraph.

I respect you opinion. Set the bar high. Uphold your standards.

Respectfully,

Dr. Jae

if you didn’t have to sift through the “crap,” how would you know what was good? i thought searching for good music was part of the fun. you want all the music you don’t personally like to disappear so you don’t have to do the work anymore?

You have to admit though that there IS a lot of crap our there that you wish you did not have to filter through to find something truly inspiring to you.

Peace & love,

Dr. Jae

What we’re arguing is that a) people like this aren’t doing their jobs well enough, and b) free digital music makes these people redundant. I don’t need these people to sort through music and decide what’s not worth my time anymore. Besides, the people you’re defending who’re “discovering” new artists and pre-packaging them for me are doing a lousy job and I don’t like what they’re discovering. They’re the ones trying to shove the Pussycat Dolls and the new U2 album down my throat, and I’m not interested. What digital music really means is that I can do the job of “discovering great music and great artists” that I’m interested in better than you can.