DRM Free Music is Everywhere 369
guisar writes "I continue to endure stories on Slashdot and elsewhere complaining about EMI, itunes and other organizations maybe (or maybe not) releasing material in DRM free format. Well- here's some news there's LOTS of material out there. So instead of complaining, download what you like. There are plenty of artists releasing their material in FLAC and other DRM free format. Just look around. Most artists are doing their part by releasing their music in the hopes they can gain enough exposure to earn a living at what they love. If you're complaining about major labels not releasing material, it's probably too late and you are part of the problem." I think this point is often unfairly ignored: the existence of DRM is a fantastic chance for new distribution to reveal new bands. Unfortunately this music is difficult to find because there is simply so much of it.
DRM hurts, copyright hurts - recording = marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Small bands need to give their recorded music away freely online in order to get more people to come to their shows. My brother's band Maps & Atlases [maps-atlases.com] just went on a 7 day tour to the East Coast and ended up in a tiny university town called East Stroudsburg, PA. Instead of showing up to no crowd, the venue was packed -- a rarity for the town and venue. Why did this happen? Maps & Atlases released their EP for free online. They sold out of their first EP (2000 copies) during their 2006 tour, and they're coming up fast on selling out their second pressing, even though the music is easily downloaded online. Why do fans pay for albums? They get face time with the band, they get autographs, and they know that buying the merch direct will keep the band writing and touring.
DRM is terrible for any band but the absolute largest, and even for them it is bad because the new fan base wants to have nothing to do with it. I look at it this way: DRM for the adult contemporary crowd just makes life harder for them, DRM for the teen crowd is easily bypassed. But it isn't just DRM that makes things difficult, it is also the fact that copyright really throws fan distribution a curve -- even the fans who openly distribute the music know it is "piracy" but they feel they're helping the band.
I look at the Internet as one big radio station waiting to be harnessed by smaller musicians all over the world. Write music with one purpose: to attract fans to your live shows where you can make your income by continuing to work, rather than hoping to write one hit once and earn royalties for the rest of your life. Who here works a regular job and wishes that they could work a few months in exchange for years of income? Life doesn't work that way -- unless you work with the distribution cartels that are quickly watching their futures slip through their fingers. If you're in a band, tell your fans to copy your music for their friends in hopes that those friends will become the new fans. Viral marketing is key to making a solid income in live music.
Sidenote: If you're in a band and you disagree with me on making a living, it is because you're trying to keep a "steady job" while also trying to tour. You can't do both. My brother's bandmates all quit their jobs (some of them have master's degrees!) to handle a tour schedule that includes typically 20 shows a month. Stop whining and dig in.
Poor marketing hurts, too (Score:4, Insightful)
I went to the site linked, and found that the only way to select music was by the artist's name. Considering that I didn't recognize a single artist, this left me totally in the dark as to what the musical genre was, and the only way that you could get a sense of the musical genre was to select each artist, one by one, where sometimes a note would tell you - but often not.
I would be more than willing to support a site like this if they make it reasonably easy. Even Wham-a-lart takes the time to sort music by genre so shoppers don't have to weed through all the styles they don't like to find something to listen to.
When they get the genre thing figured out, track preview and sale by track are the next items required to get them up to the bare-bones standards of online music sales.
The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They're rubbish.
2. They don't want to sell out.
3. They're too damn original for the major labels to take a risk.
Types 2 and 3 are probably very worthwhile. They're greatly outnumbered by type 1.
What's needed here (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't book shows -- they have someone who handles that in exchange for a cut of merch sales. She handles dozens of bands, and she gets them shows constantly. I can't think of one band I work with that can't get 10+ shows a month by hiring a booking agent, even small bands.
She spent the days making phone calls to venues who generally never called back. The band I worked for was extraordinarily talented (download some of their music for free here). They quit their day jobs for over two years. They toured up and down the East coast and as far as Detroit. They had a devoted but small audience.
She didn't follow through well with her contacts. Venues want to see warm bodies buying beer, if you send bands to them that don't attract even a small crowd, they won't call you back ever. The best way to get a band out there is to get them involved with show promoters (we have www.mpshows.com in Chicago) and get them opening for small bands. A lot of bands don't want to invest the 1-2 years it takes opening up for bands that they think are worse than them. I know, I watch bands all the time give up because they won't move forward with the risk. Many people invest 4-8 years in college to further their career; a band needs to invest 1-2 years of even more work, and they don't have to pay as much as college costs.
If they could have booked 20 paying gigs a month, they'd still be in existence. Most venues want cover bands, not original music. The venues have the power and so they get to treat me rudely. I bow before your superior nagging-people-on-the-phone skills.
I have never heard of a venue that wants cover bands over original music. The indie pop scene is huge right now, I just went to an indie show last night in Chicago for 4 bands that I've never heard of, and they were all excellent and the crowd was thick. Cover was $7, but all 4 bands sold a ton of merch to people who liked their sound -- and I think I heard one cover song the entire night. I go to 2-3 shows per week in the Spring and Summer, and I have yet to visit one venue in Chicagoland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and the Bronx that had cover bands. Most of the bands I talk to fail because they refuse to invest the time it takes to get notoriety.
(It's because of that that the "Hey, give the music away and make it up at the live shows" argument on Slashdot makes me furious. But if you've got the secret for booking venues, please let me know and I'll retract everything I've said about it.)
Plan on investing as much time honing your writing and performing skills -- make it like a future career. You go to college for 4 years and spend up to $100,000 learning a trade or a skill, why should a lifetime of performing be any different?
One thing, though: there are a LOT of bands that just don't have it -- just like there are programmers or CAD operators or lawyers who don't have it. It is easier to pick up a guitar and a mic and find 3 friends and call yourself a band than it is to become a lawyer, so of course there is a higher drop out rate. Yet I still see venues dark 3+ nights a week for a lack of bands committed to playing and bringing in warm bodies.
Take my hard earned money, please (Score:3, Insightful)
The Police tour is coming to town, and I am going to be handing over fist-fulls of cash in order to see them play live. But you're not going to see me buying their mp3's, as I already own all of their works. I'll just rip 'em, thank you please.
I really do not buy CD's anymore, partly due to the fact that I no longer wish to directly support the RIAA hedgemony, and partly due to the fact that I live in Canada and pay a levy on blank recording media (Handing money over twice just doesn't do it for me, thanks).
CDs, and music in general, should be viewed as a loss-leader to get people in to see them perform. I honestly feel that the days of rock musicians living like kings are pretty much over, with the exception of top-tier talent. It is not to say that they will not be able to earn a living, it just will be more akin to the professional musicians that you see in the classical and jazz sphere, which if you are any good, is a decent wage. If you're not any good, that's the economy saying, "It's time to get a real job."
Simply stated, I have to work to live, why should someone write songs and do nothing more than live off of royalties? Musicians work should be their ability to perform, not their ability cash royalty cheques. The performance driven model also would have the added effect of cutting out the no-talent publicity-machine generated "stars" who cannot play an instrument, rely upon production tricks to sound good singing, etc.
I pay to see you play. Do a good job, and you too can charge $200+/ticket and I will hand over my money willingly and without complaint.
It's not that hard, people.
it's sociological (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem isn't that the unsigned unknown music is bad, or that there's too much of it to find the good stuff. It's a sociological thing: I want to hear what my friends are hearing so we can say "do you have the latest XYZ album" or whatever. There's probably a scientific word for it but I'm not a sociologist!
It doesn't really matter how good the major labels' tunes are, whatever gets played on the radio will become a hit. This has been shown many many times, with a few rare exceptions of underground hits that work themselves up to the point where the radio can't not play them any more. And it's not because people just buy what they hear, it's because they buy what everyone else is buying.
You even get the same result in elections: floating voters will often (subconsciously) vote for the party they think is going to win (ie the more popular one), even if they have no idea about policies.
Submission answers own question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM hurts, copyright hurts - recording = market (Score:2, Insightful)
At the risk of flamebait.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no problem with the argument that the system is broken, and that Indie bands have little to no chance of success based on the model used by the media megaliths. Yet you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater by arguing that copyrights shouldn't exist. As a writer, I expect to get paid for my work, just like the baker down the street, the cop at the corner, and so on. If all I wrote didn't return any money, I wouldn't write for a living-- there would be no living.
As a musician, I went out on the road, snoring in the band bus, tried to stay sober, and be musically creative and deliver what I was paid for-- good music, sometimes really great music. I knew that the record companies were highly unlikely to buy into us because we were out on the edge. We cut numerous tapes, CDs, and so on. A few adventurous and kind people bought them. But we also knew they weren't for subsistence-- our time on stage was what we were being paid for.
Now that there are distribution channels, we found two bands that took two of our songs and essentially dry-ripped them. We have recourse if we want to sue. They haven't made any money with the songs, either (I'm not surprised, nor is my ego bashed). If they had, we'd be likely to want to stop them for the theft they made of our hard work.
There's the gigs, where we made money. There's the media, where we made money, all outside of the 'system'. If we'd done things differently, we might be working for the devil (I mean Sony/BMG/etc) and expecting much different ends to our work. But realistically, we know that's not possible.
Your single solution set doesn't fit all cases. Copyright has justification. DRM is probably a bad idea, because we might be interested in spreading our music far and wide. It's not necessarily a given that bands need or want to do this. Sure, we'd all like some fame, but we're not narcissistic. We'd rather just live, eat, and create. You place too much emphasis on distribution in the same sense that consumerism is a double-edged sword.
Re:Next step : better than CD quality (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure it's a travesty (I love Bad Religion but I think Green Day does a better job interacting with fans, and they've always been that way), but I agree 100%.
If you want to make money as a band, stop pretending you're "just an artist trying to be heard." Anything you do for income must be entered in with a business perspective. If you want to be broke performing, that is easy to do. If you want to pay the bills and live off of performing, you have to understand that you are now in the market of entertaining others, and this requires investing the time it takes for people to know that you will always be there for THEIR needs (entertainment), so they will support YOUR needs (financial).
DRM is for bands that suck (Score:3, Insightful)
We're going to be releasing a record by the end of the year (old school), and will be posting most if not all online (new school). I still have reservations, because I grew up the old way, but I'm fighting through them.
One of the issues in all of this is getting the word out. DRM free music lets people email you a tune, "Check this out!" When my pal tried to email a track he bought from the iTunes store to me, I couldn't open it (our first real case of DRM).
He threw it into Protools and got an unprotected version - but notably, he won't do that anymore. It's a pain. So, any other bands he might have turned me or others on to go unheard. But, they 'protected their content', right?
I agree with some
Great music that is DRM free IS everywhere, it's just that it is still harder to find than the tunes Clear Channel wants you to hear - and that is probably the biggest difference between the little indie-pop band [theschmoejoes.com] and 'Insert Major Label Band here' - marketing. Familiarity is the thing that every band needs, and DRM Doesn't Really Matter when you've got millions of dollars pushing your flavor of the week.
So yeah. Click on my link, listen to the couple songs up there, come to a show. This link-filled post is all the marketing budget I have today.
Sweet Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is filtering. I keep looking at that eMusic trial offer and thinking, man, how much time am I going to have to spend getting my money's worth out of that? If they had a built-in, fast working Pandora plug in so I could simply and accurately calibrate my mainstream preferences to their catalog? I would be on that today.
The problem is payment strategies. A dollar for a song is BS and micropayments have been pretty BS up to now too. Subscriptions make a lot of people skeevy. This should not be as complicated as it is.
The problem is dispersion. There are fifty million little this and that sites. That does not work. Independent artists who want to sell piecemeal tracks and not require people have a subscription to eMusic - desperately need a solution. The technology for delivering bits is not complicated. The technology for accepting money is not complicated. Social networking and community-driven filtering and moderation aren't the future, they are the RIGHT NOW. This is a get-in-on-the-ground-floor Google type opportunity, man.
God, that pie in the sky looks so del.icio.us. Ahem, gotta wipe these starts out of my eyes. Okay, well, if anybody takes up the cause, you know, I'm available for visionary consultation and next gen viral marketeering (not to self: no electronics on bridges)! Call me! (Man, why did I study chemistry instead of computers?)
Oh, and regarding that Nettwerk Store link (once it finally loaded)... You want me to use Real to preview, this is how you make your point? Come the fuck on. My Grandma has a simple, browser-agnostic preview player built into her website. Well, okay, that's not true but still. Bye bye, Hello Love.
Re:Poor marketing hurts, too (Score:3, Insightful)
Small indie labels really need some kind of recommendation system. Genres aren't enough. What really needs to happen is indie labels should band together and set up something like Pandora, but designed for their own marketing. Like, maybe you start by entering in some bands that you like, and it starts recommending some songs. As you hear songs, you give them a "yes" or "no", and it tries to refine the selection based on that. If you find something you really like, the site gives you a link to download/buy.
Honestly, I have a hard time finding anything that I like because there's such a high noise:signal ratio. A tool to direct people to other music they might like would go a long way.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
go back and re-read the parent (Score:3, Insightful)
You never answered the question except to say that the record companies DID do some filtering for him and they missed a bunch of stuff. Great. I am not surprised at all. But it still doesn't solve his predicament.
Who's going to do the filtering/moderating of internet/indie music? Where is a solid "Top 40" or other chart (like Billboard)? Please, tell me. I really do want to know because unless it changes, I whole-heartedly agree with the parent: I just don't have time to wade through shit to get to the 2 good songs I like. I need filtering.