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New Music Strategies

New online strategies for music business.

Why give music away for free?December 31 2008

I had an email from a musician today who said he was struggling a little with the idea of giving away mp3s. It’s a really common issue, and so I thought I’d share my response.

1) You’re not giving away music, you’re giving away RECORDINGS of your music;
2) Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music;
3) Economics works differently for bits than it does for atoms.

Example: I wrote a book called The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (http://newmusicstrategies.com/ebook). You can download it for free. For someone who writes words rather than plays music, that’s like an album.

I’ve never made money out of that book, because I’ve never charged for it. But I’ve certainly made money because of it. That’s a recording of my writing and thinking - not my writing and thinking itself.

It doesn’t cost me anything extra in time, energy, talent or investment whether one person downloads it or ten million people download it. I don’t have to manufacture any more copies. And the more I give it away for free, the more I get to charge for REAL stuff - like my time, my physical presence (speaking engagements, etc), other stuff that I write for print publications (magazines, books, newspapers - even other websites), and so on.

Okay - so it’s not the best analogy in the world - but it helps s

Is Cloud Computing the Future of Music?December 15 2008

I received an email over the weekend asking my thoughts on this blog post, in which the author predicts that along with your operating system and your software, your music collection will soon be housed entirely online - somewhere in ‘the cloud‘.

The idea is essentially that with increased download speeds, bandwidth capacity and online storage, there will be no need to ‘own’ music. Everything you want will just be available to listen to, presumably for a monthly fee.

According to the post:

You’ll no longer store your music files on a hard drive or flash drive but rather in a cloud of servers scattered around the world. Your net-devices will access your library collection wirelessly, streaming from remote servers. Exchange your Notebook for a Netbook because you’ll no longer think about downloading music files to your computer… you won’t need a massive storage system anymore.

I’m sorry - but why are we still having this nonsensical conversation?

Cloud computing is not the problem
I have no issue with cloud computing. I think it’s a really powerful development. In fact, it’s a fascinating and exciting emerging area of online technologies and architecture.

The

What do you mean by web-presence?December 13 2008

I should have written this post ages ago. I kind of take it for granted, but forget that not everyone is fully conversant with things that I just make assumptions about. I often talk about a musician’s or music business’s web presence when public speaking or consulting. By that, I don’t mean your website, although in my opinion, that should be central to the ‘presence’.

I mean the range of services, platforms and conversation going on around the internet about you and what you do. What’s online, and how it connects together. Your web.

It’s an ecology, not a destination
If you have a MySpace page, a Bandcamp page, a Facebook page or any profile on any of the kind of sites we talk about on New Music Ideas, these make up part of your web presence. So too does the conversation that takes place (with or without your involvement) on forums and discussion groups.

This is an interconnected network of related and symbiotic activities.

And while quality is obviously important (especially at those sites where you control both the content and style), sheer weight and size is also of value. Without going too heavily into search-engine optimisation, just having a depth and quality of ongoing convers

Protest thisDecember 8 2008

I received an email from my friend Mark, who runs Iron Man Records. He forwarded me a petition that’s doing the rounds, and while I’m usually reluctant to play the ‘Forward this on’ game - this is pretty important:

The 696 Form compels licensees who wish to hold live music events in 21 London Boroughs to report to the police the names, addresses, aliases and telephone numbers of performers, and most worryingly, the likely ethnicity of their audience. Failure to comply could result in fines or imprisonment.

We believe this places unnecessary and frankly Orwellian powers in the hands of the Metropolitan Police, an institution which does not have the best record of racial fairness. The 696 form can only serve to deter the staging of live musical events - a positive form of activity in London and all cities - stifle free expression and quite possible penalise certain genres of music and ethnic audiences. It is an intrusion too far. Pass this on.

The petition is here
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Scrapthe696/

More information

Might as well send it to me too…December 6 2008

After receiving a bit of encouragement (let’s not call it nagging) from a bunch of musicians who love the SoundCloud service, I’ve added a Dropbox to my sidebar. There it is, just under the Search bar. That way, if you want to send me one of your songs, you can just click it, upload - and I’ll get it in my Soundcloud Inbox.

I quite like the service - even though you can only upload 5 tracks a month without paying. It’s useful for promo-ing, for sharing tracks with people you’re working with and also for putting songs on your own site (though Bandcamp does that one better).

Here’s an example.

It does raise the question - why would you send me your songs? I don’t review music on this site. I don’t manage or book bands. I don’t even offer feedback. Probably won’t even tell you whether I like it or not (because sometimes I just don’t).

I’m more than happy to listen to your music, and happy to have this service at hand that makes it easy for you to send it to me - but I’d be curious to find out why you might feel it’s worth your time and energy to do so.

I promise to do nothing more than listen to it - and even that may not happen immediately…

Some people have cautioned me that Iâ