I believe, music should be free, and I believe there is a way to do it without harming the livelyhood of writers and preformers.I believe that as a rule – music should be free, because writers and performers sing and play to be heard. Music should not to be weighed and sold at the highest market value like some sort of valuable metal. On the other hand, to keep good music coming, and good artists fed – good artists must be able to live of their music.

Most of the music we hear today is free, free in the sense that the listener is not the one picking up the bill. I’m talking about radio, music television and publicly played music. If we weren’t surrounded with all this free music, nobody would be buying albums at all.

Many people believe P2P file sharing reduces album sales. Personally, I believe most P2P sharers simply wouldn’t listen to the music unless they could get it that way. Deprived of P2P sharing – they wouldn’t buy albums, but rather stick to radio and television. Certain studies seem to confirm this: “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates…”.

Following in the footsteps of radio and music television – I believe that the internet can provide yet another medium where the listener is not the one paying the bill for the music.

The model I’d suggest to create is one where the easiest way for the listener to get his music, would be off the artists site. I hope that soon enough – a popular artist will take the plunge and offer his music free of charge, in a high quality format, on his own website. If this succeeds, many might follow.

Google has already proved that unintrusive targeted advertising can be extremely profitable, targeted advertising on the artist website could be a great source of profit. ads with pay per-view or per-click on a high traffic site could be even more profitable than record sales – while cutting out middle-men and production costs.

MP3 ID3 Tags could be extended to include an easy link back to the artist website, media players could inform the listener of updates and new releases thus tempting him to frequent the site more often.

The possibilities of merchandising an artists website are limitless. Greenday are selling CD-R’s with the band logo for creating custom compilations, and I suspect they earn more on a pack of CD-R’s than on an album. MP3 players could be sold through 3rd party companies with a custom selection of tracks already loaded onto them. Apparel, posters, logo merchandise and the list goes on.

Making the artists website the most reliable and comfortable source for free high quality music – he would successfully circumvent P2P and gain profits from a target audience with no intention of purchasing CD’s in the first place.

In the future record stores might replace their stocks of factory made albums with a computer database and CD writers. A customer could chose an album, or make a custom compilation, and then have the CD art and covers printed out for him on the spot. this could cut back the production cost of a CD to zero and is already happening in various online music stores.

In conclusion, I dare say that even having all of an artists music freely available on his own website might have almost no effect on record sales and yet offer increased profits through other channels. The audio CD will live on, but as the world moves on to the age of digital music – the sales model for music will have to change.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2005 at 12:28 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.