The book "Free" by Chris Anderson

[richardmac]

I'm done listening to the book "Free" by Chris Anderson (from WIRED magazine - the guy who wrote "The Long Tail.") I was interested in hearing what he had to say about illegal downloading, musicians giving away music for free, lagging CD sales, and so on. In case you're wondering, you can download the audio version of the book for free. You can also read it online for free.

 

Anyway. Chris doesn't delve too much deeper than the surface level stuff that we all know. He talks about how Prince gave away a few million CD's in the UK and ended up making millions of dollars performing shows. He talks about what Radiohead did with their "name your own price" idea. He talks about how artists are doing 360 deals but the record companies aren't very good at it yet. All the stuff we already know.

 

He also talks about how some of these same things are happening in the publishing world, and the proponents and critics seem to have very similar arguments to their music counterparts.

 

But one thing he said sort of stuck with me. It's not a new original idea, but still... he said that live shows were experiences, and that real live experiences were extremely valuable in this digital cyber world. Actually he said it better than that, but that's what I remember.

 

I've always felt that I should get paid, as an artist. The thing is, I make much more money playing gigs than selling CD's. So should I put my effort into trying to sell more CD's, or trying to get more gigs? If I want to try to get more gigs, wouldn't giving my music away for free online help to do that? I mean, the pitch makes sense... come to my web site, and download my music for free. No strings attached. And hey, I am also available for house concerts, at a reasonable rate. And if you'd like a hard copy of my CD, I can sell you one.

 

And why would someone buy a CD when they've already downloaded the music for free? Maybe because they want a souvenir from the live show. And maybe you put 2 "bonus tracks" on it, that are only available on the CD.

 

After listening to "Free," I'm really wondering if I might be better off putting my energies into getting more gigs that pay better, and using my music to help make that happen.

[Jon Chappell]

I haven't read Anderson's book yet, but I've heard him interviewed on NPR, read a couple of reviews, and have even seen a rebuttal to his argument by Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote the influential "The Tipping Point" and "Blink") in a "New Yorker" magazine article.

 

I tend to come down on the side of Gladwell rather than Anderson here, because I've heard this whole "information wants to be free" argument before. The science writer James Gleick ("Chaos") said "information doesn't 'want' anything, in the same way that gasoline doesn't 'want' anything. It's people who want it so."

 

But I agree with the experience thesis. There is no substitute for human contact, and more progress and advancements get made in face-to-face encounters than in any other type of exchange. Ask any salesman who's any good. So the part about using CDs and downloadable music to service live shows makes sense to me.

[richardmac]

Hmm. Just got done looking at bandcamp.com. Disregard my previous thoughts of giving music away for free. bandcamp lets you give some songs away for free, for different bit rates, and let fans choose how much they pay for individual tracks, or not. So you could, essentially, give your music away AND charge for it, on the same site. I have to think about this some more.

[richardmac]

I just set up a bandcamp account. The link is in my sig. You can download my songs for free, OR pay for higher quality format versions. I am experimenting with this approach, and I'll let folks know how it goes, good or bad. The thing I like is, much like ReverbNation's plugin, you can allow free downloads but fans must enter a valid e-mail address and zip code.

[MartinC]

The problem with basing your income on gigs is that you can only do one at a time. The benefit of recordings is that unlimited amounts of sales can be made forever. In the first situation you are an hourly worker, limited by the hours you can work and the fee per hour you can charge. If you are able to sell recordings, you become a manufacturer of a product that can be reproduced and distributed at a low cost, potentially bringing you unlimited income long after your done doing gigs. That is why it's important to pursue getting paid for recordings, if that is possible. If it's not, the 100-200-500 whatever you make from a gig will not sustain even a middle class living in our society over the long term.

[richardmac]

 

The problem with basing your income on gigs is that you can only do one at a time. The benefit of recordings is that unlimited amounts of sales can be made forever. In the first situation you are an hourly worker, limited by the hours you can work and the fee per hour you can charge. If you are able to sell recordings, you become a manufacturer of a product that can be reproduced and distributed at a low cost, potentially bringing you unlimited income long after your done doing gigs. That is why it's important to pursue getting paid for recordings, if that is possible. If it's not, the 100-200-500 whatever you make from a gig will not sustain even a middle class living in our society over the long term.

 

 

Agree. So the big question then becomes, is it possible? I'd hate to see a survey of people who are asked if they download music files without paying. Almost everyone I know does it. The percentage is HUGE. I do not believe that it is possible to sell enormous amounts of music online because of this. I think the answer is "no," based on everything I see and hear about.

 

And I also think the number of musicians who perform and record for a living is dwindling and will continue to go down, and the number of musicians who treat music as a "hobby" will continue to go up.

 

Once again - it is still possible to make a living in the music business, so long as you're willing to work retail, or repair instruments, or give lessons in addition to selling music and performing gigs. The way I figure it, if I'm going to have to have a day job, I might as well do something that makes me 50k a year as opposed to giving music lessons and making much less. I think a lot of people come to this same conclusion.

[MartinC]

Absolutely-I'm one of those people. I don't even think much about money coming from music anymore. I don't worry about getting a gig. It used to chew at me when I wasn't gigging steady until I would go out and get one. My day gig has taken off and the money involved in it would never be approached playing music unless I became a name act. But at the same time I hate the idea of doing it as a hobby. I started playing when I was 17 with the idea of being a pro. I did make my living for several years, and spent several more trying to improve that living while doing a part time business. For several years both businesses got better each year, but in the last 6-7 years, what was a side business became very lucrative while the music thing has declined. Maybe at 51 years old, it's realistic to hang up the gigging, but it pisses me to no end that putting 20 years into a business that I really didn't care much about has earned me a very solid income with plenty of upside, while 30 plus years of love and dedication have led to free music for all and by all. Still, I'm very lucky in comparison to some buddies of mine who put all the eggs in the music gig.

[tim_7string]

 

The way I figure it, if I'm going to have to have a day job, I might as well do something that makes me 50k a year as opposed to giving music lessons and making much less. I think a lot of people come to this same conclusion.

 

 

Pretty much. I'm doing a job that involves dangerous electricity and mild physical labor as opposed to working at a music store. Why? Because I get full benefits from the job, I can rely on the steady 40 hours every week (not a guarantee from the store) and I make $2-3 more per hour than I would starting out at the music store. I would prefer to work at the music store if money was not a factor, but of course, it is very important.

 

I'm still making money from music via gigs and teaching guitar/bass guitar at the store. Just not enough for a comfortable living, especially in the summer. I have only a small handful of students, about a fourth of what I have during the school year. I would have to work a lot harder, with more hours (probably 12-14 a day, six days a week), for less money, just to maintain the life I have now...and the life I have at the moment isn't all that great.

 

I downloaded the book. I'll give my thoughts on it later if I can remember to do so.

[richardmac]

I think you can boil it down to 4 categories of people with their jobs:

 

1. Job IS Hobby. They love their job so much they'd do it for free. And they get paid a good amount of money to do it. Their job is the same as their hobby and there's no clear line in the day for them between work and fun hobby.

 

2. Great Job, Separate Hobby. These people enjoy their day job, make good money, and keep music as a hobby. Their day job could almost be considered a second hobby.

 

3. Good Job, Separate Hobby. These people do not enjoy their day job, but it pays well, and they don't hate it. Music is their hobby.

 

4. Bad Job, Separate Hobby. These people hate their job but they're stuck in it because they can't or won't find something better. Music is their escape.

 

 

There's one more category, but I don't know where to rank it. People who do music for a living, but don't make much money. They're doing what they love, but there's no long term future in it. I don't know where I'd rank that. These people eventually probably end up at one of the four above.

 

I'm at #2. Not as good as #1, but not bad.

[Styrofoam]

I listened to the book as well. I then wrote an email to some musician friends of mine. Here's an edited version of my email to them...

 

-------------

I'd like to bring to your attention a professional ***** named Chris Anderson. He's the editor-in-chief of http://www.wired.com/. He also recently came out with a book literally titled, FREE, within the past few months. The book is actually available for free on iTunes, as an audiobook. His thesis basically advocates that companies operate under "free" business models. What does that mean? It means if you give away stuff, people will gladly accept it. I'm summarizing and generalizing of course. And of course I'm biased. So I downloaded his book for free from iTunes. Hey, he offered it.

 

Oh God is it so not worth your time. Just add this guy to the list of "media futurists" who claim that free or freemium business models are the future of business practices, yet offer no guideline or insight as to how to actually make any money doing it.

 

So let's get this straight, why would the editor-in-chief of a magazine (both online and print), be advocating for free business models? Why would he offer his book for free? Why is he advocating for business practices that are shutting down magazines and newspapers left and right? To prove his point, which is that people can make money by giving their stuff away.

 

But he doesn't really come clean with how, exactly, he makes his money. Click this link. http://premierespeakers.com/chris_anderson

 

This ***** makes a TON of money on the professional speaker circuit. Why is he so in demand? Because he's advocating for what some would consider to be a radical new way of thinking about future business practices. He just sits there and makes all these claims about how business, and believe it or not music artists, should give away their stuff for free. That makes people go, "WHAAAAAAT BROTHA?", and "Well, please tell us HOW!", and he says, "OK, well first give me forty thousand dollars and I'll tell you."

 

What a **** ******. This is just further evidence, to me at least, why we people like this can't be trusted. They have their own agenda, which is to make money at the expense of others. People make fun of Glen Beck all day long, but whether he knows it or not calling Obama a racist was the best thing he could have done for his career (not society). Just look at how much attention he's received since then.

 

My point is that you can put yourself in a position of high demand if you start making outrageous claims against the status quo. Anderson is a hot ticket. Beck is a hot ticket.

 

I've seen people here and there criticize godin and anderson about their "free" rhetoric, but not as focused as it needs to be specifically when it comes to artists and songwriters.

 

I'm launching my opposition against Anderson, and possibly even my beloved Godin. Anderson and Godin are just commentators on the sidelines.

[richardmac]

I think there are points in the book I agree with and points I don't agree with. I can't see why you'd just write the entire book AND it's author off, except that you're emotionally invested in the topic and therefore are reacting with more emotion than logic - for example, making it personal and calling the author names, even if the names are ******* or whatever. He's not a ******* just because you don't agree with him. I don't believe he thinks he's fleecing everyone. I think he believes what he says.

 

There are plenty of things in the book that make sense - the whole open source software model, for example. You can get and use both PHP and MySQL for free. But there are plenty of experts making a living by selling their programming skills using these free technologies. Free works great in that sense.

 

Personally, I found it well worth my time to listen to it. I think the whole topic is really interesting. I played around (as you can see earlier in this thread) with the idea of free downloads, but it didn't make sense to me in the end. I can still sell CD's at gigs - people still buy them. So... I don't want to give away something that people, under different circumstances, are willing to pay for. Doesn't make sense. Anderson might tell me that by giving away my music for free, I can potentially gain a huge number of fans who would then be willing to pay for a ticket to come and see me.

 

THIS is where I agree with you... Anderson is sitting on the sidelines as an observer. I could give away all of my music for free and the reality is that no one would notice OR give a crap. iTunes gives away a free song every week. After downloading a few and having them suck, I stopped bothering. Free is not all that appealing. How do you convince someone that your music is good enough to earn a spot on their iPod, next to the 10,000 other tracks they already have access to? Free doesn't answer that question.

 

But the concepts of Free are, I think, important to understand, whether you agree or disagree. I now stream my music online - anyone can listen to any one of my songs for free. They have to be in front of a computer, they have to launch their web browser, navigate to the site, etc. If they're tech savvy and they want to just rip the stream, I guess they could, but my music is for the adult contemporary crowd - not really the teen ripping crowd. Anyway, that's how I'm using "free" currently. Anyone can get familiar with my work for free. But if they want to OWN it, they can either steal it, or they can buy it and support me. So I guess you could say I ended up buying into half of what he said, not all of it.

[flatfinger]

When it's all said and done being a "futurist" is basically fortune telling , magic eightball stuff. He does'nt know exactlly what the landscape will be like when the dust all settles anymore than I do .

[scradulpo]

Hello everyone, this is my first post.

 

I want to know your opinions about the meaning of a good views/favorited ratio (how many views does it take to be favorited once) on Youtube. All this in the context of home recordings made by "amateur" musicians, so the people who makes comments and favorite the videos are not influenced by fanatism, looks, fame or whatever.

 

Do you think that a good ratio implies good chances of success in digital selling?,

any experiencies about this?

 

What would you consider a good ratio?

[richardmac]

scradulpo,

 

To get your question answered, you probably want to start a new thread. Tacking it onto the end of a thread that it has nothing to do with, people won't see it.