Of course, what a stupid question.

The real quesion is why should they be the only ones not to?

Twenty years of hard graft learning to write and produce records…

I should have honed my skills in the noble art of selling T-shirts instead.

“…we shouldn’t have to turn to creating, marketing and selling merchandise to make a living while all the music is free.”

I should have honed my skills in the noble art of selling T-shirts instead.

In fact I remember people asking for a t-shirt so they could give ‘exposure’ when in fact all they wanted was a free shirt, though that’s more a funny anecdote than a big industry-wide problem. But then again we’re not t-shirt manufacturers, we’re musicians – we shouldn’t have to turn to creating, marketing and selling merchandise to make a living while all the music is free.

I agree with giving music away. I don’t think I’d give away all the tracks on the album, because then there’s no incentive to buy a copy at all; you rely on charity cases. But the point is you cannot make a living trading everything for exposure. Something needs to be traded for money.

The best exposure is created through a well-thought out marketing campaign that you push yourself. Radio play and other things may help too, but you need to get decent exposure to get on there in the first place anyway. So, get exposure through planning and guerrilla marketing, but trade _real products_ for money just like you trade a few dollars for a roll of toilet paper at the grocery store.

What else do you expect to build a career on? How else do you expect to reach new fans?

There are two issues here:

1. If everything is about exposure, when do artists get paid? Apparently, we shouldn’t get paid for our recorded music, because that only exists to promote gigs. Also ‘apparently’, our gigs are there to promote albums. Somewhere in the middle is the fact that most beginning artists have to spend money to both gig and record (though recording runs into tens or hundreds of thousands, so gigging is obviously cheaper) rather than make money doing those things. The money to feed our family comes from where, then?

2. Of course radio should pay artists. Not for the reason that most artists, either famous or completely unknown, are poor. This is based on pure logic: radio requires content. That content is music. They pay musicians to deliver the content, otherwise nobody would listen to the radio. If nobody listens to radio, nobody buys ads on radio. The business model is based on advertising and the music is content that, like newspapers paying journalists for their work, is a business expense. Radio is not some kind of service where musicians pay to promote their work. In this fantasy world, radio stations don’t have any expenses; they get paid by advertisers and musicians hand over their music for this “exposure” myth.

We supply the content so the ads get heard. We’re a service to radio.

This is exactly what I’ve been ranting about in the comments for the past couple of months. To answer your questions, Andrew: yes, musicians should make money from recordings, for two reasons.

One is that recording anything is (still) an expensive exercise. Furthermore, the amount of work that goes into preparing for recording (including learning to play – or sing, composing the material, preproduciton etc.) is inestimable. Based on a broad idea of fairness, if someone is then to profit from another’s work (by using it as bait to draw a clientele, as in this case), he should compensate them.

The other reason is that, fairness aside, if recording ceases to be an economically viable activity, people will either stop doing it, or put much less effort into it.

Personally, I hate it when anyone says: “Do this for free, because it will give you exposure.” while they’re raking in the dough. It usually means “You are an easily cowed moron, who will allow me to exploit your work for my gain, without any thought to how you are actually going to profit from this ‘exposure’.” Previously it used to be the typical line of the club owner and you could only hope that at least you would sell some demos at the gig.

What surprises me is that many independent musicians are fooled into thinking that they can somehow profit from this. When the new ecosystem – as you put it, Andrew – stabilizes, the big players are going to have more influence than ever, simply because they’ll be the only ones with the clout to negotiate decent terms with the technology companies and enough marketing dollars to break through the Internet noise.