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DRM Free Music is Everywhere
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.
As a very very small music producer (basically, I give bands money to record or tour, and I hope to recoup some of that investment in the future), I work very hard to get the bands I finance to repudiate not just DRM but copyright in general. Small bands have no real reason for either -- recording music is just a marketing process to try to get people to come to your shows. Sure, without copyright, some big producer might steal your lyrics and music and have the newest pop boy band re-record it, but this too would just be a great marketing tactic -- the Internet would jump all over it.
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 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.
I certainly don't have time to listen to 100 bad tunes to find one good one.
I need filtering, or i'm just going to keep on listening to Zeppelin.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well duh, it's the easiest to pirate.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Sounds like something Yogi Berra would say. As in "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
sulli
RTFJ.
I've been using emusic for months now and though I'm not super big into the indie scene, they always surprise me with some interesting stuff. They also have a pretty aggressive writing team that gives no end to recommendations on what you should check out.
They have free 50 download trials all over the place. Worth checking out and all DRM free mp3s. It's a great service and one we should be supporting.
Twenty paying shows a month? You're absolutely extraordinary.
I'm serious: I worked with a woman who did your job for a while. 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.
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.
(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.)
Most of these are unsigned bands. Bands are unsigned, or signed to an obscure label for any of 3 reasons:
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.
In today's glossed over vapid music climate artists like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and many others would not be taken seriously by the majors. I can hear it now.. Not marketable. Too nasally. Screams too much. Won't sell enough product. Not worth our investment.
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.
The reason people ignore DRM-free music while simultaneously complaining about DRMed music from EMI isn't that they're ignorant or hypocrites- it's that they want the music EMI is selling. Maybe you're after some classic rock act that signed up to a label before not doing so was even an option. Maybe you actually like music that shows up on the pop charts. You can't just say "listen to this instead" and expect an identical experience. Music isn't a commodity that one can simple switch to a different supplier of on a whim; each band is unique and there's personal taste involved. There are dozens of Led Zeppelin cover bands and hundreds of bands with a similar sound, but there's only one Zep and only one place to legally get it from.
if i like a band - like DMB - i buy the CDs now.
Even itunes has become a PITA when i want to make an MP3 CD for my car. I've decided i'm no longer going to buy from iTunes until i can convert the songs into mp3 in 1 step.
Remember - everything that the lables are telling you is bullshit when it comes to DRM - because they sell ALL of their music RIGHT NOW DRM-Free.... At WalMart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon, etc.
All Steve Jobs asked for was to have the same ability the CD-selling stores have - the ability to sell music DRM-free. Absolutely nothing different.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
There are the arguments that say that data wants to be free. Go to Memphis, Nashville, LA, London, NYC, and find some great lyricists whose copyrights earned them a few bucks for some long and hard work.
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Exactly! The cost to manufacture a nice CD, sticker and a T-shirt for a band is around $8 in low quantity. The fan is usually willing to pay up to $25-$30 for the merch. Sell 20 sets a show and do 90 shows a year is about $30k in profit -- not including door entry share, beer share or up front money from promoters. It isn't great money, but it is decent enough to do what you love doing in one of the MOST competitive markets in the US. I know quite a few "professional" touring bands that share 6-figures a year between their 4/5 band members, but they're touring constantly -- and they love doing it.
the major labels won't even promote someone who's really ugly
That would really pose a problem for Mick Jagger then.
Congratulations! You've just taken a lossy audio format, and transcoded it into a totally different lossy audio format, with an unnecessary step in the middle provided by Apple. You have caused the quality to degrade significantly; most of the tones in the music will come through okay, but some will be completely trashed. Anything approximating a square wave (any kind of funk groove usually has some of this) will be utterly destroyed. Most of your highest highs will end up completely distorted as well.
This stupid argument about burning and re-ripping is, well, stupid. And yet someone brings it up every time this discussion happens.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah yes, the article about how available the DRM free music takes 10 minutes to load before Slashdot runs up a hundred comments. It nicely illustrates the point: it is not about availability. Every decent sized town in America has a dozen hometown favorites who play out often, go on regular, modest tours, and have a handful of solid, professional CD releases that can stand up to 90% of what's on the Billboard 100 at any given time. They never had the "luck" or were a little too attached to their quirks to make a major label deal, or they decided it wasn't really worth it. They are working musicians supporting their families and local economies and I'd rather give them my money any day of the week than some vacuous, entitled little shit who's ClearChannel's flavor od the month. And they are virtually unknown outside their local community. If you're fan of local shows I bet several names popped into head just from that description. If they're smart you can probably find their music online, either independent or CD Baby, and on eMusic. I bet there are tens of thousands of U.S. bands that fit this profile, probably hundreds of thousands if not millions worldwide. Add to that the "long tail" of hobby, avocation or quirk artists who nonetheless have a few solid tracks a lot of people might pay a nickel or a quarter for, and you've got a catalog no individual could ever tap out. In a way, fixating on trying to transform the distribution model for the tiny population of major label stable pros (getting smaller every year) is laughably the wrong approach.
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.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
This is an excellent point and it's been bothering me for years. I actually used to listen to dozens of bands to try and find a good one. I've found a lot of gems, but had to wade through a lot of stinkers to do so. (I would download the entire SXSW bittorrent compilation and start wading through. The keeper ratio was approximately 10 (bad) to 1 (good) overall.
What we need is a Digg (or /.-style moderation) for music. On a track-by-track basis. Digg has a music section, but that's for music news, and MySpace has shitloads of bands, but it's not good for aggregating the good tunes from the bad (and it's slow, ugly and full of useless crap). Last.fm is closest to this ideal, but they're still more about tracking listening habits and they haven't added too many ways for unknown bands to get heard. They do have a label/artist signup section and some free downloads, but it's not integrated into the site very well yet. Garageband.com is good for finding cool tunes as well, but writing reviews can be a real chore.
I'm hoping for improvement here, but in the meantime, I'd really like to see a simple, clean site in the style of digg that allows people to vote either yay or nay for songs (which could easily be listened to via a simple Flash interface). Songs could be categorized individually by genre (meaning a band is not restricted to one style) and popular songs make the home page. Popular does not equal good, so people would have the chance to drill down to genres they like, and block songs from bands that they know suck (and vice versa, like a karma bonus for bands that rule).
Anybody want to make this? You'll make millions of dollars. I can't code for shit or I'd do it. It's not even a unique or novel idea. I'm kinda surprised that it hasn't been done yet. Is there a problem I'm not aware of here?
Fuck the majors, this should be a resource for up and coming bands and listeners who want to find good bands without having to listen to all the crappy ones. Oh, and the songs should be downloadable, too. MP3, FLAC or Ogg format. I know that my band would submit our music to such a site in a heartbeat.
Electric Monkey Pants