Making Your Own Incentive by George Ziemann -- June 29, 2008 Last week, I put the music section of the site on "pause" while I tried to figure out something, anything, to solve the problem of how to squeeze a few bucks out of the audience without being all RIAA about it. Realizing that I'm certainly not the only independent musician with this dilemma, I've got an idea that seems easy enough to implement and should work for everyone from the kids down the street to Bruce Springsteen, without involving a record label, plastic discs, selling songs, lying or whining. What Doesn't Work We all know that the old paradigm for selling music is dead. Everyone is running around trying to find a new one that works. As far as I can tell, Apple's iTunes store is in the only thing going right now and it is far from ideal. DRM -- Don't need it, don't want it, won't buy it. Certainly don't want my own music wrapped in it. It's bad enough that the audience is satisfied with mp3s. Pricing -- From a "program the database" point of view, having every song at the same price makes sense. However, it seems to be the only POV that it works for. There are many, many reasons for a variable pricing set-up, not the least of which is that it would provide lesser-known artists the ability to undercut the price. The fact that the record labels would start increasing their prices almost immediately would actually help the unknowns. But I have a hard time expecting that people are willing to pay as much for one of our songs as they would an Eric Clapton or U2 tune. Access -- To my knowledge, you can't get into the iTunes store without a middleman, almost all of which will charge you a fee to set this up for you and an additional fee to keep you there, where you'll still have to solve the "how to compete with Eric and Bono" problem. There are a few other mechanisms that people are trying, but they all have major flaws. Subscriptions -- Music with DRM and an expiration date. Do not want. This includes Warner Music's "every Internet user pays $5 a month" scheme. P2P -- For the life of me, I cannot fathom how you can possibly find new music on P2P, or how new music can be found. How could one possibly search for things they don't already know about? The Honor System -- This apparently works for Radiohead and NIN, but they were already famous first. It's much harder when you're working from the ground up. Eliminating the Bullshit I hate selling things because too much bullshit is involved. Lots of superlatives, hype, self-aggrandization, and exclamation points. Exclamation points are usually pretty accurate bullshit flags. New! Improved! Best Ever! Greatest! I suppose that's useful if you're selling laundry soap. That's why my thinking on this issue keeps drifting back to the simple, real-life parallel of playing music live, taking into consideration the reality that playing the bar circuit is not half as attractive as it used to be and gas prices are almost prohibitive to touring small clubs. I even tried buying a club to solve the whole touring issue, not to mention the endless "set it up, tear it down" routine, but that throws you right back into the salesman routine. What we (the acts on my site) have going for us is that we get more people checking us out every week via the Internet than we would get in the average Arizona nightclub, bar or saloon. This didn't happen overnight. We started posting free tunes in the summer of 2002. Today, they move at a pretty steady rate of about 1,000 a week. The Virtual Nightclub The question becomes why to drag your gear out to play for 30 or 100 people when it's 120 degrees outside, when you can reach more people online? That shit'll kill you. So will hauling it through the ice and snow of Ohio and Michigan in the wintertime. Add in declining pay at the clubs, obscene gas prices plus the new nanny-state morality that says you can't smoke in a bar and you'd be better off not drinking there, either. There is a payoff in a live situation as far as the feedback an audience gives you. It always helps to do a gig and see how an audience responds to new material. What I'm seeing is an opportunity for musicians to create their own virtual performance area, each to their own taste and design. Kind of like having your own club, without any of the problems associated with a physical nightclub, most of which are directly attributable to giving alcohol to morons. Yes, this includes the guy in the back that yells "Free Bird!" (Notice the exclamation point.) All the songs that we've already given you will maintain their freedom. We're just going to add another stage and ask a nominal admission charge. Let's say it's a batch of at least a dozen songs that you can stream to sample. For $2 (keeping in mid that this is a random number), you can download them all or just three of them. Whatever. Eventually those songs downloaded most will earn their freedom, making room for newer efforts. So it's not like a subscription or anything that you'd have to pay . It's like an all-access pass and you can take whatever you like. So if I had this ready today and smooth-talked you into forking over the $2, even if you became our greatest fan, I wouldn't expect to get another $2 from you until we had a whole new batch of tunes. You could buy the pass two or three times a year and probably keep up with our output. And even then, only if you are attracted to the new material. I think this has a lot of potential, doesn't require much in the way of selling (the songs must "sell" themselves), and doesn't seem like it requires squeezing the audience very hard or very often. In fact, it seems like a very reasonable deal, especially considering every other current method. It's just one step away from the honor system. And a very small one at that.