DEREK WEBB
DEREK WEBB
Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense
Music matters. It’s so integral and pervasive in our culture that it almost feels invisible. It’s even hard to imagine walking into almost any store without hearing music overhead. Culture provides a constant soundtrack to our lives. So it’s no wonder there’s so much discussion and debate about the business of music. It feels like a matter of life or death. And maybe it is.<br>Lately, there’s been a surge in that debate as pioneers begin planting flags all over the Wild West that is the current music industry. I believe that all of these creative attempts at healthy disruption and problem solving are very good things. Ultimately, the best and most effective ideas and businesses will not only survive, they will be the blocks upon which we build the new music business, and this upon the wreckage of the one we’ve been watching go down for over a decade. As an artist and a music-lover (an owner and a client, if you will), I have a lot at stake in these discussions.<br>There has never been a better moment to be a middle-class or an independently thinking artist making and performing music than right now. The costs and complications of creating, recording, manufacturing, and distributing music are at an all-time low, enabling more music to be made and more artists to make a living than ever before. If your ego can bear not being rich and famous, you can make a respectable and sustainable living as a blue-collar musician. The problem used to be access; now it’s obscurity. And this brings with it a completely new set of problems and opportunities.<br>The History<br>More than 50 years ago, Sam Philips stood in the doorway of Sun Studios in Memphis, blocking Johnny Cash from entering unless he could conjure something worth the legacy of that historical room (without which Cash might have gone on to be an unknown and mediocre Gospel singer). Today, anyone can get sufficient resources to record and distribute their music, all from a Mac laptop. While this might mean some artists never receive the shepherding that could drive them to their potential greatness, I believe the net result is still preferable to having the old gatekeepers still in place, deciding for everyone what is truly great. The tools are democratized and as a result, the market is flooded. The problem goes from having the chance to be recorded at all to that recording having the chance to be discovered and listened to.<br>But as it tends to do, the market is adapting. The whole business used to be focused on the head of the sales curve, the handful of artists who were selling records in the millions of copies. But as music sales have sharply declined and fewer artists than ever are winding up at the head of that curve, attention is drifting to the “long tail” of the curve where thousands of niche artists live, none selling more than a few thousand records each. The power of the “long tail” is in the fact that its combined record sales are more than the combined sales of the top-selling artists occupying the steadily narrowing head of the curve. While there will always likely be a “hit” market resulting in a precious few artists moving records in the millions, the business is shifting to service these niches.<br>As I have navigated the business, especially over the last decade as a solo artist, I have noticed several gaps in the services available to blue-collar artists like myself. This is how NoiseTrade was born in 2008, a service I started with several friends seeking to help artists find and meaningfully connect with their fans by trading free music for information and viral promotion. NoiseTrade has enabled thousands of artists (including myself) to have and cultivate direct relationships with their fans rather than having to depend on proprietary third parties such as Facebook, Twitter, and not so long ago, MySpace, and therefore, to have a job.<br>These connections are not only meaningful, they’re also valuable.<br>The Details<br>On Twitter, I recently said, “I make more money giving records away on @NoiseTrade (in exchange for info) than selling those same records on iTunes (let alone Spotify),” which resulted in some pretty interesting discussions. I said that in response to questions I received after criticizing streaming services like Spotify, which claim to offer a viable alternative to “piracy,” when in reality they offer artists almost no meaningful revenue or fan connection. And while iTunes is certainly a better financial model and more equitable for artists, it does almost nothing to connect the fans to the artists in a way that yields any long-term benefit.<br>For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free. This means it will take upwards of...