I am obviously not prone to buying music but I’m honestly considering buying Ashtray Nagivations’ new release Cloud Come Cadaver. Why? Because there aren’t nearly enough people listening to this stuff to make it find-able online for free. I’ve tried already, and I’m good at this; I’ve been pirating software since BBSes (I’d say music since then but this was before MP3s existed).
This creates a weird sweet spot in selling-your-music land. On the one hand, if you’re just completely unknown, you’ll be lucky if people find your music to begin with; while if you’re fairly well known but not being played in shopping malls, your music will probably be too easily accessible to the people that listen to it for them to buy it. (I’m leaving out if you are one of those people whose music is played in shopping malls because they’re part of a whole different world of music business issues.)
But you have this place between completely unknown and well known among music lovers only that allows you the option of actually selling music. I come across it more and more as my tastes continually lead me to noise, glitch, and contemporary classical music. The last category is almost uniformly inaccessible to the file-sharer, with the exception maybe of Nico Muhly and the NOW Ensemble, the latter of which has actually offered their albums for free at one point. Nope, when my Soundamus feed tells me a new Kaija Saariaho release is coming out, I don’t even bother adding it to my calendar because I know I could only listen to it if I bought it.
That last point typifies a couple issues. First, Ashtray Navigations is only selling the album for ₤3 and I imagine they’d be pretty lucky to get even 500 sales (correct me if you’re in the know). That’s ₤1,500. I’m not sure how they go about their recording process but if it’s anything like what I’ve previously described about packaging and distributing music, that money could be 100% profit. Even at that, though, it’s not enough to go into making music as a full time job by itself. They could maybe raise the price but it’s likely that a curve would be created where the more the music costs the fewer people there are that will buy it and so the profits will even out. I certainly wouldn’t pay $10 for the album, because I can still listen to their old music and save that money for bus fare. This is reality for a lot of consumers, which is the second issue typified here. I get probably 10 newly released albums every month but there’s no way I could afford a $100 bill each month. I buy store-brand peanut butter. I can afford $3 a month for a single album that I particularly want to listen to that isn’t available through any others means, though.
I think Ashtray Navigations’ Bandcamp is pretty fair, but the above often leads me to the “lets just make all our music free for fuck’s sake” conclusion. It reminds me of a thesis project a classmate of mine was recently proposing. She’s an economics major and wants to look into altruism in the market and one of the points she made while discussing it is that studies have shown that people will offer their resources much more willingly when it’s not made into a business deal. Blood donors, for instance, were more willing to donate if they weren’t offered cookies or money or anything in return. Maybe this is why those pay-what-you-like albums seem to be turning into a thing these days.
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