What a difference 5 mins can make
What a difference 5 mins can make when you talk to someone about music! I had a great conversation online with a friend yesterday, and we were sending each other music back and forth and putting the world to rights for some time. But it only took the first 5 mins of the conversation to be exposed to something new that I’d never heard before.
I think we’d all be a lot better off if we made some time in our days to talk to someone we respect about music, and share some ideas. It’s like talking about something that saddens you, it feels a lot better afterwards once it’s off your chest. I felt the same way yesterday talking about music. It wasn’t that it saddened me at all, but there was a big feeling of relief once some ideas had been shared and someone else’s input was received. I brushed aside all the things I had previously planned to do that day and got to working on more new material for my next record, and was more productive that any of my previous writing sessions!
There was a blog post recently by David Lowery in reply to yet another blog post from an intern at NPR.
It’s a mammoth amount of reading to get through and if you don’t have the time I’ll paraphrase and save you the trouble…
The Intern Emily was basically saying how she has this collection of 11,000 songs and has only ever bought 15 CD’s in her life. And that she and her peer group would never pay for music from this point on. Then Herr Lowery rants for several thousand words about how she’s wrong etc etc..
David makes some great points, although I’m not a huge fan of the epic length of post. And Emily is a little naive and doesn’t sound like she made her point in writing the way I think she intended.
What I took away from this was really interesting in terms of our current musical climate. Emily is about 21 years old I think and has lived her entire life free from the CD culture and music buying climate of the generation that grew up a few years before her. There was no transition for her from CD’s to digital, it has just been digital. This is, of course, something that is going to slowly take over the entire listening public in years to come as printed and physical media becomes more obsolete.
Where this ties into this blog post is that I think it’s awesome we can share music so easily now. My experience online skyping with my friend yesterday would have been rather more cumbersome had we not had the facility to file share music that quickly. And through these blog posts I’ve been reading, the debate of “giving music away for free” seems to rage on. I still maintain that if you interact and engage with your fans on a regular basis by creating compelling and inspiring content, then why not give your records away for free and let the fans decide how much the material is worth?
It’s called trust. A two way street of trust between artist and fan, and fan and artist. And it puts the responsibility on the artist to create something fresh rather than allowing a record label to package something together that has nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with commercial gain.
What would the movie industry be like if fans got to choose the price they paid to get into a movie? or buy a DVD or download? I bet you they wouldn’t be making Terminator part 17, or re-hashing movies from 40 years ago because they’re out of ideas… I think great new film makers would become globally known, and people’s hunger for “fresh and interesting” would increase, and we’d be less susceptible to being led down whichever spoon fed path hollywood and clear channel want to take us next.
Go and download my music for free. All of it. Enjoy it, don’t enjoy, pass it on, don’t pass it on. But know you have the option.
Janek
