This Too Shall Suck...

Matt Davidson (Stretta) put up an interesting comment on Google+ the other day that sparked a rather long and involved discussion. Since he put it on G+ instead of his blog, and limited it to his Circle Of Compadres or whatever, I assume he doesn’t want me quoting it in entirety here. However, I’ll paraphrase him (badly, and take specific points out of context even) here, and provide my own color commentary that I touched upon in the comments of his missive.

His general premise was that when one puts up an album on Bandcamp for “pay what you want,” one is somewhat disappointed at the prevalence of the $1 that many people kick in for a full album, especially in the context of one’s altruistic nature. Matt, like me, puts up a ton of secondary and tertiary content in the form of samples, entire songs, and software for free, in addition to the meta-project that is the album itself.

Looking at my Bandcamp stats, I feel I can break consumers of my (recent) music in to three groups: Benefactors, Listeners, and The Curious. The Benefactors kick in ten bucks every time, pretty much no matter what the content. Listeners tend to make a quantitative assessment of the value (“This album has 10 songs, therefor it is $10. This one has 5 songs, so here’s your fin.”) The Curious are the ones that pay a buck. I generally put up my EP-sized material for Pay-What-You-Want-Minimum-$1, so this number gets colored.

Benefactors are who really drive the commercial side of the process. After so long in this business, when I release an EP or LP, I know for certain fact that there is a group of people that will give me $10. I can count on them. I don’t know how they perceive me in general, or why they do this, as I’m not one of these sorts. But this amount of money that I know is coming is essentially my budget. I use it for the TuneCore shit, and to buy anything else specific to the release. It is an immutable fact.

The Listeners are a source of extra income, but they’re more fickle. These are the people I actually have to please, because the Benefactors, as long as I don’t go all Metal Machine Music on them, will support virtually any endeavor. They aren’t a terribly good sounding board. The Listeners, on the other hand, don’t buy something they don’t like.

The Curious are the people that find my material on YouTube or via a retweet, or hear it in Real World vs. Road Rules #23: Des Moines, or some shit like that, and are like “fuck it. It’s here, I don’t have to hunt up a Torrent. It’s a buck. Fuck it.” I look at this as value-added to me. I don’t attempt to please these people. It’s nice if they turn in to a Listener or a Benefactor, but they don’t figure in to the equation except tangentially.

A commercial success for me is a release I didn’t have to spend any of my own money to make. That’s the 2011 version of the music industry. Even if I did, it’s not that big a deal, because I make music I like, and am beholden to anybody only inasmuch as the more Listeners I alienate with any given release, the less income I’ll see from that release.

Mark Beeson, who most of you don’t know, but you’re currently reading and commenting via a big chunk of code he wrote a long time ago, brought up an interesting point that is tertiary to my mission statement, but should be touched upon anyhow: iPod don’t care. iPod don’t give a shit. An album is no different than a song as far as your playlist is concerned. To put that in the context of what I’m talking about, from a crass commercial standpoint, to maximize the benefit of your Benefactors and Listeners, you should release a lot of single songs and two-song packages, rather than saving everything up for a single monumental release. Those of us that are older have an incredibly difficult time getting rid of the notion of the Long Playing Album Of 45 Minutes as a unit of music, but in this amazing modern world we live in, that is a relic of the 70s, for better or worse.

Thoughts?