“
I’m all for file sharing. That’s great— as long as people are prepared for the significant consequences. One is that music will become completely couched in advertising. That’s already happened. And another is that people should be prepared to have fun with the past because the only music that can possibly be free is the music that’s from the past. It costs money to make music. And if people are prepared to only have the past to listen to, then let it be free.
But if they want new music then they are going to have to figure out a way to be patrons of the arts. And they will. We discussed doing a free option, but we were like “No, Fuck it. They can pay a dollar.” We played shows for five dollars at a time when people thought it would be impossible. We played five-dollar shows for so long and nobody ever complained about that, and then we sell it for five dollars and they’re like, “Why isn’t it free?” Well, it’s just trying to help us recoup a little bit.
”—
good points as usual from Ian MacKaye from this Pitchfork interview - especially about advertising, that’s always been my fear/annoyance with the ‘free’ cost of many things online (when it stops being an annoyance and is, as he says, ‘couching’ content in a way we don’t really pay any conscious regard to but which nonetheless shapes, distorts and underpins the medium, that’s probably worse).
The other thing is, people can make music ‘for free’, and do - they just need to be able to rely on either their own financial resources, or as mentioned, those of a patron or patrons. Those obviously have limits - but so do the record label/touring/digital sales models, and I think the point to take away from it is that we “will” “have to figure out a way to be patrons of the arts”. Probably doing so as individualised consumers is not really the best way, given the inequalities currently inherent in the notion of disposable income (which, however you view that in itself, leads to inequalities in accessing artistic culture when it is funded and made available privately, rather than publicly).
However, it’s either the best way we currently have in the current, non-socialist economic structure, or we are already adapting it to a mixed economy of free downloading and targeted - ‘crowd-sourced’, to cut myself with a buzzword - patronage from wealthy and/or enthusiastic fans. Unfortunately advertising is likely to remain and entrench itself as the conduit for that majority of fragmented patronage.
(via hardcorefornerds)
