Free or not too Free - How to price our music?

  On 2/27/2011 at 10:44 PM, hahathhat said:

because we all know something is worthless if you can't attach a dollar value to it.

You'd be surprised how consumers judge things.

Ochre is probably getting a little bump from being in little big planet 2, that should be considered (tho employing the pay model now is most likely taking good advantage of that). I think as soon as you have some sort of established identity, you can find success with pay what you want, but I don't think you can introduce a person thru this model.

For the first relase I'd say free or name your price for the mp3's, and $5 for FLAC could be a good start. It's much more important to get your name out there than selling 20 copies for a fiver, so name, branding, getting plays, talk, and so on is key in this business now. Give away your best song to blogs and online magazines, and hope to get publicity.

You could even try to get some of the big torrentsites like What.cd & Waffles.fm to make your releases free-leech, and thousands of people will download only to get ratio boost, but you will also be in the music library of just as many people, and if just a small prosentage of them like you, it's instantly a quite lagre fanbase right there.

I know that a lot of electronic music fans just download stuff illegally, this pisses me off. The industry is fucked enough as it is, and producers need to be earning money to pay the bills.... and keep on making music...

If I can preview tracks (soundcloud/web streamed /boomkat etc...) and I like them, I will pay for them. I still buy a lot of physical media, and its only in the past year ive started buying mp3/wavs from online record stores.

I would offer a free stream, then a donate button. If I like your tracks, ill donate to the cause.

  On 3/6/2011 at 9:40 PM, feltcher said:

producers need to be earning money to pay the bills.... and keep on making music...

This might be a bit of a sweeping generalization, but I'd say electronic musicians are probably more capable of making tracks "on the side" than most other types of musicians. No having to get a band all together in one room, no having to practice playing each part of the song, way more cheap/free tools available.

I think it is all a big illusion. I buy music in all formats, and I don't think there is a premier format.

This idea that digital has to be free originates from consumers having experienced an alternative. Things are worth the value they are empowered with. Just because a digital file can be copied thousands of times doesn't mean it doesn't have value, and just because vinyl is made of physical material doesn't mean it is better than digital. People buy digital because they enjoy it, and it's the same with vinyl. Supporting the artist is good too, but people want to feel like they have obtained something, and doing so through legitimate channels is more rewarding for some people.

Now, I want to talk about FLAC and WAV purchases. Sites like bleep.com and others who offer different "tiers" of digital formats. When you have this nofi music, selling it in all of these formats is ridiculous. It's fraud. It's like recording a 48kbps sound file being played on hifi speakers with a $3,000 gold diaphragm condenser mic. I can understand when someone like Autechre crafts some futuristic diamond coated album and the original file is FLAC that people want that same file. I just think we need to think before we pay extra for a WAV file.