An excellent article about selling records, file sharing and trying to flog MP3s via Word Magazine:
web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them.
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0 responses to “The futility of flogging music (and the despair when you can’t even give it away)”
I was at the OGN that he presented the original talk. It was very interesting, hilarious too, and was followed by a talk about Songkick which stated touring provides a lot of a bands income. Of course the views conflicted so they discussed their reasoning in the Q&A, though it seems the transcript isn’t up anywhere (if it ever will be).
Of course it’s not likely the record companies will accept the “Not down £20 but up 20 listeners” mentality. What will they wipe their arses with?!
Musicians, I suspect.
Good old Rhodri – I’m a big fan of his blog.
He appears to be a popular chap – the linked article’s been posted in a few places, such as MetaFilter, and people have been saying nice things about him.