I really enjoyed this episode, if for no other reason than I lay on my couch for a long time afterwards thinking about everything you talked about, and everything you didn’t.

The morality issue that you brought up struck a particular chord with me. Of course musicians need to get paid, and it’s a cop-out to say they should ‘innovate’ if that means they have to learn to make money by selling something other than their music. I’m sure no one practices the guitar for years on end in their parents’ basement, thinking about how one day they’ll make it big by selling really great t-shirts and other merch’.

That said, I do feel that there’s more than one way for musicians to make money. To say that it’s not up to the recording industry to change and that the responsibility lies with listeners to do the right thing and pay for music the way they used to before file sharing became possible … that idea makes me fume. It seems to suggest that the system of CD production, sales and distribution was perfect and fair for everyone until computer geeks came along and screwed it all up. It implies that there was no room for improvement. But of course, like in everything else, there was and there continues to be.

As a music fan, the age of online music has been great for me. It has meant discovering countless new bands and even entire genres. It’s not that file sharing is free that makes this possible, but that it is user-driven. Focusing of piracy misses the point I think. Jimmy Maze and others touched on this on your show…. we can now seek out new music at any time, on any whim, at our convenience. That’s a far cry from going out of our way to hear something new by listening to the radio late at night or going to a friend’s house to listen to records, or even nicely asking the clerk at the store if they will let you listen to a song or two from an album before buying. Which I remember doing. Getting music through the internet has the huge advantage that you have control, you can share not only the music itself but all kinds of opinions and knowledge about the music, and that you never have to be disappointed that you paid $20 for an album of crap that you didn’t know was going to be crap.

I haven’t purchased a CD from a record store in about 10 years, but I also haven’t routinely copied music for free in quite a while. And in the dark ages of file sharing, I still paid for music… certainly not everything I listened to, but I paid for quite a few albums that I had downloaded first. I paid for them because I liked what I heard and it was worth something to me. Fair is fair.

Now for a rant-y bit. The people who have the most to say against file sharing / piracy are inevitably the people who have the most to lose. When Napster came out, musicians who were already signed with major labels certainly lost money. The music profit pie got smaller overall when people could choose to listen for free. But I think the bigger problem for the major labels is that the music profit pie is now divided into much smaller pieces than before… and yes, like any disruption to the system, there have been winners and losers.

I remember for a while in the 90s (and probably well before that), independent music was called ‘underground’. I think that was because it was hard to make, hard to find and generally obscure, and that made it cool to have, not unlike the rarities you brought up in this episode. There was also a good chance that it was more interesting than what was on the radio. But I think that underneath that awesomeness of getting to have something that other people didn’t know about was the tragedy that lots of musicians could never get heard. I’m not convinced that many independent musicians are truly upset about piracy, because file sharing may actually mean bigger exposure and the possibility of having a career without major label backing. This makes me wonder if the average band might actually be better off than before.

So, it’s hard to accept when artists backed by the majors claim the moral high ground. Not only is the old way of making money in music dead, but I feel that it deserves to be. When distribution and sales of music was exclusively under music industry control, labels exploited that monopoly to fulfill the mission of all corporations – to make money. It was easy to do. Pick and choose a select few bands and market them to stratospheric fame. That way of doing things satiated listeners’ appetites and in doing it made money. It probably even made possible those commercially-viable music trends like 80s synth pop and hair rock that are interesting in a History of Rock and Roll kind of way, but that might never have happened in a more listener-driven market like we have now. It’s hard to argue that the old way of selling music served the artform well, or the average struggling band for that matter.

So in this new world, how can brave musicians still get decently paid?

It’s interesting to me that there is still money to be made in recorded music at all, and quite a lot of it. I don’t see anyone buying encyclopedias anymore. Profits declined after Napster but they didn’t dry up. It’s also interesting that iTunes was so successful – it’s how a large part of that money is being made now, and with a much larger margin going to the musicians themselves. iTunes is convenient, and to me, a consumer of music, I like it because it seems fair.

It must be that people do want to pay musicians for their music. I have a completely unproven theory that people often download music for free in part because they feel they are sticking it to the man. It’s empowering. People naturally object to being cheated (e.g. price hikes, shitty b-sides) or having new restrictions imposed on them (copy protection, DVD commercials you can’t skip) and feel justified to retaliate through piracy. But I think the opposite is also true – if you give people more than they expect, they reciprocate. I for one like paying a fair price, and no one wants to believe that they are in the wrong.

So suppose you make a good product, make it easy to buy and make the price fair. People will buy it. Don’t know what a fair price is? Instead of guessing, appeal to your listener’s sense of fairness. Maybe you start by giving away your music*. My bet is that people would still choose to pay (if it’s easy to do) and maybe pay even more than you would otherwise charge. Or you could let them listen first and choose whether to buy afterwards. Or auction downloads like on Ebay… there are lots of possible approaches, but start with the premise that people will do what they think is right if you make it easy. Technically, there might not be a practical way to do this, but hey, a couple of guys made Apple computers in a garage and a couple of other guys made Napster. That’s sometimes how new ideas take hold.

*I know that some people would object to this idea because when something is given away for free it gets devalued, but I think that’s because people are used to there being a catch. So if that’s a sticking point, don’t think of it as being free. Think of it as “pay what you can.”