crashroots

theindiedigest.com has a great summery on why to give your music away for free. Free music on the internet is nothing to be scared of or feel threatened by. In fact as you will no doubt discover it can be incredibly valuable for all involved. We have reached a pivotal point where the cost of music distribution has fallen to a stage where we can effectively consider it to be free. That is to say, it costs me and you nothing to ‘listen’ to a song I want to hear. Recording a song still costs money, but listening to it no longer does. As with any industry that undergoes a rapid transformation where scarcely controlled goods (CD’s, Tapes, etc) become infinitely available goods (music downloads), in order to gain a strong foothold you need to stay ahead of the curve and adapt as soon as possible.

1. Maximises The Possibility Of Discovery

2. Builds Attention

3. Builds Your Brand

4. Helps You Make Money

read full post at theindiedigest.com

Trent Reznor is warning artists to steer clear of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want scheme. Sure, he has ranted about his fellow digital revolutionaries before, calling their offer “a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream,” but this time he is more specific about the danger of letting fans choose the value of your music. Here’s the full excerpt:

Pay-what-you-want model

This is where you offer tracks or albums for a user-determined price. I hate this concept, and here’s why. Some have argued that giving music away free devalues music. I disagree. Asking people what they think music is worth devalues music. Don’t believe me? Write and record something you really believe is great and release it to the public as a “pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth” model and then let’s talk. Read a BB entry from a “fan” rationalizing why your whole album is worth 50 cents because he only likes 5 songs on it. Trust me on this one - you will be disappointed, disheartened and find yourself resenting a faction of your audience. This is your art! This is your life! It has a value and you the artist are not putting that power in the hands of the audience - doing so creates a dangerous perception issue. If the FEE you are charging is zero, you are not empowering the fan to say this is only worth an insultingly low monetary value. Don’t be misled by Radiohead’s In Rainbows stunt. That works one time for one band once - and you are not Radiohead.

Read more here.

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money. Read the full article. (via dailyswarm)

Business models are a tricky subject. There is an old saying among entrepreneurs that there is no real value to writing down your business model, as it will have changed by the time you commit it to paper. The joke has truth to it; I can personally attest to its veracity. But there is something brewing in the larger world of Internet business models that has wide implications: freemium.

Fred Wilson, famed VC and blogger, originally came up with the general concept of freemium, which he explained this way:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

This concept, building an audience, then implementing paid features as later expansions, is slowly becoming the de facto model for online companies. Of course, there are many successful Internet companies today that avoid it entirely. However, they all seem to lose money. Digg, Twitter, and the other media darlings of the Web 2.0 world still live in red ink, even after scaling to mass market size. Read more at bulding43.com

Download Chris Anderson’s new book “”The Future of a Radical Price as PDF or Audiobook for free via Wired.com. Great read, good audio book and informative videos: check it out now!

Still need proof of the power of  free? Or maybe you just want to be sure it’s not going to cannibalize your opportunity to make a little money? Wired Editor Chris Andersen’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price comes out this week and the debate is certain to heat up.  But in the meantime, here’s  a real would example: Moby wrote to Bob Lefsetz a couple of days ago to point out that his top selling  track on iTunes is also the one he’s giving away free.

Read more at hypebot

Here is a a great speech by Cris Anderson (Wired mag founder and author of “the long tail) on the new emerging market of free goods. In this speech he is outlining the ideas he puts forward in his new book. (via mediafuturist)