As Music Production Costs Fall, Shouldn’t Price Fall Too?

Your new favorite song could come from here. (CC-BY Matt Gibson)
Your new favorite song could come from here. (CC-BY Matt Gibson)

The cost to produce music is at an all-time low.

The price of music is… well… schizophrenic. A single track can be simultaneously obtained for free on BitTorrent, or purchased on the iTunes store for $1.29. Or you can stream it for next-to-nothing on Spotify, or for a fraction of next-to-nothing on YouTube. And you can still buy the CD for $14.95 to get that one song you like, if you’re a masochist or retired.

The free music debate is often framed as an epic battle to save music itself. Proponents of stricter copyright enforcement claim that keeping these price points high is necessary to keep the quality of music high. Without the proper funding, musicians will make less music, or if not less, at least worse.

I think we can all agree that while the price of music is effectively (with streaming) or literally (with torrenting) free, the cost of producing music is anything but. There is real labor, real expense involved in producing an album.

On the one end of the spectrum, you have major labels paying over $1MM for a single. On the other, you have Nirvana’s Bleach, a multi-Platinum-selling album made for $606.17 in 1989.

What does it cost to produce music? Whatever you want to spend, or can afford. That’s the problem with putting the pricing debate in perspective — the costs to produce vary as wildly as the results. There have been plenty of multi-million dollar flops and home-recorded hits, so how can one ever put a definitive cost on music production? We can only assign a range of possibilities, but doing so does help illuminate the debate.

Before we talk production costs, there is something important to be said for the fact that costs vary wildly. It would suggest that pricing of music ought to vary wildly, at least somewhat in line with the cost to produce it. And yet, the basement DIY record and the multi-million dollar Rhianna album both retail for $1.29/track on iTunes. This is because the price of music is fixed by the big 3 record companies that control around three quarters of the global music industry. And yes, those same three major labels were the ones who negotiated how much artists get paid on streaming services — an amount that as we have seen is so paltry as to only be sustainable on a large, major-label market scale.

Point is, music should cost whatever the artist and their business team wants. This idea is often invoked by detractors of free access to music. “You can make your music available for free, that’s fine,” they say, “but I have the right to charge for mine.” Which is true, and copyright makes it so — artists enjoy a monopoly over the right to distribute copies of their music at the moment they record or write down a song. The intent of copyright is to create value around this right, so that production costs (both in labor and materials) can be covered, and the production of music can flourish. So it would stand to reason that the value created by copyright would not remain fixed as production costs fall.

Nope. The major labels have consistently fixed the value of music copyright by litigating and legislating against any force that threatens to devalue music access fees. They have extended copyright terms to draconian lengths. Any technology that is outside of their price-fixing controls is sued out of existence, and the law is changed if it does not suit their litigious needs. Forget free access to music, the powers that be don’t even want variably-priced music!

Major labels have enjoyed an effective monopoly over the monopoly that copyright grants artists. This happened because the value of copyright was not intrinsic, rather it was hitched to the ability of a business to exploit it. In the past, it was incredibly difficult for the artist to exploit their own copyright to create value — they had to sign their rights over to a label to be exploited. They didn’t have access to the apparatus of production, marketing and distribution like they do today. Thus, the value of music copyright was in the value of being exploited.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a major shift in the value of copyright, due in no small part to the falling costs of production. The cost of recording technology dropped to a fraction of what it once was. You can still spend a few million dollars building a state-of-the-art studio, but more and more are recording for less and less. Modern recording technology also speeds up the recording process considerably, so there are fewer labor costs.

Music listening is becoming a more participatory process, and more music is being made (via remixes, covers and mashups) just for fun or expression, without commercial intent. You can still spend a year writing an album, but plenty of musicians are vastly reducing the labor involved in composing an album by using technology to demo as they write, with feedback and collaboration happening at a faster pace.

Marketing costs are at an all-time low thanks to social networks and the ability of bands to connect directly with fans. You can still spend millions on a national marketing campaign (or get a consumer electronics company to underwrite it), but it’s now possible to market an album guerilla-style, and catch on virally without spending a dime.

And don’t get me started on distribution. Since the Napster days, the cost to distribute digital music has been effectively free. The real expense that these streaming sites have is not server bandwidth (a point that would be largely mooted by peer-to-peer technology). The exorbitant expense is in the labor required to seek out rights holders, get them to sign a digital service license agreement, and the accounting behind tabulating and paying out their share of the streaming pie. And when you’re talking about having to negotiate with the big three majors, you better believe the expense is going to be as exorbitant as the top entertainment lawyers can manage.

Digital distribution is what truly democratized the music industry, and the genie is never going back in the bottle no matter how much the RIAA continues quixotically to cram it in. I can distribute my music worldwide via any number of retail aggregators (CDBaby, OneRPM, TuneCore, DistroKid, etc.) for the cost of a magazine subscription. I can certainly distribute it worldwide absolutely free as well. The cost of digital distribution is near zero, and has been for quite some time.

So, there we have it. The labor involved in songwriting (to the extent you can call it ‘labor’) has been slightly decreased by technology. The time and cost of recording has been drastically reduced. Successful marketing can be achieved at a fraction of former costs. Distribution is nearly free.

The cost to produce music is much lower than it was just a decade ago. Shouldn’t the price of music adjust accordingly? Isn’t the pricing of streaming much closer to what’s fair for consumers? Doesn’t the declining cost of music production dictate that we charge less — even nothing — for access music? When you factor in new opportunities in direct fan patronage, a growing live music market and greater demand for licensed music, shouldn’t we continue to develop the intrinsic value of music as a service, and relax monopoly distribution rights on the music product in order to do so? This would be disadvantageous for the big three record labels, but a boon to most musicians and their fans, because a chance to be heard is a chance to be supported.

Ad-Sponsored Music Piracy is a Mythical Threat to Musicians

David Lowery, musician with Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven supports Trichordist and is angry that recorded music doesn't pay like it used to. (photo: Clinton Steeds CC-BY)
David Lowery, musician with Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven supports Trichordist and is angry that recorded music doesn’t pay like it used to. (Clinton Steeds CC-BY)

A small but growing number of formerly well-compensated musicians are rallying around a new empty catch phrase: “ad-sponsored piracy”.

As far as I can tell, this idea gestated in the bitter womb of The Trichordist, an echo chamber for musicians who are too scared of changes in technology to discuss solutions. Instead, they spew dangerous propaganda about the “new exploiters” of musicians, namely technology companies. Though they continually remind readers that they’re “fighting for the artist”, though there seems to be no sort of plan or strategy other than complaining.

Look, I think we can all agree all types of businesses exploit people on a fairly regular basis. But I believe I’ve made it clear that technology companies are more ethical that the business forces that dominated music in the past. They are far from perfect, but at least they’re trying to find solutions.

The Trichordist went way out on a limb, grabbing screenshots of ads from major corporations being displayed alongside free music downloads of popular artists. This shock-and-awe tactic is presumably to incite fans to petition the advertisers to pull their ads from these sites.

Unsurprisingly, this attempt has backfired horribly. When the Dead Kennedys and Lou Reed posted the aforementioned Trichordist posts on their Facebook pages, their fans were quick to point out how stupid the posts were, and how out of touch Trichordist and the artists (or more likely, their embittered management) were for posting them.

Eric Kennedy wrote on the Dead Kennedys page: “…that shit is from a year ago, and I can pretty much guarantee that site doled out more viruses than songs. Stick to reposting whatever Black Flag is posting on FB in the future.”

Jay Conner added: “It is utterly astounding that somebody directly involved in the industry on both the business and artistic sides could be this uneducated about how internet advertising works. Particularly since he, you know, runs a blog dedicated to the internet and its ethics.”

Here’s the problem with so-called “ad-sponsored piracy”: it’s a mythical threat. It’s a fake problem cooked up by butthurt musicians who saw their market share crumble when the music business model shifted away from charging for access to recorded music.

I don’t have to get long-winded to prove it. Anyone with a basic understanding of how Internet advertising works understands that these ads appearing on these sites does not equate to companies sponsoring the site or its contents. It’s doubtful they even know where 99% of their ads appear.

And even if they did, anyone with a basic understanding of copyright law and how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act works knows that any site that makes available copyright infringing material must remove it immediately at the request of the rights holders. Reed and the Kennedys can play the victim all they want, but if they feel their copyrights are being infringed, they do have legal recourse to deal with it. Instead they are just complaining, and their fans are totally turned off by it.

Furthermore, even if we assume these sites were committing copyright infringement, most people understand that copyright law — and much of society, really — has been hijacked by corporate interests. In reality, free access to music is a good thing for most musicians because a chance to be heard is a chance to be paid. Pre-Internet, very few artists were heard, a minority were paid, and a tiny minority were paid fairly.

In fact, I think Lou Reed and Dead Kennedys would actually benefit from having their music available as a free download, largely by tech-savvy young people. If you look at the artistic merit of both these artists, I think popular opinion would agree they’ve been on the decline creatively or at least nowhere near the work they’re widely known for. Let’s say nine out of ten kids might come along and download “Walk on the Wild Side” and they hate it, or they like it but not enough to be curious about discovering more Lou Reed tunes (purely hypothetical, because kids stream music these days). One out of ten is going to love it so much they’ll seek out more, and along the way there will be plenty of opportunities to pay the artist far more than what they would make selling the track on iTunes to ten kids. That’s the new business of music, and it’s a much more fair shake for musicians than one given by the labels, lawyers and lobbyists of the past.

As for the Dead Kennedys? I’m sorry, but they’re not the Dead Kennedys if Jello isn’t in the band. He’s on record calling the band a ‘cash scam’ and that’s what the band is purely about now: making money. The art is gone. Forget musicians, fans are being exploited.

So you see folks, the myth of “ad-sponsored piracy” is really just the product of desperate musicians at the end of their careers. The primary purpose of copyright law is to create a rich and thriving culture — economic compensation is a part of it, but not the whole. Why would we deny thousands of musicians the right to be heard and to be paid just so washed-up artists like Dead Kennedys and Lou Reed (more accurately, their buisiness teams and labels) can squeeze some more dollars out of a good run that happened decades ago.

If The Trichordist were serious about fighting against musician exploitation, they would be fighting against the corporate corruption of copyright and fighting for Internet freedom. By their rationale, even Spotify qualifies as ad-sponsored piracy because of its almost non-existent royalty payments in the face of hundreds of millions of dollars of ad and subscriber revenue. But Spotify pays 70% of revenue to artists, just like iTunes. Somehow one is morally bankrupt and the other perfectly legitimate. It’s absurd. I’m no great champion of Spotify, but put up against iTunes they look like Mother Theresa. And like I said, music downloads are approaching their high water mark and will be all but a memory as a new generation grows up on streaming, so the myth is already hopelessly outdated.

In the future, I would like to see The Trichordist discussing some actual solutions instead of throwing tantrums. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you some topics:

• Building a culture of entrepreneurship among musicians
• Crowdfunding as a way to finance an album without signing an exploitative contract with a label
• Marketing as discovery, not as manufacturing popularity or generating music sales
• Music for music’s sake, not as a product but as a service
• How digital services for musicians democratize the industry
• How digital technology dramatically cuts the expense of music production and marketing

Compositions with Samples: A Music Discovery Market in Arrested Development

Girl Talk producing live. Photo by IllaDeuce. CC-BY-SA
Girl Talk producing live. Photo by IllaDeuce. CC-BY-SA

When you can’t sample something, you can’t discover you like it, and you won’t buy it.

Like many suburban white kids, my first exposure to hip hop was when Run-D.M.C. teamed up with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way”.

That collaboration was not just how I discovered Run-D.M.C., it was how I discovered the whole genre of hip hop. 2 Live Crew, Beastie Boys, NWA, Public Enemy, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince and LL Cool J would soon follow, along with lots of awful hip-hop/teen pop crossovers I needn’t mention. For someone straight outta the Catskills, my hip hop roots run deep.

Was Run-D.M.C. showcasing its sound through Aerosmith’s composition? Or was Aerosmith showcasing its sound through Run-D.M.C.’s composition?

The answer, of course, is both. In this case, it was as much musical chemistry as calculated salesmanship. Both bands were rocking each other’s compositions as a platform for greater exposure. Run-D.M.C. appealed to fans of hair rock, and Aerosmith suddenly seemed relevant again, saving their music career. The whole thing was a marketing plot orchestrated by bearded studio magician Rick Rubin, who carefully arranged the profitable pairing in advance.

As any hip hop fan knows, creative appropriation of sound recordings — samples — are a fundamental building block of the genre. “Walk This Way” was staged, but most samples at the time were taken without permission. Hip hop had not yet begun to emerge as the commercial powerhouse it would soon become. It wasn’t until Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films that copyright law was brought down like a hammer against unauthorized sampling, and the practice suddenly became very expensive if not impossible.

Hip hop pre-Bridgeport was a revelation because it was a genre of music based on exposing people to other artists and genres of music through the actual composition. It wasn’t a composition as we traditionally thought of — sheet music with lyrics. Instead of notes, there were bits of sound recordings, with compositions contained within. Songs were transformed through sampling into new compositions that showcased artists and genres in a new context.

Hip hop wasn’t just a music genre, it was a music discovery platform.

The mashups, remixes and EDM of today are taking the mantle of genre-as-music-discovery vacated by hip hop after Bridgeport. I would argue that these genres are the natural progression hip hop would have taken had the creative act known as “sampling” not been stagnated by an unjust court ruling.

Today, you can discover several artists or genres in a single mashup. Like an audio scavenger hunt, listeners follow snippets of sound to their source, finding new favorite tracks and entire styles of music they didn’t know existed.

All of this is happening under the commercial radar right now because creating songs with unauthorized samples is technically copyright infringement. Girl Talk is the poster child for trying to make a career out of claiming such use is fair, using hundreds of uncleared samples and making lots of people scratch their heads as to how he gets away with it. There was a whole SXSW panel on it:

No one can argue there is a growing cultural awareness of Girl Talk-esque sampling as transformative, fair use among listeners and musicians. This contrasts with another widely held belief that there is a limit to sampling another’s work without payment. As they say in the video, “Puffy’s got to pay” when it comes to using the heart and soul of a song as the heart and soul of your new composition. In other words, any rational musician or listener can see there is a spectrum between fair use and copyright infringement when it comes to sampling. Unfortunately the law is generally absolutist about these things, and Girl Talk only avoids prosecution through conspicuousness. The fact is, anyone who samples any copyrighted song without permission is breaking the law and risking a lawsuit, and because of that, the professional mash-up musician is not allowed to be born.

Where does that leave music discovery via other people’s compositions? Will mashups/EDM atrophy without commercial support? Probably not. That’s the beauty of the illegal art form — it remains relatively un-compromised by commercial interests, and sustains a creative if chaotic scene. The uglier side — at least from a purely aesthetic perspective — is that the genre remains clogged with amateurs with no clear path toward a professional music career.

Much of the progressive talk in the music world around this issue centers on the concept of introducing a compulsory sampling license. Some serious thought and legal expertise has gone into developing this path toward copyright reform. The intent is to balance the welfare of the greater good and culture at large against what many perceive as too much power given to the individual — in this case, the copyright owner of the sample in question.

In the same way I can cover a song without permission so long as I compensate the original composer via a compulsory license, I could theoretically do the same for the composers (and sound recording rights owners) of my samples.

In practice, this is tricky for a number of reasons. For example, how do we set a compulsory sample licensing fee? Most people seem to think it should be based on what percentage of your composition the original sample represents, or what percentage of the original composition/sound recording you took. But how does one possibly determine that? Length of the sample? Whether it’s used in the chorus or the verse? Amount of sample transformation? The variables are endless. Calculating them in any standard format is flatly impractical — any attempt to do so would be fraught with compromise.

Then comes the personhood concerns — the idea that a person might not want their composition to appear in a particular context. For example, when Kanye West paid handsomely to use an Otis Redding sample on Watch the Throne, Otis Redding’s estate vetted every word in the song to ensure it matched Redding’s legacy. A compulsory sample license would allow me to use the same sample in a new composition called “Otis Redding Sucks” as long as I paid the requisite fee.

For those unfamiliar with music copyright, a song basically has two rights attached to it: the actual sequence and structure of the notes and lyrics as well as the actual recording. It’s another reason why sampling is trickier than cover songs — with a cover, you’re making a new recording, so you don’t have to pay or get permission to use the old one. With a sample, you’re dealing with two different sets of rights, which technically means two different licenses. Compositions are administered by performing arts organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SEASAC) on behalf of publishers and artists, licensing them is a fairly standard process. But many musicians transfer their song’s second right — the sound recording right — to a record label in exchange for financing the recording and marketing of their album. Thus, negotiations for sample use are not always entirely up to the artist, but their label as well. So in many cases, the composer would be cool with using the sample, but the record label that owns the sound recording would say no or hold out for more money.

For these and other reasons, it’s not likely that genres based on unauthorized sampling will reach any sort of widespread commercial viability any time soon. And that’s a real bummer, because we’re denying a generation of listeners one of the most vibrant music discovery platforms yet invented by humans — the composition-within-composition. Not to mention all the dough being left on the table.

Thankfully — as I always say — music finds a way. Bridgeport didn’t stop unauthorized sampling any more than Napster stopped unauthorized file sharing. In both cases, music discovery was driven underground.

We will continue to see the growth and evolution of compositions that make unauthorized use of other people’s compositions and sound recordings. I would urge all musicians to fight the good fight and protect their compositions and sound recordings with a Creative Commons license instead of relying on traditional copyright. With Creative Commons, you can protect your song against unauthorized commercial use while giving a wide berth to allow transformative uses of your song like sampling and remixing.

Sample culture will continue to thrive beneath the surface of the mainstream, waiting for a law to pass and unleash its bottled-up commercial potential. Until then, it will only get cooler and more creative, and samples will only gain more political power.

The corporations that control 75% of the world’s music would be keen to pay attention and change their strategy. Picture this: Girl Talk takes the stage with Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. at the 2014 Grammy Awards and they infringe 60 years of music in 5 minutes. Watch that mashup single become the new “Gangnam Style” overnight.

Answering the Question, “How Do Musicians Make Money in a Free Culture?”

Thanks to the hundreds of readers who made yesterday the most-visited day for my blog yet! And a big thanks to QuestionCopyright.org for their kind words about the article everyone was reading. If you haven’t checked out their site, it’s great.

As you can imagine I’ve been getting a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. I’d like to respond to a F.A.Q. that boils down to something Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (thanks to Aaron Wolf for the quote).

In other words, if I’m a musician that acknowledges free or near-free music as an inevitability, and I’m watching my income depreciate thanks to this effect, what the hell am I supposed to do? Isn’t it impossible to make a living as a musician if one’s music is available for free?

It’s an issue that Free Culture advocates should be acutely sensitive to. In fact, I believe most of the negative feedback I’ve received stems from the frustration of artists who don’t know how to approach this new business of free music.

First, I need to dispel this myth that musicians are getting paid by the people consuming their music. In fact, it is the labels, publishers and performing rights organizations that get paid and then distribute money to musicians. Along the way, that money is subject to all manner of recoupment, administrative fees and questionable distribution formulas that favor corporate-backed music enterprises. So forget about this idea that when you buy music, the musician is making money. Too often, musicians making money is the exception to the rule.

Second, I need to dispel another myth — that when musicians make money, it’s because their music is good, or at least popular. It’s certainly much harder to make money off of bad music, though a casual glance at the Billboard top 100 shows it can be done if you throw enough money at the problem.

But creating music people enjoy is only a small part of the business of success as a musician. It’s the musician’s business team that often determines how lucrative and sustainable the artist’s career is. You may be surprised to compare two artists with the same amount of album downloads and see that one is broke while the other is buying an iced-out watch. A good or bad manager or lawyer is all it takes to make the difference there.

So, now that we understand musicians make money when they have a successful business team that knows how to play the game of squeezing money from labels, publishers and performing rights organizations, we are more qualified to answer the question, “How are musicians supposed to make money in a free culture?”

As you can see, it’s the musician’s business partners that first must answer this question. And no matter how well they understand the potential answers, it may be moot if the labels, publishers and performing rights organizations continue in vein to put off changing their old business models to new ones that embrace technology. I probably don’t have to tell you that this is exactly what’s happening to a large extent.

While efforts drag on to reform mechanical licensing and manage the complex micropayment chaos threatening the industry’s ability to compensate anyone fairly, the truth is none of the musician-industry intermediates are going to be making graceful paradigm shifts into a free or near-free music model anytime soon.

Therefore, the onus is on us, the musicians, to work with our business teams in ways that obviate the need for old methods of making money.

In fact this is exactly what’s happening. Steve “Renman” Rennie, manager of the uber-successful band Incubus, has publicly stated that record labels no longer have much to offer a profitable act. The list of bands foregoing labels is huge — keep in mind that it’s not the musicians saying, “we’re fed up with the old way of doing things” but the business team themselves. When the lawyers, wheelers and dealers that have to keep the money coming in are telling the labels they suck, we ought to take note.

Self-publishing is reaching new heights as well, with the ability to license music through any number of democratizing Internet services that aggregate independent music for paying licensees. And while the performing artist organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and SoundExchange here in the U.S.) continue to try to adapt to the changing landscape, musicians and businesspeople alike are starting to question their efficacy in helping small music businesses make money, noticing how much of the spoils are concentrated among wealthily, powerful industry incumbents.

The question is “How do musicians make money in a Free Culture?” and by now you’ve seen they can’t rely on record labels, publishing companies or performing rights organizations like they used to.

You’ve also seen this is a question that musicians aren’t asking rhetorically out into the ether — their business teams are hearing it, probably once a week at least.

Allow me to answer the question with a quick but relevant anecdotal aside. All around me I see people choosing to go into business for themselves rather than get a job at a corporation. In addition to the difficulty of finding a job opening in the first place, they know that we no longer live in a world where you work for 40 years and automatically become a company man/woman with a fat retirement package and full benefits. So I see many people making the smart move to control their own destiny and start their own small business. They know they can no longer rely on the corporations for sustainability.

The same exact thing is happening in music. Musicians and their business teams are realizing they need to aggressively pursue their own small businesses, no longer able to rely on the old methods of making money. They are taking matters into their own hands and taking full responsibility for their own success or failure.

I realize this may be more abstract of an answer than you were expecting. I’m telling you the way to make money in Free Culture is to look outside labels, publishing and performing/mechanical rights, but not giving any specifics as to what those outside sources are.

The Future of Music Coalition’s recent landmark study on Artist Revenue Streams is the best place to start looking for specific money sources. It identifies 42 discrete revenue streams that musicians and their business teams can draw upon. Granted, a bunch of them have to do with labels, publishing or PROs, but plenty don’t. The short, specific answer would be to comb this list for those exceptions — particularly those under the headers ‘Brand-Related Revenue’ and ‘Fan, Corporate and Foundation Funding’.

I have a marketing background, so I’m keen on thinking of everything as a “marketing funnel”. Basically, picture a funnel where the wide end represents casual interest in your band, and the nozzle is where true fans pass through with their money. Somewhere in the middle are your Facebook and other social media followers.

Free or near-free music represents the widest, cheapest funnel entry possible. In fact, it no longer becomes about marketing music in the traditional sense of manufacturing popularity. By democratizing music discovery, small music businesses have a shot at eking out a modest living. (If that’s at the expense of R Kelly having to take a taxi instead of a limo, so be it.)

Social media provides a filter for the funnel to catch and keep people’s attention. Looked at in purely capitalist terms, following a band on a social network or app is akin to saying, “I would consider spending money on this band or a product affiliated with its music”.

If you’re going to push fans into the money-making nozzle of the funnel, this is where you begin. Not somehow interacting with your online following, especially when it’s in the three- or four-figure range, is like opening a retail store and not staffing it. This is where the concept of “band as brand” becomes critical. If that whole idea makes you want to puke, well, you won’t be puking your way to the bank. Besides, that’s what managers are for.

Now that you’ve pulled your fans to the edge of spending money on your band, it’s time to push them over. This is where the formula for making money as a musician is super-easy to understand. Getting them to a live show to buy a T-shirt is your goal now. Clearly this will not add up to rock and roll riches, but will provide the cash-on-hand you need to run the business of your band. The second this basic revenue stream dries up, so does your business. This was true before Free Culture and still is.

Now, give the fans what they truly want: The ability to directly support you, and feel part and parcel toward your success. Patronage through crowd funding and other inventive means is the new label deal — a deal with your fans who are excited to know their money is going “directly to the cause”. They can see their money paying off in front of their eyes through behind-the-scenes updates leading up to the launch of the product they backed. It truly is one of the most exciting things happening on the Internet and if you’re not privy or convinced, read my recent article Top 3 Reasons Musicians are Scared of Crowd Funding and Why They Should Get Over It.

If that’s not specific enough for you, I’ll give you one more. It may be the least specific idea in and of itself, but from it you can draw many specific streams of revenue. My red-letter advice to musicians trying to make a living in a time of ubiquitous, free access to music…

Make something scarce.

Rather, make anything scarce — it doesn’t matter. Make limited edition vinyl. Make original artwork. Do you have a contingent of golf fans in your audience? Make custom golf balls. Make leather dog collars with your band name. Make a custom ringtone on commission. The only thing it takes is imagination to make something scarce — something sorely in short supply. But something tells me this movement to take back culture from the subjugation of industry and oppressive intellectual property law could mean we’ve got a lot more imagination to spare — and that’s a good thing.

Not incidentally, the same idea of scarcity that applies to your business applies to your music itself. The new scarcity in music is not about how many copies are made available — infinite copies have reached near-zero distribution costs on the Internet. The new scarcity in music is, “how awesome is it?”

We have our whole lives to struggle to make a living, but life is too short not to be awesome.

And remember, true musicians don’t make music to make money. We continue to rock whether it pays the bills or not.