If you haven’t noticed, I’ve dropped the price of my music on my website store significantly. Crows Into Swine is $4.99 for a download that gives you the option to grab the entire album in whatever format you wish. (Side note: Please for the love of scented towels, choose a lossless format. You can always down-convert but you can’t up-convert an mp3 to lossless. Don’t be lame.)
Most people who come to see me play know that I pretty much give out my CD’s for free at my shows, so why don’t I just post my music for free or under the Radiohead-pioneered ‘pay what you want’ plan on my website? There are a few reasons, but here’s the primary one: value.
Let’s skip to a related sidetrack here: I use Google Alerts to help me keep a pulse on whether anyone is linking to, berating, or pondering my music (or hairstyle) on the internet. Around late December I started getting flooded with links to torrent sites where people had posted my music for free. I checked them all out and there were comments and people thanking the poster for posting it. And no it wasn’t me.
Which is awesome. It made me very happy to see the sheer number of torrents that my music was reaching. I didn’t even have to do anything.
Seriously I fucking love this.
For the past decade we’ve heard the record industry state that torrents are killing music. Killing MUSIC?
Hell no. Torrents are exposing the over bloated completely artist-unfriendly infested belly pustule that the record industry has become, yes.
But music? No. You can’t kill music. How do you kill art practically? You can kill someone’s drive to make art – but if you did I would argue that maybe they weren’t really making ‘art’ to begin with or that they should toughen the fuck up. You can’t pursue this seriously with any degree of happiness unless you have a do or die attitude. (But I digress into a tangent of a tangent aka another topic for another time.)
We’re just shifting the dynamics of power here. The music industry has essentially been under an ‘Occupy’ movement for the better part of the past decade. The power and the choice is shifting back to the artist and more importantly the PEOPLE.
When I was signed and touring in the early part of the 2000′s I had to protect the CD’s and music we made like a farmer constantly under threat of weevil attack- I wanted to give it out for free, but in order to sell MY OWN CD’s at shows I had to buy them from the label at $7 a pop and then sell them back to you at a price that would enable my band to keep touring. Plus, the entire band made just about $1 per CD sold in quarterly royalties. One. Fucking. Dollar. How the hell is this scenario fair to the fans or the artist? The labels are the only ones making money here. The realization: Maybe my band had made that music, but the label now owned both it and the physical means to hear it.
Nowadays the only people who have control of my music are my self and my audience. That’s some shift in the dynamic alright.
Take the music you want. It’s not stealing. If anyone tells you it is, they’re out of touch and clinging to a dinosaur’s breaking back. EMBRACE the music and art you want. Who cares if people think it makes music ‘disposable’? Great songs stay in your soul and mind – a great song will reverberate in your skull even when you’re not listening to it. Disposable music will remain disposable no matter how it’s obtained (remember the used CD stores of the 90′s?) and GREAT music will stay with you like a cuddly Bush Baby; adorably bug-eyed, smiley and sinking its fangs into you when you least expect it.
So out of touch- don't be him
You’re getting music. Not a product. An experience.
The bottom line is that there are places you can get my music for free. And I encourage you to do so whether listening through a service like Spotify or grabbing it on a torrent site.
But why am I charging 5 bucks for my new album on my own site if I think this way? Well again, value. I personally like paying for my music. When I go see a band play and I like their stuff, I will buy their music and/or merch- simply because I want to show some direct support. I appreciate the value of what they’re giving me and I want to give something back in return.
So I keep a price up on my site because I respect that there are people out there who would like to know the value of what they’re getting. And $5 is reasonable to me. Again, you can grab it for free in many many places out there – so please do so if you’d rather do that. Just make sure you get the music if you want it.
Here’s another fact:
Truth is, if you contact me directly for a link to download my album for free, I’ll probably send you one. I value the fact that you want it enough to reach out to me for it. That’s fucking cool of you to do, so I’d like to reward it if I can; just like I give out my CD’s at shows because I love the fact that you decided to spend the evening listening to my music. I’m on Twitter, Facebook and my email is right up in the header of my site.
So buy, take, or reach out – you have the power of choice and, no matter what the record execs or fear mongers say these days, they’re all good ones! Just play that shit. 
