Blink 182’s Tom Delonge: “Put It Out There For Free”
"…if you look at your band with a modern filter, your band has so much potential to have all these different elements about it…you can monetize all these other elements, and not really worry about selling the record. In fact, I believe that, you should take down every barrier and put as much music out there for free…"
Blink 182 guitarist Tom Delonge shares a deep understanding of where the music industry is and may be headed. You could dismiss this as coming from the perspective of a platinum artist. But listen carefully and you'll hear some real insights. (Guitar Center via Techdirt)
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All I hear is free, free, free…monetize. First and foremost we are in the MUSIC business not the merchandising business. How will an artist pay from the cool web portal, clever graphics, etc. if you have no money. Independent artists still have to buy the computer the runs the DAW that records the songs that they have to give away just to sell a few tshirts. I disagree wholeheartedly with this model.
One last thought, I firmly believe that even if a home recording can and does sound good enough to sell, it cant compete with a studio album recorded by an artist with enough money to produce it.
Again, another major label act who has an huge following bought and paid for by 3 major labels giving newbies “FREE” advice and doing a little self advertising. Millions were spent on Blink182 – they are well financed. Of course they have no problem giving away their music for free, they want to get heard and are now competing with all of the NOISE from the millions of great indie bands that have sprung up.
I’ve never heard anyone say that true art is about creating something that will appeal to the masses ($$$ – major label talk) -what about Niche. Art is art.
It would be nice to hear some success stories and get some advice from true indie acts who started with nothing – no secret involvement with a major label. Myspace is jammed with major label acts posing as indies. We should expose them and put up a list.
This free model is all well and good…but what happens years down the road when people expect all music to be free? We’re near that point now, but if musicians like the above continue to purport to speak for all of us (just by virtue of his success), there’s gonna be a problem.
I think there will always be fans willing to pay for our goods, as they realize we need monetary support, but there is this pervasive mentality spreading that says…”well, artists get enough money from touring, so we can download for free.” This may be well and good for some folk, but for a part time student/musician like myself, I make my money from CD’s…because I only do local touring where I can fit it in.
If musicians are going to get into the merchandising business, they are going to need to know a lot about direct marketing, design, working with manufacturers, etc. I’ve been covering some of those topics on my blog because a lot of people say this is the future of the music business, but don’t give many details in what is involved.
http://brandsplusmusic.blogspot.com/
I also think that if the point of music has now become a way to sell “stuff,” you might as well sell other companies’ stuff as your own if their stuff is better and they want to compensate you well for it. In other words, whether you are running your own merchandise, or being sponsored by a company so that your music is used to sell their “stuff,” it’s still about the stuff-selling business.
There are certainly enough people in the world that already feel that music should be free. I can remember having this discussion 10 years ago when Napster popped up. I have paid a lot of attention in the last few years to Gerd Leonhard’s “Feels Like Free” theories but there will still be so many unanswered questions. Even in a “Feels Like Free” system, indies will have a very difficult time collecting any money for streaming or cached files ala Spotify. At the end of the day I suppose that many will be unable to do music for a living and there will be little or no working musician middle class. I must say that I grapple with several issues attached to this topic. 1) The sense of entitlement that many feel they should have to free music and 2) The sense of entitlement that many artists feel when it comes to their career. My father made his living in the book publishing business and they are now starting to deal with the same issues as the music business. As someone who was luckier than most in this business I am torn over the excitement I feel about new technologies and how I feel about those same technologies making it harder and harder for a new artist or act to actually attain some reasonable and sustaining level of success. Tom Delong, in my humble opinion, is the last person on earth that indie artists should be listening to. Nothing against him or any of his projects but I without the old business model, the band probably would not had the huge success they had. At least Metallica earned their stripes before Lars went off on Napster 10 years ago.
I think that people who hate to hear “FREE” are usually songwriters or people who have never really been in the trenches of being indie.
I work with nothing but urban indie artists who have never received a check from ASCAP or BMI, gotten radio spins or recorded in a full blown studio..yet they have cult followings and make impressive income from shows, verses/features, merch and direct sales from mom & pop stores.
Taking the distributor out at the indie label has a great upside on margins. More work, but you can sustain a legitimate hustle…for the time being that is lol.
I also want to add that most if not all of the successful indie rap acts make their music freely available and give away tons of bonus music in the form of mixtapes.
– Danny
The challenge with the DIY model is that there are so many people hoping to succeed at it. There’s so much music out there now, much of it legitimately free, that it’s overwhelming. If everyone is adopting the same techniques (i.e., give away the music for free and sell something else), there won’t be enough money to go around. Everyone is going to compete for places to play, for example. There aren’t enough venues or hours in the day to support all the artists/bands who want/need live shows to generate income for them.
So I try to look at the realities of what the new music business model is and will be to have people think all of it through before dreaming of becoming the next DIY success story.
The bottom line is that recorded music has a ton of value, it just can’t be utilized right now. Every day I see people on the streets walking around with earbuds and iPods. Does an iPod have value? Yes, it does….anywhere from $150 to $300 bucks from most retailers. So let us get this straight then…people will spend money on the hardware, but not on the actual music that makes the hardware useful! The hardware exists for the music, not the other way around. If hardware companies started giving away their players for free, that would be wonderful but it ain’t gonna happen….which is why the hardware has usuable value; you can’t have it unless you pay for it. Unfortunately for us artists, the process by which we convert the demand for our work into usable value (money in the real world) has been broken…the longer it stays broken, the more society as a whole deems that it should stay broken for the good of all. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
The problem with monetizing the music itself is that so many people are creating it and willingly giving it away for free. A lot of people want to create music, even if they aren’t getting paid for it. So when you have so many people asking you to listen to their music and giving it to you for free, it becomes hard for most people to make a living at this.
Music is a great form of self-expression, creativity, and community. So do it because you enjoy it. Making a living at it may be much harder to do.
Even if some artists withhold music because they aren’t getting paid, someone else will come along and do it for free, so there’s always going to be lots of music.
“you can monetize all these other elements” …Yes, lets sell trinkets. Glow in the dark trinkets.
Just to play devil’s advocate — you’re saying a rapper can do just fine giving away music for free; what about producers/beatmakers? What income model would you suggest for 9th Wonder or RJD2 if music is free?
My point is, there are people that do valuable creative work in the music world, that don’t play concerts. Let’s not toss the ‘music-has-value’ baby out with the ‘piracy-is-satan’ bathwater.
I am happy to pay a reasonable price for good music, and I know I’m not alone.
This reminded me of a little irony I found the other day — the bittorrent client Transmission has a pop-up window asking you for donations…
Maybe musicians should be the first ones to put their work up as a torrent? At least then you get to put your own message on it.
Yes, that’s what is has come to and not everyone wants to be in the trinket business.
My advice is for you to look for the dayjob that is the most satisfying and pays the best.
And then play music, but don’t necessarily expect to make money from it.
It doesn’t always make sense to get into the trinket business in order to play music. Maybe you should be in some other business in order to play music. Selling trinkets isn’t usually the most lucrative way to support your music avocation.
The combination of music’s increasing ‘freeness’ and the constantly improvement of recording technology, IMHO, is basically going to be the death of professional recording studios (which I believe is already well underway). Why would an indie musician spend $20k on studio time in order to record something that is essentially promotional? Especially when a perfectly acceptable home studio might cost a quart of that.
Perhaps there will be a market for talented home studio types to turn semi-pro, charging ~$10/hour to make someone’s album in their basement on weekends. Like everything else in the ‘new music industry’ (marketing, booking, PR, web fluency, graphic design, etc), successful musicians will be those that master engineering and production, or can convince someone talented to do it free/cheaply.
The idea that making music has gotten so cheap that everyone can do it is what spurred me to write this:
http://brandsplusmusic.blogspot.com/2009/09/people-formerly-known-as-fans.html
I see the lines between fans and creators blurring to such an extent that I think everyone will be a music creator/producer/promoter to one degree or another. Not everyone has an equal amount of talent, but I see a lot of people wanting to express themselves.
The same dynamics have driven down the amount of money that writers and filmmakers are getting, too. There is so much free content out there (a lot of it not particularly good, but some of it very good), that it is hard to charge for it.