How to Use Social Media as a Musician: Pay What You Like
The great thing about being a musician in this day and age is that you don’t need to rely on a record company in order to get your music out there. We are toward the end of the era where an artist needs to sell their soul to the devil/media conglomerate in order to reach their audience. How is it possible you ask? The power of the internet is at your fingertips!
In this post-napster world, you can’t expect to be making your money from selling albums. Not that you’d make much money from record sales anyway unless you’re a megastar with enough clout to take your fair share from the record company, but that’s beside the point. Eventually, around 2007, some artists decided since they can’t beat piracy, might as well join them.
In that year, Radiohead were done with their contract with EMI, and decided they’d had enough of dealing with record labels. For their album, In Rainbows (which by the way, is one of their best, go listen to it if you haven’t already), they decided to try something different. The album was initially put out as a digital download where customers could choose how much they would pay for it. Although many people paid nothing for it, many dedicated fans paid what they normally would pay for music. Although they ended up going with a more conventional release for their album after that, the pay what you want idea is still pretty useful for other musicians (I’m not going to talk about Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke releasing his latest solo album on BitTorrent, since we should probably wait a while to see how that experiment works out).
So, what good will a pay what you like model do if you aren’t a beloved 90’s British alternative rock band who keep relevant with experimental later work? If you are in an unknown, unsigned band like I am, then just getting your music out there should be your number one priority. If you are in the music business to get rich, you should find a new business. You should be doing this for the love of your art. With that in mind, people are more likely to take a chance on an unknown band’s music if they don’t have to pay for it. If people like your music, they will likely spend money on your future releases.
(Shameless, but relevant plug time)
My band, Ipswich, uses this model for our album, which is essentially a demo since it was recorded before I joined and we started playing live shows. You can download it on soundcloud.com, a popular website unknown musicians use to distribute their music. Here is the link, where you can pay what you want for it:
http://ipswichband.bandcamp.com/
Also, here’s a youtube link to that radiohead album I was talking about earlier. Seriously people, it’s good enough I would have paid full price for it had I been into radiohead at the time it was released:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSx6hXHzRHc
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