Music and Money, Money and Music

The Cover of My New Single, "Pretty Blade Trickster:
Live at Lestat's," Which is on Sale Today on Bandcamp

Today I am excited and proud that my new live single, "Pretty Blade Trickster: Live at Lestat's" is on sale on my Bandcamp site.  It is 99 cents, and there is an option on Bandcamp for people to pay more if they feel moved to lend additional financial support to my music.  You can buy it HERE.

It was somewhat challenging to decide whether or not to put this single on sale.  There has, for years now, been great debate over at which point it is best for an artist who is not well-known far and wide to begin selling his or her music.  There are many people out there who recommend that musicians and bands give away just about everything they offer for free, until they have a very large and measurable fan base.

Their theory, if I understand it correctly, is that someone may listen to the music for free and become a fan, someone who will buy music from that artist in the future.  But that same person might not even listen to the music if they have to pay for it before even becoming familiar with the artist.  In this line of thinking, charging a price for the music is seen as a deterrent to accumulating a fan base of large enough size in the future to sell lots of music.

There has also, for several years now, been a trend in selling music towards offering people the choice pay whatever they like.  Radiohead was the most widely-known of this a few years back, when they put a new, full LP on sale and allowed fans to pay whatever they liked for it.  They could pay 1 cent or $100.00.  

I still hear a lot of people say, that because of the impact of the so-called Digital Revolution, that "no one is buying music anymore." But in 2011, music sales worldwide went up for the first time since 2004, and in 2012, they went up in the U.S. for the first time since 2004.  There were 330 million total albums sold worldwide in 2010, and 330 million in 2011.  Last year in the U.S. alone, a total of 1.6 billion individual units (including sales of singles, music videos and albums, in both physical and digital form) were sold.  To me, numbers like 330 million and 1.6 billion would seem to contradict that claim that no one is buying music.  

So who knows...it's another mysterious step on this mysterious musical journey of mine.  In the end, I decided, this is what I want to get paid to do with my life, so...I might as well charge for at least some of the music I put out.  I spend a lot of time writing, practicing and rehearsing, and I try to put out the best songs I can.  After that, it's really beyond my control and up to you and others out there, what happens next.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog here and for reading, I appreciate it very much.

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