Holiday music exchange: a modest proposal.

[rivka]

I know that there are at least a couple of people on my friends list who like Christmas music, or general winter holiday music. (In particular, I'm thinking of fairoriana and patgreene - but there are probably others.)

Would anyone be interested in a CD mix exchange with a winter holiday theme?

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Not quite, on interpreting me. It isn't sales that are relevant to the swapping of music aiding artists, though I do indeed believe based on the evidence that free access to music is crucial to driving sales of said music. Rather, the fact is that in terms of popular music, most artists make little or no money from the sales of lp's, tapes, and cd's. At least not if they are signed with a major label, they don't. This is because royalties seldom if ever catch up with the up front cost that the artist "owes" the label for studio time, equipment rental, session musicians, etc., which the label will deduct back out as the album makes money. It's a system not unlike the company store of old. Where artists actually make their money is in their percentage of ticket sales for performances. To make more money, performances need to generate more ticket sales and more and larger bookings. To sell more tickets, artists need to build audience. But to build audience they need to get their music out to as many people as possible, in order for the music to find its audience, and vice versa. And radio, formerly a fairly good source for the free passing of music to potential audience, is growing far narrower in its selection as it becomes more corporate and homogeneous. And even worse than publishers, major record labels have little time or money for the promotion of their midlist artists. They have a model of success that is heavily weighted toward having a few mega-selling superstars. So midlist and other non-superstar artists need other ways to reach their audience. Thus, it is beneficial to the artist's bottom line for their music to be passed freely among potential new fans.

To the extent that the metaphor of theft (which I take to be the motive behind moralizing about swapping music) applies to passing copyright music around to other interested listeners, it is the label, not the artist, who is being deprived, and on the field of moral probity, the major labels appear to me to be bad actors. But, in fact, the label is likely to benefit, too, rather than be deprived of income, because extending the audience is likely to increase sales not only of music swapped but of prior and subsequent releases by the artist as well. Also, the metaphor of theft is a very bad one to apply to passing music around anyway, though that is another long discussion, perhaps best left for another day. Also, I have no idea how the model for popular music relates to that for classical.