Thoughts on money for music

Here I mostly want to talk about why I decided to go over to "Pay what seems to you the right amount" song releases on the website. But first I should probably say: it's likely that some or all of the new songs will end up on a CD at some point too, which would be for sale at some price or prices invented by me, in classic 20th-century tradition :-)

Why this way?

  • Decrease the friction. Far more people will hear the music if they can just take some, try it out and pass it on.

    This is also why I'm not even making people give me their email address before they can get a download from here. People might want to listen to the music and not want to give me their email address. (Though if you want to be on my emailing list(s) as well, please do go ahead :-) )

  • Increase the velocity. I'm not fast at recording*.

    * This statement could win some kind of award for "Understatement of the year" ::falls about laughing::

    Add to that the delay caused by having to wait till 10 or more songs are ready all at once, and some artwork and all that... the timescale becomes a disincentive in itself to work on things, because the exciting part is so long away in the future. The idea that I can finish one song, upload it and have people listen to it THE SAME DAY... oooh! Much more cool!

    It'll still be a long wait sometimes probably, but maybe a bit shorter than it used to be :-)

  • Song as the unit. Surfing around one day, I read something about "track as the unit" versus "album as the unit".

    As I read that, it just clicked into place: of course Single Bass is a "song as the unit" thing. I can put the songs together into albums, but that's a whole other kettle of fish from writing them.

  • Fairness. Money is worth different amounts to different people. A trifling amount to one person is a small fortune to another. Fixed prices can't groove with that.

  • Payment method obstacles. From some places, it's difficult to transfer money to the UK (even if you've got the money in the first place). E.g. if there's no PayPal in your country and you don't have a credit card. But I still want people in those places to hear the music.

  • A world of human trust. Most people have an innate sense of fairness, and if a song means a lot to them, they'll want to give something back (not necessarily money). I like the idea of living in that world. So there's a bit of "be the change you want to see" in there as well.

  • Embedded information. I really like knowing which songs are people's favourites. By inviting people to pay after they've heard the songs - and perhaps also lived with them for a while - I'm giving the money an additional role: as a quantitative way for people to express which songs they valued most highly. Money very often acts as a kind of feedback mechanism anyway, but this makes the feedback more information-rich. It means that every time people give me money, there's an additional bonus of satisfying my curiosity on that front :-)

    (If you're paying for more than one song at a time, be sure to use Bandcamp's "shopping cart", now that it has one - new at July 2011. That's a little less clicking for you, and marginally lower transaction costs for me.)