Thursday, April 07, 2005

Music: If they don't like your music, they wont buy it

Just had a little blip of a brainstorm.

If you give your music to somebody and they don't like it. They wouldn't have bought it in the first place. So, by giving your music away to that person, you haven't really lost a sale. It doesn't hurt my ability to earn money off my music if everybody who hates it has a copy.

Now you might lose out on the "I bought this CD cause I thought I would like it but I don't" type of purchases, but who really wants to earn a lot of money off their music that way.

What is much more likely is that the inverse will be true. I find I'm less likely to buy music these days because I don't know if I will like it. Add to that, the fact that it's very hard for me to find out if I will like a band. The best way to find out is to listen to some music. Some of the best music I've found is because a friend played it for me, or recommended it to me.

So how does this translate into a business plan? Good question. I'm not sure I have it all figured out yet, but there's gotta be something that can be built on top of this. My original idea was subscription based, but maybe it doesn't need to be.

We'll see how things go with the EP release. Maybe there is a model closer to that that might be easier to implement.

The fact that the music is released under creative commons means we get to play around with technology.

What if we could extend the creative commons searching functionality that Yahoo has. Add the recommendation and rating system, build in a good way for people to pay the musicians to make more music or because of the enjoyment we've gotten out of the previous work and kablamo.

I love how podcasting can influence this. Podcasting is basically nothing more than a content delivery mechanism. One that I think is well suited to pushing new music at people. There just has to be a good business model surrounding it or else artists wont be able to afford to make cool music.

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