Passionirates: Why Allowing People To Download Your Music Might Make You Successful

Has anyone else noticed that despite the seemingly never-ending number of startup music services, only a handful ever are used by the public at large? For the most part, all I ever hear about these companies is an article about their inception on hypebot or Digital Music News, and then they proceed to fade into oblivion. In a recent article Neil Cartwright explains why so many of these companies never go anywhere: they aren't appealing to the right crowd. Neil, citing The Tipping Point to prove his point, says that most companies try to market to the indifferent masses when they should be aiming at the passionate few.

The article includes a chart, which classifies 12% of the population as being passionate about music. Enthusiastic fans make up 25%, casual fans make up 27% and the people who couldn't give less of a fuck come in at 37%. Most music services (including artists and record labels) try and aim at the last category, when they should be aiming for the first. The reason is that people who are passionate about music actively seek it out more then anyone else. They spend countless hours trawling through the underbelly of the Internet to find new and exciting bands. And after crawling through all the crap, they will share any gems they find. They'll post about it on Facebook. They'll blog about it. They'll play it for their friends. They'll talk to anyone who will listen (and even some who won't). Why? Because this new band/service/label/whatever is FUCKING AMAZING!!!!!!

From here, the effect grows and grows, trickling down through the enthusiasts and casuals, until it reaches The Tipping Point and manages to get the great unwashed on their side. This is how a band or music service (really, any service, but it's more true of music and art) gets big: not by going directly to the masses, but in a sort of trickle-down effect (Reaganomics, when applied to music, apparently does work after all). According to Neil, this is why most startups fail, and how the big services (he names iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon) got big in the first place.

This is also why you should let your music be pirated and shared. In fact, you should upload it to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid yourself. You should hand it out to your local record store clerks. You should throw your album or demo up on Mediafire, and send it to every niche blog that'll take it. Why? Because these are the methods by which the enthusiastic fans find their music in the first place. Don't take my word for it though, check out this study that shows that people who download music are 10 times more likely to pay for music as well. This is the mark of the enthusiast: someone who defends their downloading by saying "I'll pay for what I like", and actually will.

And I should know. After all, I am an enthusiast. I used to run a blog that reviewed and, ahem, "shared" music. A majority of my money and energy goes towards discovering new music. At last count, I have about 8 months worth of music (that's sorted, there's at least another month that I haven't gotten through yet) if it ran continuously, and I have listened to all of it at least once, often more then once. I have also talked about bands, and then watched them get big: local thrash metal band Havok being one such example. While I can hardly attribute their success to myself alone (I'm not nearly narcissistic enough for that), I can contribute it to the combined proselytizing of me and my ilk.

This is why you should let people download your music: it gets it into the hands of the people who matter, in terms of marketing. And because it's free, an enthusiast is more likely to take a chance, and give you a listen. Granted, at this point you need to be talented enough at whatever you do to catch and enthusiasts ear, but if you ever had a realistic shot at being successful, you needed that talent anyways. If you do manage to impress the Passionirates (passionate pirates, for those of you who struggle with portmanteaus) though, then it's off to the races.

Music As Water

I read an interesting article recently about how the concept of music as water may well be harmful to the future of the music industry. Given that this concept is the driving force behind subscription services such as Spotify, it caught my eye.

Simply put, the idea of music as water says that we will treat musical products like we treat water, we pay for all that we can use on a monthly basis. This idea came about because of the way that music has come to be viewed similarly to water. It's freely available, there's a lot of it, we use it often and we get it on demand. Some of these points have been true of music for a long time (the quantity and how much we want/use it), others have come about with the advent of digital piracy (free-ly available and the ability to get it on demand).

The article points out that music as water reinforces an already existing consumer devaluation of music. If we cater to the idea that music is essentially free, we backup the notion that music is almost worthless economically. This would be backed up by the perception of the music industry being in trouble as a whole, and rampant piracy. It would seem that these troubles would stem from a consumer attitude not valuing music as a whole, and therefore not paying for it. Given how harmful this attitude already has been, fueling it further could be a disaster.

However, maybe these perceptions aren't as accurate as we thought. Another recent hypebot article states the number of people who buy music is growing, and has been for the last couple years. The former article also mentions that the author has also seen growth from streaming services, but attributes this to an older generation who is used to paying for music.

However, this conclusion seems to be the biggest fallacy present. After all, though generations existing prior to the information age are more used to buying music, they are also less likely to buy music period. According to "This Is Your Brain On Music" as we get older, we tend to stop looking for new artists. We become set in our ways to an extent. While this certainly doesn't apply to everyone, I would argue that older people who do continue to voraciously consume new music do so because they have always done so, and are set in their ways as well. Even so, the majority of new music is consumed by a younger audience, and one that is used to being able to get it for free. Given that they can get things for free, why would they spend money on it?

Though we may use piracy and streaming services, the second article demonstrates that we also tend to buy (in some form) the music we truly care about and value. This is music is essentially a piece of culture, and the culture someone owns says a bit about who they are. It's a way of showing to others and to ourselves that we truly belong to the culture conveyed by the music we own. It's like the difference between owning a painting and looking at a digital scan for free via Google Images. While there is literally no sensory difference between the two mediums, the former shows others that we truly like this artist. While we may have a motive ulterior to simply enjoying the piece, that motive is enough to encourage us to plunk down money for it. This is because music, and all art, is social in nature.

Given this social aspect, I truly believe that people will never entirely move away from owning music. While they have moved away from ownership, this is because ownership was often necessary to check something out if it wasn't on the radio. Given that this is no longer true, people are only buying what they truly value. This is in part why singles sales have outstripped album sales. In many styles, an album is a collection of a couple of good songs and mediocre filler. Since they don't value filler, and don't need to purchase it in order to get what they truly desire, they don't buy it.

While the first article has a point, it is flawed in several aspects, and this comes from the fact that the author is viewing music as a product, and not as anything of cultural value. He is making the same mistake that he is decrying in the younger generation. While music as water could be potentially bad, it will never get as extreme as he seems to think. After all, even though we all have water bills and freely available water fountains, if we truly need it enough, we will still buy bottled water. In other words, despite being able to get music for free, if we truly like some artist or album enough, we will buy it.