Give all your music away

I think every small indie musician should consider just giving all their music away for free, outside the streaming ecosystem in the easiest way possible, “pay if you want” style. Not as a teaser for something bigger, just give all of it away. But alongside that, give people a way to optionally support you.

I think this is the only truly viable way forward for musicians who cannot, or don’t want to, play the industry game (which is a losing game unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in PR and marketing).

Let’s be totally honest: Streaming and AI have fully commoditized music. It’s market value for most is effectively zero. I don’t like it, but we can’t do anything about that in small pockets. Many of us small indie musicians are comfortable streaming any music – even each other’s music – using our service of choice ourselves. We’re just as guilty as everyone else.

But we also want to change things so that it’s feasible to make even a portion of a living through art. To do that, we need to slowly change habits of listeners (including our own), and therefore change our tactics.

What’s an easy way to start? Make it really easy to get all your stuff, but on your terms.

I took a page from my internet friend Dave Hawkins’ book and put my entire latest album on the Kid Lightbulbs website. You can listen in full for free, even download it in whatever format you want (via Faircamp), and optionally throw me a few bucks in a few ways (including Venmo). All my other albums are there too.

Nobody’s actually paid me (yet) through this mechanism, but I kinda don’t care. The point is that it’s there, and if people see my stuff & want to listen to any of it, they don’t need a streaming app to do so.

Sure, people can discover me through Spotify because I have a few releases still up there, it’s free (but bad) marketing. But most people find my stuff through my posting, writing and in li’l communities I’m in, and I suspect many artists find success this way. It doesn’t cost anything other than the website hosting costs I’m already paying for. Plus, my listeners now

• can own my music
• have been to my website
• can join my email list
• don’t need a streaming service to hear kid lightbulbs

Plus, giving your music to these communities for free is awesome! It cultivates good will, and gives you a great base of fans to help spread the word with you. Some of them will pay you down the line, if you give them a way to.

Even if you make $0 on selling your music, the act of a listener downloading your music directly instead of going to Spotify (or any other service like it) helps to encourage the idea of owning music again and reduce further entrenching streaming as the model.