Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Why I am not giving my albums away for free. Sorta.


Late last year and early this year, I put a number of P&C albums on bandcamp for pay-whatever pricing. No minimum. At the time I figured - why not? Sales have been slow, I don't depend on album sales to make a living these days, so why not?

I have come up with a reason why not, so let me see if I can explain.

I recently offered up my new EP, "Hello, World!" for free download. The catch was that you had to email me personally and ask for it. And I have had hundreds of emails requesting the record. Which I am thrilled with. Many people took a few extra minutes to tell me they appreciated me making music, were glad to hear that I had something new, or to tell me how long they had been fans. Some people really went into depth about what my music meant to them, or how they could relate to my present situation of having less and less time to make music.

Many people also took the time to let me know what they thought of the record. No one emailed me back to say it sucks, so thats good… though if you had the balls to email the artist directly and say his record sucks, well hats off to you!

Anyway, all of this interaction was fantastic for me. Because I don't tour, this was a great way to know people are out there, and will make a bit of time in their busy lives to hear what I am up to. Awesome.

So anyway, back to the bandcamp thing, and the free download thing.

So how many times have people downloaded a free P&C album in 6 or so months of bandcamp? A few hundred. How many paid something? A couple dozen.

And thats what I have to show for it. A bit of paypal loot and stats. Stats. Thats it.

Stats aren't worth it, to me. To me, music has value. The music I produce has value and is worth more than statistics. And the value doesn't have to be money. But when I look at a page and see that my records been downloaded X amount of times, and thats it, who cares? Is that why I do this?

No. I do this to know that my music is worth something to someone. And if you wanna take the time to email me, thats enough. If you want to open your wallet, thats enough too I guess. But a log of download links isn't enough for me to keep going.

Does that make sense?

So last call for the no minimum at bandcamp, get it while you can. But you can email me anytime at roddy *at* mcenroe *dot* net and ask for the Hello, World, EP. Or something else if you really want it. Because if you take the time to ask for something, I will take the time to respond, and hook you up, on a one to one level.

P&C bandcamp -> http://peanutsandcorn.bandcamp.com

Also, read this article on thetrichordist. My mind was blown.

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Peace, my friends!
Roddy

2 comments:

Rob said...

You mentioned in an earlier post you were going to press 100 copies on CD. Any idea when they will be available?

mcenroe said...

100 copies available next week. I will be doing a maillout with an update and some package deals.