Archive for Did You Know
Goldilocks solutions to free vs. full price album acquisition
April 11th, 2011 • Did You Know
I am of the persuasion that downloading music for free is a great thing. I get the damage it’s doing to the “music industry” but I’m a punk at heart and think that the cathartic advantage of music is more powerful than the practical advantage of money. But I frequently disagree with myself here. Really. If you’re going to dedicate yourself completely to your musical “career” you need a way to eat and sleep and actually produce the music. I do want them to make some money! Some people have used the internet to introduce a lot of awesome solutions to rectify the damaging boom to musicians’ livelihood that it initially created.
A lot of websites, most notably Rhapsody, let you pay a monthly subscription fee to listen to their entire catalog (which is a pretty big catalog). Problems with Rhapsody and other sites like it are that a monthly fee can kind of add up and it’s kind of just access to a library rather than a super cheap book store.
Another solution is the Bandcamp route. It allows artists to upload any music that they want and choose the price at which it can be downloaded. This includes setting a $0 price and, going the Radiohead route, allowing the audience to set its own price. I love this. A lot. Bandcamp is slightly limited to smaller bands, though. This can be fun for finding hidden wonders, but you really have to either know what you’re going in for or be ready to spend a few hours having fun and digging, which usually yields some cool results.
A newly created site, Groopease, has a new approach. It’s pretty small scale but that’s a start! The site introduces a new band maybe twice a week and has an album discounted ridiculously (usually around 50%, but I did just get The Salvadors $10 album for $3!). 5% of the sales are donated to various causes (this week’s is Empower Nepali Girls Foundation). Also, it’s send you a physical copy of the album. A real live copy. You can touch it. You can put it in a CD player, if you still even have access to one. It’s also been working with Obscure Sound blog to really diversify the artist choices. This is a totally different approach from the search-based internet sources that have been dominating (and which will continue to dominate) and it’s kind of interesting. It’s always exciting to get an emailing update about a new band the site has chosen to promote. It’s cutting out the hours of fun searching on Bandcamp-like sites, which can be nicely easy sometimes (like at the height of finals week).
You’re (almost) always going to be able to find an album for free online somewhere. You’re always going to be able to find an album for full price somewhere. Now you’re getting more opportunities to kind of pay, kind of get things for free, kind of let the bands choose how they wish to share their music! I’m really warming up to this whole internet thing.
Artistic Temperament
August 26th, 2010 • Did You Know, Japan
My friends are nice enough to pick out some of the more interesting articles from the New York Times and send them to me. WRBC will now pay it forward and send them to you:
Did you know?
April 6th, 2010 • Did You Know
Tags: concerts, crystal castles
Bands that have performed concerts sponsored by WRBC since 2007 have been played 57,617,765 times on the internet music tracking site Last.fm. (Data as of 4/6/10, includes concerts that WRBC cosponsored with other organizations)
This means the average WRBC performer has been played 2,618,989.32 times as of April 6, 2010.
The most popular musician on Last.fm presented by WRBC was Crystal Castles, with a total of 20,160,152 plays.