It seems like the last thing people want to do these days is exchange money for recorded music. Artists and labels have long considered revenue from band merchandise merely a supplement to money from album sales, but as a September 10 article in the New York Times Magazine pointed out, some are beginning to see merch as the real product, with music just sort of attached to it: You could buy the most recent Of Montreal album, False Priest (Polyvinyl), in the form of a T-shirt with a download code. The new Matthew Dear album, Black City (Ghostly International), is available as a $125 sculpture, reminiscent of the cryptic obelisk on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence, that has a download code inscribed into it. The magazine quotes something Sub Pop Records vice president Megan Jasper said in an August post on the Seattle Weekly‘s music blog: “We used to give many of these tchotchke items away for free in an effort to entice people to pay for the music. But we’re considering flipping our strategy so that people pay for the toy and receive the music for free.”
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With album sales falling through the floor, lots of artists have taken to heart the conventional wisdom that they have to use social-networking sites to survive. If a band connects more intimately with its fans, the thinking goes, then the fans will feel more loyalty and spend more money—not just on music but on merch and concert tickets. The weak link in this logic is pretty obvious, and I expect to hear a lot of ideas in the months to come about how to realize the presumed connection between social-networking juice and revenue. Especially since the music business, among its myriad attempts to figure out how artists and label people can still earn a living, looks like it might be ready to try something pretty radical: asking people to pay for music with buzz.
The question remains, though: How do you translate buzz into gear or rent or studio time or frozen burritos? If a song is worth one tweet, does that make one tweet worth anything?
Reed thinks crowdsourcing is a natural fit with promotion. “You look at companies like Cornerstone and they’ve been trying to do this with street teams for years, but no one’s been able to say, until Twitter and Facebook, ‘Do this thing which is beneficial for our label and we’ll give you something in return.’”
