harvest

Currently listening to Opeth - Blackwater Park

As a college student in the late 90's, I took advantage of the all-you-can-download music buffet that Napster offered at the time. As time wore on and I educated myself on the issue of downloading, I changed my tune and deciding that it was unethical to obtain an artist's work without paying for it (unless, of course, the artist was offering it for free, as in the recent Radiohead example). As such, I have tried to go back and purchase legitimate copies of everything that I ever downloaded. I think I'm close to succeeding in that goal.

Buying legitimate copies of music, be they electronic or physical, is an expensive proposition for a person like me, who has an insatiable hunger for exposure to new music, artists and genres. By now, I have well over 2000 albums in my possession, with 99% of those albums being in CD format. Music is an expensive love and hobby, but I never look around my home office where all this music resides and think to myself that I could have purchased some other really cool stuff if I hadn't bought all this music. We all spend our money differently and for different reasons.

I think many music fans live with the misconception that all musicians are wealthy and make tons of money off of album sales, or in general. This is the justification that illegal downloaders frequently use for their behavior. This couldn't be further from the truth. The majority of musicians out there never make it big, and have to scrounge to get by. I always knew that artists made little from album sales, but a recent article in Rolling Stone really drove that home for me:

In Rainbows, Radiohead's seventh album, was released in October, and any talk of its content was immediately overshadowed by its method of delivery. As everyone knows, the band, in a surprise announcement, decided to release the album as a download on its Web site, where fans could pay whatever they wished, anywhere from nothing to £99.99 (about $212). Though Radiohead have refused all requests to release official numbers, even the estimates of the online survey group comScore — estimates that the band dismisses as low — would make the experiment a success. According to comScore, a "significant percentage" of the 1.2 million visitors to Radiohead's Web site in October downloaded the album, and while comScore claims only two out of five downloaders paid anything at all, the payers averaged $6 per album — which, factoring in the freeloaders, works out to about $2.26 per album, more than Radiohead would have made in a traditional label deal.

That's not much at all, when you consider that the average CD probably sells for $15 each. In any case, knowing this, I've often wondered where I could buy CDs in order to ensure that the artist was making as much money as possible. I mean, sure, record companies, distributors and retailers do serve a purpose and they need to be paid as well, but when the artist is making less than 15% of the CD's actual selling price, that just seems wrong.

I frequent a few different music bulletin boards. A few years ago, a mostly unknown jazz pianist who also frequents one of these boards started a thread in which he asked if anyone was interested in hearing his music in a high-resolution format such as DVD-Audio. Nothing was ever announced in the thread, and I forgot about it. A couple weeks ago, I remembered this thread and musician and sent him an email to inquire about this album and whether or not a high-resolution version was ever made. He replied and told me that he could never figure it out, so he didn't do it. I offered some technical assistance and directed him to a program that he could use to do it himself, but he said that he was too busy building a studio to play around with it again. I was disappointed, but told him that I'd buy his album anyway, and asked him what the best way would be for me to purchase it and ensure that he got the maximum amount of money from my purchase. He told me that I could send him the check personally, and that he'd not only send me that album, but also my choice of one of the other three albums he's recorded as well, free of charge. The check will go to him tomorrow, and in a few weeks (he's currently living in Mexico), I should have some new music to listen to.

Obviously, not every musician would do this. Either way, I wish there was some way for me to ask every musician I like how I could best support them in order to make it easier for them to keep recording music.