4 ms·
One thing I'm really happy about regarding this article and the accompanying blog post from Pomplamoose is that it pretty much devastates the argument of "you s
by tunesmith 12y ago
One thing I'm really happy about regarding this article and the accompanying blog post from Pomplamoose is that it pretty much devastates the argument of "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!"
People can quibble about how much they spent on lights etc but none of it would have made an order of magnitude difference. Plus, Pomplamoose is comparatively huge - I've seen that touring/merch argument made against the indie that only has 1-2 CDs out and simply wants their cd/recordings sales to cover the production costs of recording the CDs.
I wish Pomplamoose had broken out their "merch" number - how much was from selling posters/t-shirts, and how much was from selling CDs? The fact that they were even bundled together almost as an afterthought is another indication of how devalued it has become.
- wwweston 12y ago> "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!" Yeah, I hate this argument so much. Touring is labor intensive, often risky, and scales badly except for the biggest acts. And there's also a degree to which it's competed against by any amount of freely released music (yes, they're different experiences, but ask yourself why the live band market labor became considerably tighter when recorded music came into its own). Merchandising is another way of saying musicians should have other jobs besides music. And saying that is another way of saying you don't really care if musicians can use more of their time to either improve or increase their output. (Which I guess is fine if you really don't care, but own it, don't pretend we're in some kind of new magic economy that makes those fundamentals go away...)
- Pxtl 12y agoAt the same time, look at how we comics do the same. Their primary output is free/ad-supported and their main source of direct income from customers is side-projects, merch, and donations.