> "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!" Ye

> "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...)