…from my FB response to Andrew D’Angelo’s original post…

(lonnnnnng sigh) It’s a mindfuck of a situation.

The article’s author makes a good point in that we are teaching people to assume if they listen to it that it’s free. That is hard to undo, in the same way that it is hard to convince people to buy organic local food instead of Costco mass produced-produce, or to shop at an independent designer rather than buy Old Navy cargo pants made overseas via substandard wages. Once things become cheap, it’s hard to imagine ever paying more for them, and the idea of compensating the producer is overridden (perhaps instinctually so) by our own survival instincts.

Not to mention that fact that audiences in general consider music disposible, so they are reluctant to buy it when they can just sample it. A friend of mine—who ironically enough is a former musician and works at and high up with a seriously successful indie label—was lauding Spotify, and spoke of unlimited streaming this way: “No, you don’t get to keep it, but why do we need to keep it…like we’re ever going to listen to it again?”
People don’t realize that only listening to it once or twice doesn’t justify not paying the artist who made it. If we wear a stupid Santa costume once or twice for a pub-crawl, do we expect the store not to charge us full price? Perhaps if audiences considered buying music as a longer term investment they would be more selective, more discriminating (which is really what artists want anyway!) and choose to pay more wisely.

The difference is that we don’t ‘need’ all the shit we buy on Black Friday any more than we ‘need’ music. I think that if we can inspire people to make small choices/changes in their spending habits (for example, skip Starbucks for one week and spend the money instead on one or two $10 albums) we can reverse this trend. But, like Biondo, as an artist who poured my heart and $6000 into making my first solo record and then sold the financial equivalent of a steak dinner for 4’s worth of albums, I am just as frustrated and open to suggestions as everyone else