Violinist To Release Record For Free Online
from the power-of-free dept
Top British Violinist, Tasmin Little, has announced plans to release her next album Naked Violin for free online next week. Although fairly well known within classical music circles, Tasmin wanted to grow her fanbase, so her solution was to use the power of free. The classical music genre has seen a huge rebound as a result of the internet, so perhaps it's not surprising to see more classical musicians embracing its power more quickly. Seems like they're finally starting to realize that the actual problem isn't that people were "stealing" their music, but rather that not many people actually cared enough to bother.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Re: public domain
There is a very nice collection of JS Bach MP3s that was just released to the public domain at http://www.blockmrecords.org/bach/
I'm not as much a Bach fan as a Mozart fan, though.
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Also, a newly-published edition of a piece of sheet music gets a brand-new copyright. Even if the music is exactly the same as an older public-domain manuscript, the new edition has been typeset and printed differently, and the editor may have made changes to piano fingerings and other details.
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classical music
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Seriously though, here's my prediction: She puts the album up, a bunch of people download it, and a small percentage of them pay for it. Every idiot reporter will be talking about how it was a failure, purely by looking at the percentages, and ignoring whether or not she actually increased her exposure and grew her fan base. (That's assuming she's asking for payment, TFA isn't clear on that.)
As I've said before, if you looked at the percentage of people who hear a song on the radio that actually buy the song, you'd get some pretty dismal numbers. (Sadly, the recording industry has lately been acting like they took that advice seriously.)
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Something similar
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Free
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Great idea
Most people are not going to pay for that album but a good amount will buy some of her other releases.
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Like ChurchHatesTucker says, a lot of analysts will take anything they can to point to this as a failure. 5000 people download and only 1000 pay? It works now but when everybody does this it won't? Only big name artists are known enough to make this work? Only small, up and coming acts can take this kind of risk?
Fortunately, this is a much better model than the radio. I don't buy what I hear on the radio (not that I listen to the radio any more. You ever hear of Pig?) because I was burned so many times when I was younger. Hear a good song on the radio, go buy the CD for $16, and only two tracks are worthwhile. This model is much better--I can preview the album, decide if a significant portion is worthwhile, and if so, buy it. If I only like one track, maybe I'll pay a fraction of the requested price and keep that one track. Better for them than not receiving anything.
And here is the crux of the "record labels treating their customers like criminals" scenario. If I can't hear this album for free first, I'm not going to outlay cash for it. Since I can, I may. It requires trust.
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