Giving Your Work Away For Nothing
27 Nov
For a good long time there has been this idea that if you give your stuff away for free it will find more people, and those people will find their way back to you and if it’s good, then eventually labels will be knocking down your door.
Or is that not the way you picture it? And I’m not saying that’s totally wrong, I just don’t want to wait for someone to come along and promote me or my music.
Wanting Someone To Do It For Us (Or ‘The Lazy Approach’):
I used to think that if I gave away all my stuff and kept making good stuff that labels would eventually come find me. That’s kinda lazy.
It’s not that I’m charitable with my art and want to share with the world without getting anything in return. It’s that I’ve been lazy about marketing and learning how to earn and appreciate fans.
I just want to make music, I’d tell myself.
Photo by Phil Moore
What I really meant was ”I don’t want to do that thing that I don’t know how to do,” namely marketing / networking / hustling.
If I had admitted it then, it would’ve become clear that for me ”I just want to make music” meant ”I’m not willing to be uncomfortable and put myself out there.” Basically ”I’m not willing to try that hard because I might fail.”
I’ve been creating songs since I was 15, now I want to get something in return for that value I put into the world, how about you?
What are the benefits of giving it away?
So when I got a message from a guy on Soundcloud simply saying “I like your music, and I want to put your song out for free on my next free compilation!” I applied my principle. I asked him: “What do I have to benefit from that, compared to the loss of me giving this thing away for free?”
The obvious answer is “Well, free promotion.” And that is what a lot of us have been doing for a decade or so.
However, I didn’t see the value of him putting out my song at all when it was already out, right there on my page. Putting it out on his page would dilute the results of the song only being on my page. The balance is, it may have brought me new followers, who in the future would get stuff off of my page, which was something I didn’t think about at the time. I may have screwed it up.
But on second thought, I remember why I did this. Because it forced him to see my perspective, to recognize me and to value what I think. He responded kindly, and promised me he’d release my stuff in a way that was more beneficial in the future. Suddenly, we had a conversation. I sacrificed the publicity of giving the song away, but in return I started a conversation and I got to keep my song.
Ownership, Samples, Fans As Promoters
I’m not saying you should charge for all of your songs, either. Talking to Vanilla, a beatmaker from the UK who’s been pretty prolific and puts out quality music, music so good that it doesn’t need a label and promotion, people upload his stuff to YouTube for him. The fans act like a record label for him.
But he told me he’s not interested in gathering email addresses. And he let’s people pay whatever they want on Bandcamp, including no money at all, for the broke musicians and kids without credit cards or paypal accounts.
He’s generous, but also he’s mastered his style, he’s prolific and he has a following. He doesn’t know where they are or how to get ahold of them whenever he wants, but he has a following. He has to trust that they will seek him out next time he puts something out.
When You Legally Can’t Charge For Music
Oh, and big reason why he leaves the free option open on his songs? His songs are made of already copywritten material. He samples soul, jazz & r&b songs, in a completely recognizable way, vocals and everything.
A Legal Way For Samplers & Re-Editors to Make A Buck
Legally Vanilla *can’t* charge for his music. He’s sampling the hell out of a bunch of Motown records, so he’d get sued. Record companies still are on the prowl for that. BUT he can allow people to ‘donate’ to him (a feature implicit in Bandcamp’s ‘pay what you want’ option).
He told me that people have been a lot more generous than he thought, some paying way more than what an album would cost. Like I said, he’s good, he’s revived a lot of awesome songs.
On Donation
And if I was a rich fan, I would give a lot out to those musicians who inspire me, just to keep them inspired and working. You get inspired by their music and want to give something back. Fans feel that.
Owning the fans
That’s what I mean by owning your fans. Let them pay you what you’re worth -and what it’s worth is whatever the value is of the feeling you give them with your music. And for people who like your music, that isn’t zero.
The currency you have is inspiration, and you can make as much of it as you want.
How about you, how do you plan to get paid for what you do?
Do you ever get paid more than you had expected?
What value do feel like you really offer to your fans?
Let me know in the comments below, I’m curious.
I’ve made this mistake so many times, and have used it as a fall back many times as well. Back when I was doing website design, I designed two or three websites for free in the beginning in order to build a portfolio. The result was fairly disasturous – the people didn’t take me or my time seriously and instead of taking a month to complete, it took around six months and I lost a lot of time and money on it. If I’d have charged for my time from the get go, perhaps giving a discount in order to build my portfolio, it would’ve taken a lot less time and I would’ve been able to promote myself to future, full paying clients in a much shorter time frame. That taught me not to keep giving my creations away for free and if you charge people, they start taking you more seriously.
Sarah –
So true! I keep wondering why can’t this be true with music?
It’s funny because there are equal forces from both sides of this topic. Some people say you should give stuff away for free, and in some mediums maybe they’re right.
But for those of us who have given it away, again and again, it’s a sad fact of reality that it isn’t rewarded that often.
Probably the same goes for giving away a nice website design. People kinda take it for granted without even meaning to. Design is one of those things that people don’t notice (or people who are’t designers). That old adage about good design being invisible probably doesn’t work to your benefit, right?
I’ve heard from entrepreneurs and people who are using their skills to create value and earn a living that you have to assert to people that you are giving them value and need something in return. People who respect that about you are the people you want buying it anyway.
I think those of us who are hoping to make a living off of music especially need to get creative, maybe beyond selling songs like they were cheeseburgers. On iTunes songs are ‘worth’ 99 cents (the low price being an effort to compete with piracy, a.k.a. free) and how does that affect the perception of an artist’s value? Not to mention the artist’s own self-worth?
Thanks for that comment, Sarah! Sorry for my meandering response!
I think the way to work the ‘give it away for free’ angle is to have a plan of attack set up before you start. Perhaps if I’d had a more stable plan and worked out a system of dealing with the ‘freebie’ customers as a different kettle of fish as my paying customers it would’ve worked differently? But that’s not mentioned anywhere I’ve read where people talk about giving stuff away for free.
Totally get what you mean about good design being invisible. Nobody seems to know how much /work/ it takes to get something to look good, and think it’s just something you can throw together in a few hours in photoshop / dreamweaver and therefore you don’t need much payment… I imagine it’s the same thing with music, too – because there are so many artists, and because it’s made to seem to easy to create music nowadays (you can make an entire album on an iPad and Garageband for example), people get the impression it’s really easy to make it GOOD and therefore think it’s less valuable. That’s probably fuelled in part by advertisers of these products who want to sell to people who want to be musicians / artists, so make it look as easy as possible… Anndd now I’m going off on a tangent. Ha.
Not a meandering response at all, I enjoyed reading it
Sarah – I meander alot, and I don’t think it’s worth apologizing for (even though I do). Especially when your meandering was super good at putting something into words I hadn’t done before!
If I said these same words as a musician / producer of music, in the first part I would sound like an elitist, like I’m saying “No, you don’t know, it’s really hard to make good music!” and in the second part I would just sound like a jaded, bitter musician, burned by some self-defeating conception he has of the music ‘industry’.
But, yeah, I think technology is always a good thing, specifically when it puts tools in the hands of anyone to make anything great. Just like blogs, since there are millions of people making music, only the good stuff floats to the top / is findable on google / youtube. And by good, I think I mean stuff with a solid idea behind it.
The only thing is is if a song is all instrumental, with no lyrics, it’s hardly topical. Whereas blogs are topical and easier to find thanks to words. I can’t search a mood I’m hoping to put to music, so it’s harder to find songs (although I can search a melody by humming a few bars of a melody that’s playing in my head, so hello future).
But meandering back to my point, I don’t think there’s any problem with music being free and easy to make and readily available and everyone being an artist. People still will end up hitting the same walls when creating stuff, and people will still want to share their knowledge.
That and people still get a lot of great ideas when they are in a pair or a group or community with others interested in similar ideas. So while giving stuff away for free is in general a good mentality, that usually works better with blog posts and books in an oversaturated (but searchable) medium. The ‘give it away for free’ approach in music needs to be backed up with a new way to tease the fan/listener back to the artist, by offering something else of value, I think!