All started in October 2007 with Radiohead and their “In Rainbow”, a record fans could pay just “the price they felt right for it”.
For many artists spending years bathing in the illusion that digital files were an enemy to fight rather then a reality to confront and prosper with, it was like being punched straight in the face by a boxer.
For Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, though, that was the turning point. At the time, Reznor was busy ruminating on the partial failure of the record “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust”, which he was producing. Some of the things he commented back then were really revelatory of the direction he had in mind for his next opus, “Ghosts I-IV”.
“NiggyTardust” was a record one could download in standard definition for free from the website of artist Saul Williams, or, for just $5, get them at a much better quality in various formats. Two month after the stats were clear: 154,449 persons downloaded the record for free, and only 28,322 decided to pay $5 to support the artist. Saul Williams was happy (“My music is in more iPod than ever before”), Reznor instead was livid.
In the interviews back then he claimed to be disheartened by the results, adding that “music should be considered basically as free” because “the toothpaste is out of the tube. [...] If I could redo everything and start again, I think having a physical product is a good thing. [...] I think if we could wave a magic wand and do it again I think being able to offer an inexpensive version in addition to a premium physical product that could be shipped out afterward is a good thing. [...] If I had a record to put out today, I would do something very similar to what we just did cause I don’t think there is a better option. I would include a physical piece as I just said and all of the components I would make sure had value.”
Those thoughts came from the evidence that most leaks happened the moment the record left the artist’s hands to reach the printing facilities, landing in shops days after digital copies were already available on torrent sites. If the problem were the songs…why not give them away and focus on other aspects for monetization?
The idea for “Ghosts I- IV” was then born. The work itself had a massive influence and its too hard to analyze in just a few lines (if you are interested, I made a freely downloadable study about it), but it should be enough to say that the peak in concert ticket prices and the explosion of super-deluxe editions depend mostly by it.
Fast forward a couple of years: torrent sites, the nemesis of record labels, are already getting old. Almost everywhere audio streaming services are on the rise, de facto nullifying the necessity to buy – or download illegally – a CD. From Rhapsody to Spotify, a lot of new releases are now available from Day 1 directly from your favorite client. With an affordable monthly fee (9,90€ for Spotify, $10 per Rhapsody, basically two beers) it’s possible to access huge catalogues of music non stop, without commercials, at home and on the move, with a plus of several extra services.
In a situation like this, there are at least two questions worth asking:
1) Where is Apple? Cupertino’s titan is late for the party, even though something it’s supposed to be announced on June 5;
2) How convenient is the status quo for artists?
In the next part I’ll try to answer to these and other questions. Stay tuned!
