Starting May 15th Coldplay will give each fan attending a Coldplay concert this summer a free copy of the live CD “LeftRightLeftRightLeft”. A free digital download for the general public will also be made available on their site.

According to the band, the give-away is meant as a recession-busting mark of gratitude to everyone who’s supported them: “Playing live is what we love. This album is a thank you to our fans – the people who give us a reason to do it and make it happen.”

James Kirsch has been creating music under the moniker General Fuzz for the past nine years. In that time he has released five albums, two of which were listed in the Top 25 Essential Albums of The Year (2007 and 2008) on the NPR syndicated show Echos.

A notable aspect of Kirsch’s music is that the entire General Fuzz catalog is licensed under Creative Commons and can be freely downloaded from his website. Kirsch’s inspiration for making his music freely available came out of “the availability of inexpensive software and the Internet”. On his website he explains, “These two elements allow me to compose music AND distribute it globally without making me destitute, which is fabulous. I know in my heart that this music will really resonate with a few people out there, and I want to maximize the probability for that to occur.”

Select Tracks From Soulful Filling
eye heart knot
four prophets
second thoughts

This week I spoke with Kirsch to learn more about his experience creating and distributing free music:

Q: How can you afford to give your music away for free?
JK: General Fuzz is not my primary source of income. I’ve been fortunate enough to pursue music and share it. I just really like to do this, I don’t need to make money making music.

Q: I notice that you have a donation button on your site. Have you made any money this way?

JK: It’s surprising, but I do received a lot of donations. Or at least more than I ever expected: maybe around 4-5 a month. This year I’ve received about $500-600 in donations. Before this last year, almost nothing (but I only just installed the donation button two years ago).

People seem to find the site somehow, and some of those people get really into the music and will donate money. I’ve been lucky enough that donations have been able to pay for my last album.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to get some licensing opportunities. Most of the time if you want a licensing deal you have to go through an agent, but I’ve had quite a few people contact me directly – which is rare.

Q: How many license deals have you done?
JK: I’ve licensed my music about 10 or 15 times. One example is this show Prom Queen that contact me.

Q: I notice you don’t sell merchandise on the site. Have you considered this as a possible revenue stream?
JK: I could probably sell merch to boost my revenue. It would just take more motivation then I have right now. I’m pretty happy with my life balance right now. Its something I may explore down the road.

Q: Have you had success marketing yourself with sites like Jamendo, MySpace or Last.fm?
JK: Not really, mostly people just find my site. I know a few people that come in from each of those sites, but most of my donations and exposure come directly through the General Fuzz site.

On the General Fuzz website - in addition to a collection of beautiful music - Kirsch has posted a summary of 6 lessons that he has learned from making music as well as a behind-the-scene look at making the album Soulful Filling.

Speaking with Kirsch I get the sense that the biggest reward for him is just being able to create music that is personally meaningful and share it with his fans. “No one cares about my music the way I do”, is the first lesson he shares on the site.  I think that’s an important lesson for many things in life: similarly I know that no one cares about musicNeutral the way that I do (or my music for that matter). So check out General Fuzz’s music and if you like what you hear please follow Kirsch’s advise: always contact the artist to let them know you enjoy their work

The band Metric has been quite succesful with their latest album Fantasies, despite releasing it without a record label.

How did they finance the album?
Typically the record label will advance the artist money to record an album. When the album is finished, a percentage of the album sales are recouped by the label to pay off the loan. So one of the problems with not being on a record label is finding the money finance the recording. Metric was able to finance the record through the Canadian non-profit Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR).

FACTOR is dedicated to providing assistance toward the growth and development of the Canadian independent recording industry. They provided Metric with a $50,000 loan, which the band will have to repay. In addition, Metric received a small federal grant from the Canadian government.

How are they making money?
Metric claims to be making more money now then they ever did in all four years as a band. They’ve been using iTunes to distribute their music and are able to pull in $0.77 on the dollar for ever album sold, as opposed to the $0.22 they were receiving when they were on a label.

They’ve also made use of Trent Reznor’s multiple price-point business model. On the Metric site they are offering 5 differ pricing packages. And similarly to Reznor’s story, they’ve sold out of all 500 copies of the “deluxe” package (which is the most expesive at $64.99) in the first 48 hours.

Last week four of the men behind The Pirate Bay were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The men have been sentenced to 1 year of jail and over $3million in fines, yet at this point TBP site itself will not be shut down.

In response, Forbes pointed out the obvious: P2P and BitTorrent will continue to reemerge, despite this never-ending witch hunt.

They go on to explain that Google can also be used as a torrent search engine, and that therefore it could be “the new Pirate Bay”. Harvard’s Business School professor Ben Edelman has weighed in, “Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done,” Edelman says. “And if they’re prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense.”

While there is pretty big difference between TPB and Google (namely, Google doesn’t provide a torrent tracker), Google is a pretty reliable source for finding torrents.  Someone here has  taken Edelman’s to the next level and put together a Custom Google search to make it even easier to find music using Google.

And just today I noticed the site The Pirate Google (which does exactly the same thing, but with a more memorable name).

No Doubt have decided to give away their entire catalog of music to fans that buy a “top-priced ticket” (above $42.50) to their summer tour.

No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont had this to say about the offering, “Since the band is heading back to the road, we wanted to find a cool way to get people listening to our music and stoke them with a great deal at the same time.  With this download its easy for fans to get psyched up to hear our music live once again and that rocks.”

The oXcars is an awards show that celebrates free culture and supports the belief that all citizens have the right to benefit from the exchange of information and culture. Live footage from the first ever oXcars held in Barcelona last October has been edited into an hour long movie. I saw a screening of the film in Amsterdam at the Winter Camp 09 festival last month, but now the movie is freely available on the Exgae website (and I’ve posted it below). The oXcars featured live performances from free culture artists and musicians, as well as educational films and dialogue defending “piracy” and criticizing intellectual property rights.

The oXcars is an interesting experiment. Putting together an awards ceremony and deeming some pieces of artwork “superior” and award-worthy gets people’s attention. I think it is similar to the signature “leaves” label given at independent film festivals: regardless of which festival the movie was presented at, people see the leaves and like to say to friends, “so-and-so movie won an award” (implying that therefore it must be worth watching). Awards can cast an aura, and seemingly they make something more desirable. This in turn helps solve problems of discoverability (being able to find quality content). One of the problems with a site like Jamendo (and the web in general) is that there is too much free content and I never know what I should pay attention to or what is junk. Awards help in this case by making suggestions for us.

oXcars 2009 is already in the works, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be long before a category like “Best Creative Commons  Licensed Movie” was included in some of the independent festivals (or even at the Oscars), or if Pitchfork started a Top 10 of free culture musicians. How might this celebration of free culture affect commercial culture?

oXcars, The Movie from eXgae on Vimeo.

Some of the highlights for me include an intellectual property Q&A game (8:20), the “Advanced Realities” screening documenting that follows (12:10), and P2P pioneer Pablo Soto’s acceptance speech (35:16) where he talks about his interview with former-RIAA present Cary Serman on NPR.

As a follow up to this post I’ve included some excerpts from the “conclusions” which were published on the oXcars website:

Above all, the oXcars were a question of attitude, a way of being in the world.

The kind of attitude that recognises the fact that things have changed through the efforts of all the pioneers who have spent years proposing a new paradigm for the production and diffusion of knowledge and those who defend it as a right, and thanks to the natural way in which society is using new technology.

The idea of the oXcars was to put the spotlight on this situation, and to break some of the taboos surrounding it. To act as a bridge between all of the hard background work and the general public who don’t always get to find out about it. And to do it using all available channels, even the mainstream.

We’ve worked from a strategic belief that there is a need to draw attention to these practices, and give them value within society. The oXcars made an effort to include very different realities side by side, because we think it is important to defend shared culture through a clearly identifiable response that respects the specific nature of each path, while sticking to the final objectives. We think that free culture can only exist if it recognises talent and the contributions of each individual. Only then can we provide a dense response, one that comes in so many forms and is so ubiquitous that it is beyond the reach of any attack.

Josh Freese is selling himself to sell his new album. He is best known as the drummer for A Perfect Circle, The Vandals and Devo, but just yesterday Freese released Since 1972, his second solo-album.

Taking off from Trent Reznor’s tiered pricing scheme on the album Ghosts I-IV, Freese’s new album is available online for $7, but for those willing to pay $50 Freese will call you up to say “thank you” and you can “yack it up”, or for $250 he will show his appreciation by taking you out to The Cheesecake Factory.

Above the $250 mark? The incentives are hilarious/bizarre and it is really worth checking out the site.

Every package above $50 includes a signed CD and a t-shirt: For $2500 Freese will give you a drum lesson and let you pick any member of the Vandals or DEVO to go with to the “Hollywood Wax Museum”. For $5000 Freese will write a song entirely about you and put it up on iTunes.  And (limited edition for 1 person) for $75k Freese will join your band for a month and the two of you can take shrooms and cruise Hollywood.

While Freese doesn’t actually believe that anyone will pay for these more expensive packages, he is ready to fulfill his part of the bargain.

Of course, this is bizarre - but it’s an interesting way connect with fans (and no, you don’t actually need to give them a foot massage).

Freese is giving his fans something that can’t be copied, and give something unique. I’m sure that some crazed fan of The Decemberists or (insert popular band name) would pay more than $12 for the CD if it meant that there was an after-show-party and the band would be there hanging out (I know I would have, I remember going to great lengths once when I was a teenager to party with The Smashing Pumpkins).

I have a feeling that bands are going to start getting more creative with how they make money, even if means selling themselves to sell their music.

*More info can be found on Josh Freese’s website or in this recent interview

Amazon has been experimenting with digital music prices by offering an array of full-length albums for less than $7.99. Each week they pick five albums to sell for $5.00, and for a limited time U2’s latest album “No Line on the Horizon” was available for only $3.99. Similarly, up until recently all the music in the iTunes catalog was priced at $0.99 per track, but in April iTunes will also adjust the price of their MP3s: $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29 depending on the record company.

Why the change?

• Amazon might be using the low prices to entice new customers; potentially to take market share from Apple.
• Cross-subsidies: Amazon.com might be selling cheaper music with the hope that customers will buy something else in their online store. Wal-Mart has been doing this for years by offering DVDs below cost in order to lure customers into their store.
• A response to shifts in the digital-music market. (ie. to stay competitive)
• A decrease in the price point may make music reasonable enough to buy. Remember that on Amazon the bestselling album of 2008 was being sold for $5.00.

The market price for music continues to fall towards $0.00 like an inverted Moore’s Law. I’ve drawn up a price comparison for a few of the popular music distribution channels to illustrate a gradual decline in the price of digital music downloads.

*I’ve omitted streaming audio sites like Last.fm in order to visualize the market price for owning one digital music file.

“Newspapers Fold. At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008”, reported CNN. Some newspapers like the Ann Arbor News are being superseded by their online identity, while employees at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are holding on for life after news that their parent company has declared bankruptcy.

Earlier this week Clay Shirkey wrote a related piece about the cosmic myopia of the newspaper industry:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

Shirkey goes on to explain the options that were considered by the industry early on:

• educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law
• new payment models such as micropayments were proposed
• they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported
• sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

Yet the “unthinkable scenario” that they never considered was that the ability to “share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow” because we were in the middle of a revolution.

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

So now is not the time to push old models of media distribution, it is the time to experiment. I don’t think anyone really knows whether if in twenty years all online content will be freely accessible, behind someone’s walled garden, or another alternative we have yet to think up. But we do know there will still be journalists, photographers and musicians.