Looking Forward: Music / Technology in 2008
Happy 2008!
The new year brings many new things, especially in technology, and one of the things I’m most excited about in 2008 is the relationship between music and technology. You can already produce a high quality record at home using a personal computer, and distribution is as easy as uploading to MySpace Music. If you’re good, you can get big on word of mouth and demos.
Of course, it also helps if you’re already established or know someone who is.
Saul Williams’s new album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, followed in the footsteps of Radiohead’s In Rainbows recently by offering up a high-quality mp3 download of the album for free, with the option to pay $5 for your choice of an even higher quality download (mp3 and FLAC). Saul isn’t known to most — his first album has sold a little over 30,000 copies since it was released in 2004 (the Nine Inch Nails site has exact numbers from Trent Reznor, who produced the album). But Niggy Tardust?
As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.
Which means, that without any marketing, and purely relying on fans to pay only if they want to, as of Reznor’s post, the album made over $140,000. Reznor mentions that they spent too much money on making the album, and that he’s a little disappointed that only 18% of chosen to pay for the album, but he also points out that more people than ever before have Saul’s music on their iPod and are listening to it.
I’m one of those people who never would have heard Saul otherwise. I didn’t pay anything initially for Niggy Tardust, but after listening to it a few times, guess what? I think I’m going to go back and pay $5 for a FLAC copy. I mean, why not?
Meanwhile, Radiohead’s In Rainbows finally hit store shelves in CD format and the album is on target to hit #1 in the UK (via the Times Online), with predictions of sales hitting 50,000 by Sunday.
Radiohead also served up a New Year’s Eve webcast of the In Rainbows album called Scotch Mist (available from several websites):
And Radiohead won’t be the last. Wired had a great article towards the end of ‘07 on webcasting live music, and why it starts to make sense in 2008:
Although Kniest has had more luck with indies over the past eight years, he said major labels — especially EMI and Universal — have become more amenable to live streaming in the past year. Fabchannel has also begun offering labels a share in revenue generated from 10-second ads (pay-per-view pricing is not seen as a good option, because it restricts the audience even more than a 30-second ad would). The company hopes to expand Fabchannel’s live webcasting service to venues in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
But word on the street has it that Sony (of rootkit fame) is even planning to ditch the DRM, so it shouldn’t be too long before that last roadblock crumbles too. And if we’re really lucky, all of this means the RIAA will even get a clue.
Yeah, 2008 is going to be interesting. =)
