What does the music industry have to teach us about giving music out for free? In Ep#59 we're going to learn from Prince, Radiohead & 50 Cent about how to adapt to change & delay monetary gratification.
Huge thanks to Deezlaughs, Chad F & Sam Sethi for supporting the show (plus everyone streaming as well). You all make this show happen!
40% of this episode is going to Cole, Sven, The Doerfels and the app developers who make this all possible.
Extra Links:
Radiohead Interview: https://youtu.be/V-4CpJyZ4Yw
Thunderroad Media: https://thunderroad.media/live-is-lit/
Timeline:
(0:00) - Intro
(1:19) - Why Make It Free?
(3:22) - Quote 1
(8:37) - Why Pay If It's Free?
(9:54) - Quote 2
(12:10) - In Rainbows' Radiohead Interview
(16:07) - Why Does It Seem Scary?
(18:18) - Quote 3
(21:56) - Why Is The Money In Merch & Touring?
(27:43) - Boostagram Lounge
(32:54) - Latest Developments
(37:50) - Why Bitcoin
(40:47) - V4V: Time/Talent/Treasure
(43:13) - Freedom by Vale Ramirez
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Unknown:
What does the musicindustry have to teach us about giving away musicfor free? Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome everyone to another episode of theValue for Value Podcast broadcasting live hereon the 18th of March 2024. This is the podcast for Digital Contentcreators who want to connect deeper with their audience,perhaps look at some differentways of monetising. Although you might bewondering like monetising and you're talking about giving away stufffor free, how does that work? Well, we'regoing to dive into that in this episode today.
So we'regoing to be learning from the bookFree by Chris Anderson. I have previously donea book review of this on the main models, book reviews, if you wanted to dive intothe full book of that. But we're going to befocusing in particular from about pages 153 to 161, and we've gotsome juicy quotes from from Cole coming upto help explain that. So what we're going tolearn in particular is a marketing slashgrowth tactic, if you want to put itthat way. Some counterintuitivebehaviour that you'll see from your audienceand your friends, and alsohow to face the feel, the.
Feel. Of free. So let's just jump right into thisand why make it free? Why should you makeyour music free? If you are a musician, you're putting stuff outthere. Doesn'tthat that sounds weird. Why would you do that? Now this is linkeddirectly to the next point that I'm going to make, which is opposing it, coming at itfrom the fan side of thingsand why they would pay. But we'll start here. We'll start from the creative side first,because this is the, you know, the Value for Valuepodcast, mostly directed at peoplewho are trying to understandif you're a creator, why you would do this.
You've got to do thisfirst, and then you can get the value backfrom your audience. Now, the reason to offer your creation for freeis that wide interest in your product will ultimately ultimatelyallow you to to make more money offof it. Or perhaps even freedom is the better wayto to categorise this. And then once you havefreedom, you can choose to make moneyhowever you want. You know, essentially,once you get to a high enough levelas a musician and I'm goingto be focusing just on musicians today,but these these apply broadly toother types of creators. But we'll focus onthe musician niche.
You can dowhatever the hell you want once, onceyou've got freedom, once you've got enough money,it's like now you just get to choosewhat you choose to create, how you go about doing it,and trying to find the most exciting,interesting ways. And you might be thinking,okay, well, I'm not the you know,I'm not Kanye, I'm not ye I'm not at this the high enough levelwhere I can just do whatever the hellyou want. Well, I think a lot of the valuefor value concepts will allow you to get to that levelif you want. If you're aimingfor stardom, if you're aimingfor things like this.
And it's essentiallythe acknowledgement, I think if you're givingsomething away for free that you could makea small gain. Now if you were tojust keep it locked in and like,here's a price on it, I want to create this and I want some immediategratification from that. But it's going to reallystunt your growth. Or you can have, you know, none of the upfront payments,but you have much larger in the future. Once you have grown, once you can do whateverthe hell you want. So we're goingto start off with a quote from page 155here of the book. And we're going to learnhow Prince did something a little bitcounterintuitive of not only just giving his his music away for free,but actually paying to give it away.
So Cole will take us awayhere. How can a music CDB free? In July 2007,Prince debuted his new album Planet Earthby stuffing a copy retail value $19 into 2.8 millionissues of the Sunday edition of London'sDaily Mail. The paperoften includes a CD, but this wasthe first time it featured all newmaterial from a star. How can a platinum artistgive away a new release? And how could a newspaper distribute itfor Free of charge? Prince spurred ticketsales. Strictly speaking, the artistlost money on the deal. He charged the Daily Mail a licensing fee of $0.36 a disc ratherthan his customary $2.
But he more than made up the difference in ticketsales. The purple one sold out21 shows at London's O2 Arena in August,bringing him record concertrevenue for the region. The Daily Mail boostedits brand. The freebie bumped upthe newspaper's circulation 20% that day. That broughtin extra revenue, but not enough to coverexpenses. Still, Daily Mail execsconsider the giveaway a success. Managing editor Stephen Miron says the gimmickworked editoriallyand financially. Because we're pioneers,advertisers want to be with us. Carl will love that.
That'sexactly how I imagined, thoughit would sound as well. So it's interestingto note with this this kind of explanation,with this deal that happened, thatneither party actually made moneyout of this in terms of the strictfinancial dealings between Prince giving awaya CD to the well, you know, selling his CD,I guess, to this newspaperand then the newspaper actually distributing it. Neither of them actuallymade money from it, but they both had thesekind of like intangible tick,you know, branding slash, you know, prints, selling more ticketsat the O2 Arena that that they enabled this toto be a financial venture.
If you look at the broad scale of things,and I think that's one of the problems with musicalmusicians perhaps the you know, the focusto tightly narrow on this like one little thingof I've, you know,I've got to try and do thisand I'll be successful. Whereas it's it's, it's the broaderthings, you know, travelling aroundthe world might not help your music in this one particularinstance of like, I'm not actually creating music,but I can give you exposure to all sortsof experiences, sounds, thingswhich will enable you to create better stufflater on.
And I think this sort ofthing is happening here and I'm going to caveatthis, that this all requires ayou know, I feel like it's a rathertiny leap of faith because measuring secondor third or other effects of what they've done here is going to be very,very hot. You know,how how we hear that he sold more tickets,but how much did he actually morewould he have sold or not have soldif he hadn't done this? So, you know, we're doingsome kind of like, you know, counterfactuals. If this had not happened,what would have happened? That sort of deal?
But I think in these cases and I've got a coupleof more examples of this, which is layering on thisthis kind of, I guess, evidence arguments of whyyou should maybe do this. And I think by gainingmore exposure at the, you know, cost of some smallpotential profits he could have madefrom the the the advertisersfrom the actual Daily Mail itself, Prince made a huge windfallwith the concert. And perhaps he had bigger,bigger revenues then in comparisonto selling suit. Who knows? Who knows? But this is why I advocatefor similar reasons for podcasts as well, that sticking your contentbehind a paywall where it's impossibleto get to without paying all being exclusive, for example,on somewhere like, you know, Spotifywas trying to do this and we've seen recently all these podcasterswho are exclusive, they're jump ship and wantedto be everywhere because you're stuntinggrowth.
You'rereally hurting yourself by narrowing your niche to likeyou can only get it here or you have to pay for ithere. And the only timesI've really seen this work is for really large creators who already have a verywell-established audience, and I don't even thinkthey do it for monetary reasons, to be honest,I'm pretty sure they pay well theircontent and put things behindbehind stuff like that. Not becauseit pays the most, but for other reasons, such as wanting to limit their their messageto a certain set of people or to not have, you know, feedbackfrom X number of people, which I know for a factis what happens with a content creatorI followed called Andre Antonopoulos, a Bitcoin guy who's a Bitcoin educator who's been doing it for like ten years, and he is exclusive onPatreon pretty much for all of his stuffbecause he just doesn't want to dealwith all of the, the random noisethat he gets.
So this is why we see,okay, this is maybe why should give it away for freefrom the creative side, but then let's go onto the next point, which is, well,why pay if it's free? And if we see creators are willing to work for free? And we'vedefinitely established that in the last episode,why would fans pay if they can get itfor free? And I was actually having a chatwith a lovely young lady named Hannah, who was she's doinglike an article on on one of the placeswhere you can listen to thisvery podcast on true fans. You can listen to it livethere or post at Post Hoc and she's doing thisarticle and she was doing on on micropayments and in particularon true fans.
And one of her questionswas was basically piggyback of this if you're giving away this stufffor free, why would people payfor it? And I think this ismy answer to this was somethingthat we learnt last week. People do thingsfor credit status, reputation, enjoyment,satisfaction and experience. Paying away paying can be a way to getto all of these things, expedite the processin getting to some of these things. And I think that's a very,very strong reason why people will pay for stuff. And now you'd be like,okay, car And that's nice andhypothetical, but give me give me an example,give me something real.
So, well,we're going to get as real as we can get here with this next quote from page 253 and we'll see some peoplewho who did it. Well. If the video gameindustries of business racing towards freeto accelerate its growth, music is a businessstumbling to freeto slow its decline. But the early experimentsare encouraging. By nowthe success of Radiohead's name your own price experiment with InRainbows is legendary. Rather than release itsseventh album into stores. As usual, the band released itonline with the requestthat you pay as much or as littleas you wanted.
Some chose to pay nothing,including me, not because I didn't think it was worth something,but because I wanted to see if that was in factallowed. While otherspaid more than $20. Overall,the average price was $6. So, yeah,this is what we see. Okay. And this is theclassic view. If you heard about thisbefore In Rainbows by Radiohead was essentially they gaveaway their music free. They put it upon a website, you could just goaccess it. And I'd heard about thisfor ages. If you're in the valueto value world, you would have heardof this example. And what's reallyinteresting about this is if pure upfront monetarygain was the play, they wouldn'thave actually done this.
They wouldn't have givenaway their music for free, was they,you know, overall the average price was $6. I'm pretty sureback in those days, you know, paying for afor an album of something waswas much more than that. And so telling ontoI was like I'd heard about thisso many times and I wasextremely intrigued as to what actually went into thisbecause it's it's kind of like toosimplistic in a way. You know, when you hear people will bring upan example of something and you're like, Yeah,yeah, okay, but is that? And then you learnlater on like, no, the real the real lessonto be learned from this is not whatit appears on the surface.
And if you look into theStanford Prison experiment or the Milgram shockexperiments, for example, this is where you alwayshear like, it just showcaseshow bad humanity is. But if you look into the actual studiesthemselves, the science, what actuallywent on there, it was cherry picked data. It was, you know,they were going for to to prove out this thing rather than doinga scientific experiment. We won't get into that. But essentially this waswhere I was like, okay, I've heard of this In Rainbows thing by Radiohead too,so many times. What's actuallygoing on here?
So I found this interview and it's called Tom and Ed talk about In Rainbowsrelease and it's just, you know, it was someone who found a randomI think it's BBC baby C or R2,it's some sort of English station, TV station. And this interviewwas really illuminating. It's onlyhe's about 7 minutes long, but definitely worthchecking out. And we'll have thatlink down below and you'll learn a coupleof things from this. So one,they were very careful about their wordingon their website, so they actually really explained the valuefor value philosophybefore it was even, you know,called value for value.
Then it was pay. What you wantis another expression, which is kind ofinterchangeable with this. And they were veryexplicit like, Hey, this is we're doing thisthis way. This is the reasonswe're doing for it. We would very muchappreciate it. We would you know,there's it's not an expectation you can get this for freeif you want. And as the authorand we found of that quote there, ChrisAnderson he he did it and he just wanted to test it out if he could do it. They didthis very specifically. So they're very careful aboutthey asked that pitch. We know how much importantthat is.
They were very careful. They cut out middlemen,for example, and could releasedirectly to the fans without meetingsand without promos. It was hilarious watching this clip and then them just talking about howmuch they detest meetings. And it's like, yes,thank you. Thank you. So the the actual interviewitself would have been publishedrelatively recently after the releaseof the actual album. Not that I'll have to goback and check that. I'm just responding to a a comment here in the in the YouTubechat at the moment. Another thing wasthey didn't have to wait 3 to 6 monthsto actually release it.
They could do itas soon as it was done. And I'm sureif you're a musician, you know, you've createdyour work of art, you've created this piece,and then and thenyou just have to wait because you need approvalby this place. You need the, you know, marketing budgetto get approves this to be done,this to be done. And that would talk abouthow they would finishthe album, you know, do all the editing lost you know sampleschopped everything's good this is exactly howwe want it. And then six months, you're just sitting on it and just go like twiddlingtheir thumbs like, And so they said, No,this is why we could release itstraight away.
And the benefitof releasing it straight away was they didn't have to worryabout the inevitability of it getting leaked. And so by releasing itlike this, they could actuallycontrol the distribution mechanism because these thingsalways get leaked. Once you've createdsomething, it gets leaked outsomehow. And so they released it for the not to be greedy,but for the spirit of music. And funnily enough,you know, for the spirit of musicand doing things this way actually ends up resulting inmore of a monetary gain. Because if you read the book,the next page talks about how the album wasthe most successful, how it did so well.
This could be, you know, adjacentto the actual pay, what you want for the philosophy, but it certainly didn't hurtwhat happened. So all of this is veryv v esque and if if you go to the paywhat you want article on on Wikipedia, it also shows how it's known as the valuefor money model. And it goes links to a blog posttalking about no agenda. So pay what you wantvalue for value. They're very similar. And once again, another example of sayinghow, okay, something's being given away for freeand you know, you would expectself-interest. People would just,you know, pay zero if you can get itfor free.
Why wouldwhy would you not do that? But now we see, you know, they actually got,you know, $6 on average, which is pretty,pretty bold and pretty amazingconsidering it was one of the first first times that they didthis. Now, I think it's worth talking aboutwhy this seems so scary. And I just mentionedWikipedia there. And as a as I mentioned, I was doinga bit of research on this album itself. And if you go intothe Wikipedia page of this album, it talks about theirresponse to what they did for this Paywhat you Want released and they've kind of got two sections,the first sections talking about how peoplewere praising it.
You know, Bono was saying is courageous,imaginative. Courtney Love was saying,you know, the kamikaze pilot of me wants to dothe same thing. I'm grateful rainbowsRadiohead for for making the first moveand doing this. And then we see the other side of it,which was the criticism. And this isreally interesting because a lot ofthis is really fear based. So we've got some quotesfrom Lily Allen saying the release was arrogant and sent a bad messageto less or less successful acts saying you don't choosehow to pay for eggs. Why should it be differentfor music?
Sonic Youth bassistKim Gordon said it seemed really communitycommunity orientated, but it was wasn't catered towards the musician,brothers and sisters who don't sellas many records as Radiohead makes everyone else look bad by not offeringthem music for whatever. And then The Guardianjournalist Will Hodgkinson arguedthat Radiohead had made it impossible for lesssuccessful musicians to make a livingfrom their music. And I think this is worthaddressing. Like, why does this seemso scary to other people? You know, it'snot it's not Radiohead who were or theiror their fans who were criticisingwhat they did.
It's just these like other relatively well-knownmusicians as well. And it'sbecause they have this zero sum mentalityof like it's it's all the criticisms themselveswere all about money as well. You noticethat, you notice how the it was all about the moneyand it wasn't the, the spirit of the music,of releasing of, of giving it directlyto fans to have this, you know,direct interaction, of being able to be in controlof your own music and doing whatyou want with it. None of it was addressedtowards that. It was all aboutthis money side of things. And I think theywere afraid of change.
And having to adaptis the is probably the, the main argumentI would be saying there. And we're going to learnfrom, from someone as well. And page157 teaches us about this. So we're going to have another couple of quoteshere. What'sparticularly interesting is that the same pragmatismabout the need for the industry to embrace new models is shared even by the biggestwinners of the Old way. Interviewed in 2008about the impact of file sharing on his label,G Unit records, the rap artist 50 Centhad the advantage of perspectiveof also being an artist. Sure, file tradingwas hurting his label, but there was a larger warto be won.
The advances in technologyimpact everyone and we all must adapt. What is important for the music industryto understand is that this reallydoesn't hurt the artists. A young fan may be just as devoutand dedicated no matter if he bought itor stole it. The concerts are crowdedand the industry must understandthat they have to manage all the 360 degreesaround an artist. They, the industry, have to maximisetheir income from concertsand merchandise. Yeah, I think this teaches a couple of things on both sidesof the equation. Thank you Mr.
50 Cent for for that quote and for Colefor writing it out. So the problem isthe radio guys, Radiohead guys mentioned is that'll get leakedone way or the other. And you know,this was particularly I supposeprevalent in 2008. I'm not sure how with, with file sharingand things like that. I'm not surehow much it is nowadays. My fingeron the pulse of the of the music sceneis, is not super strong. But I thinkbeing proactive, getting ahead of thesethings is necessary. Adaptingto change to technology and free might scare you, but ultimatelyyou have to work with it.
And a lot of thisnext season we're goingto be looking at particularly,you know, the book, The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly,which I covered a little bit last week. Some of this stuff isinevitable. You know, file sharingcould not be stopped. The distributionof of music at a super, super lowcost is happening. You know,there's a small vinyl, you know, resurgent. But we're not going backto the days of CDs. We're not going back to the days of vinylbeing everywhere. It is digital. It is going to be ondemand streamingand things like this. And I think as a musician,you have to acknowledge that it's not worthfighting it.
It's not worth trying to, you know, lambaste peoplefor for getting the music however they want it. As 50 Cent mentioned the a young fanjust because he's he stole it doesn't mean that he doesn't love the music or that he hates the musicianor anything like that. He could be justas dedicated and devout no matter if he bought itor stole it. That was a quote. And I and once again,with the value for value model, we can find waysto use this dedication and and devout fansfollowings if we are a bit creative,if we think more about how we can actually goabout doing this word of mouth,you know, campaigns, just because they don'thave money doesn't mean they don'thave things to contribute.
So this is where it whereI definitely think that the arguments for freeis essentially the you need to do itbecause it's going to happenno matter what. If you try and fight the technology andthings that allow things to be distributedlike this, it's ultimately goingto be a failing venture. And so it's worth thinking about how you can get the message across that even if you don't pay in a monetary form,you can actually get paid in other ways or you can get valuein other ways from your from your audience. Now, this will ultimately gets usonto the last point I wanted totalk about here, which is the money is in merchant touring,so why is the money there?
And much of the pagesin between the quotes of this bookwas really focussed on analysing the declinein the record industry, but overall growthin the music industry. And you're like, okay, well aren'tthey the same thing? Record industry, musicindustry? No, the record industrywas solely concerned about the distributionof music, whereas the music industryis obviously it's just about musicas a whole. Is music getting outand getting played and we said yes, it was. Is getting played in TVshows and movies. It was working its wayinto more and more genres,areas of the world, you know,elevator music, gyms, shopping malls,all this sort of stuff.
You know, there's musicbeing played everywhere all the time, basically. And now look at, you know,TikTok and Instagram and all these placeswhere you can just click a button, you can puta song into it. Okay, it's everywhere. Now, the thing is, how have musiciansmaking money? Well, when this transitionwas happening, all of it was basicallybeing like because the CDS saleswere declining because vinyl and those sorts of thingswere declining, you know, cassette tapes,all that sort of stuff. The musicians were having to do itthrough touring and, and through much,which is, you know, to two ways where once again, it's kind of like a physical product almost,you know, I would have to physicallygo out to a venue or I would geta, a physical shirt or something like this and I believethat this was probably the waythat had to be done.
And that made sensefor musicians to to monetise their workin some sort of way, consideringthat they couldn't do it through the recordindustry, couldn't do it anymore,it wasn't making sense. The technologyhad moved on and changed. File sharing hadbasically destroyed that and so they had to do itthrough the through touringand through much. I am arguing thatI think the case is now that with micropaymentsbecoming a viable option, that this is allowinga new way, it won't completelydominate, you know, these othertwo mechanisms. But I think that micropayments, it'sworth having a look at and thinking aboutif you're a musician, because there arecertainly many people who don't want or can't consumethe physical things.
And so let's take me,for example. I don't particularly enjoylive music and concerts. I've been to a couple, butit's not a regular part of my living and livinglifestyle, I guess. And the last one I went to wasprobably in 2019, 2018, maybewhen I was in Mexico, I went to a big concertthere. That was the last timeI've been to one. I don't particularlyenjoy them. I'm rather minimalist, so I actually don't enjoybuying merch. A lot of times by desperation. I have sometimes bought tshirts to support people. Other podcasters,for example, sending money to the UKvia the banking system.
So awful. I hated it. I wished I wishedmy friends at that time had accepted bitcoinbecause that would have been so much easier. But it's but I also liketo support artists. I like to do these things. So let's take one of my favourite musiciansin a for example. Now you know. Yeah. Create some amazing music. I, I, I rememberbeing a kid and hearing some of her musicand loving it and she was alsoreally hot and I had a crush on herand probably still do. And you know, she's oneof my favourite musicians. Even if I wantedto see her live the last timeshe was in Australia, I was looking this up,I believe was in 2018.
So it's like, okay, well, you know,it's been a while since I could havesupported her in that way. I went on to ourwebsite just the other day and her shop was down, so if I wanted tobuy merch, I couldn't have even doneit like that. There's no donate buttonthere. And I was struggling to think like,okay, how can I how could I get some moneyto her? And I'm guessingthat there is a way of still buying musicsomehow, maybe through, I don't know, iTunes orAmazon music or something. I don't have iTunespersonally, I don't haveAmazon music personally, so I would have to go really out of my wayto to do these things.
But man, if she was Vfor V enabled, if she had her music upas an RSS feed, she and with with youknow, wallet splits and a way for me to domicropayments to her, she would make bank bank of meI would be sending her all of my money because I would be just listening to itall the time and boosting and streaming and all thesesorts of things. So this is where I wasgoing to just say like, if you're a musician, giving it away for free,I think it's a is a good is a good way of thinkingabout this, doing this of putting your music uponline. It's up online everywhere.
You know, peopleare accessing it for free. Now, if you want to thinkof it through Spotify, it's a very convolutedmechanism. I'm sure Spotifystill pays out, but it's, you know, we're getting there'sincreasing steps moving. The technology is movingus further and further towards like everythingbeing available If you are creatingcontent online. And I just argue,you know, if you if you haven't thoughtabout micropayments and you haven't thought about getting directsupport from your audience, it'sworth doing that. I argue the best way to doit is through the the triangle of RSS,v2 V and BTC, as we've saw pretty muchin the last season.
But you know, it's worthjust looking elsewhere if you're a musician and havingto think about that. So that is my argumentfor today. Free, free. Let's jump onto the gremlinsand I really want to thank some peoplefor helping support this show from last week. So Mr. Adam Curry,please take it away. Welcome to the value for value histogram. Yes. Sothe booster gremlins for those who don't knowis where I think the peoplewho help support this show and in particularin the monetary aspect. We'll talk a little bit more about how you can supportin a non-monetary aspect at the end.
And this is by doinga boost to ground which you can senddirectly through one of a newmodern podcasting app. There'sall sorts of reasons outside of the valuetransfer you can do. I go live so you could be listeningto this live the on on onone of those apps. I put chapter images there so that you can haveinteresting things and you'll see stufflike spends bitcoin gifts, whichI put in there to help brighten upmake it more interesting. You canget transcripts in their notificationsas soon as the podcast goes outin this release, all these sorts of things.So good reason to check outsome of these apps.
If you gave me a modest podcast dotcom search support, you'll see a listthere of where you can actually goand find these apps. I've done a run through all of thesesorts of things and you can send a messagedirectly with an app. That message will reach me and this is just a classicexample of how these micropaymentswork. You can stream inand you can also do it via sending in what is known as a boost, which is just a one timepayment or booster. Graham Same thing, but you have a messageattached with that. So I'm going to readsome of these out here and I'm just going to dothem in sequential order because it will lead upto the big the big one.
So we had these laughscoming in with a thousand sets sent using fountain. He says Good show. Would loveto make your end of show tracks one day fire. Hey,thank you, mate. Thank you. I am very muchin this moment of I've got my structurefor this season, but I will hit you upfor next season because that sounds likea really fun way of being able to collaborateand do something interesting andand change it up. So, yes,more and more on that in I'll also like six months time, I'll get back toyou. That's probably what I'll be doingthe next season. We have a message herefrom Chad and he says, Hugeshout out to what Barry is doingfor live concerts.
I did mentionthis last week. If you enjoyedVoice of Music and want to help it grow, please considerdonating some sets sets of upto Thunder Road. And then he's got a a clapping emoji 3333 setssent using fountain. Thank you very much,my friend. And the link there isThunder road dot media and then forward slashlive of what is that the it's not colonthe square hyphen livehyphen is hyphen lit. I'm going to have the link to that in the show notes. I've also included themas a 5% split to this very podcastin this very episode. So yeah, I really lovewhat what Barry is doing for the live musicof creating these concerts where you can essentially do what I'm talking about.
This is, this is whatwe're talking about. The musicians are doingthis concert for free. You could jump into the live streamat any point and just watch the whole thing without having to paya single cent or you can jump inand contribute. So show some support likeI will be doing as well unless I'mflying in mid-flight to Brazil,which is possible, I will be doing that and it's just areally exciting avenue of of I think the future of music,of things are changing. I did see a lot of streamscoming in here from Sam, Sam Sethi,the founder of True Fans. And then check this out.
Sam Sethi 100,000 sets. Cent using true fans, although a Bola bolaI don't have any of the sound effects,but thank you very much. So my God, thanks. And he says,thank you so much for your kind wordsand support. Building an appat the bleeding edge of tech is superhard, often rewarding, but sometimesvery frustrating. And once again that. So if you're wonderinghow much So I'm talking micropaymentsand you're like, they're sendingthese stats. What are theserandom things? The equivalent of thatat current prices is about 105 AUD. So, Sam, thank you.
Thank you very much. You know, you've paid myhosting for a half a year. A year? I don't know. Thank youso much for doing that. May I really doappreciate that and I highly recommendpeople check out true fans because it's it's one of these placeswhere an app progressive web app so can be used on yourdesktop, on your iPhone, whateverphone you're on Android and it's got allof these functionalities. He has everythingin there. It's a it's a sweet app. I'm going to berecommending it more because he's he's really creating somethinginteresting there. And like I said,I did a little interview for someone who was alsovery interested in it and writingan article on it.
So I will also link thatwhen it comes out. Chat offices in the chat. That's me. Thank you, Chad,very much. Appreciate for joining usin here as well. So let's jump on to,I suppose, some current developments, latestdevelopments. Things are interesting. Like I said, Thunder RoadMedia at get al Bitcoin. If you wanted to helpsupport that, live things that are going on, it really gives methe same vibes as what was going onwith Able Craft when Iwas tuning into that show like two years ago where it was just,you know, so Spencerand this guy Abel Kirby, and they were creating basically the first music,the first album specifically to be ableto release it in a value for value format.
And that was Abeland The Wolf. I will be playingone of their songs in the near future,and I think this is just it's a pillar in what's going to besomething that is really, really bigand be for the music. That's why I'mtalking about it today. I thinkit's really interesting. Now, this is slightly offtopic from music, but it's it's very muchon the same trend of someone who was doingsomething digital and having to adapt with the times change, make their money through not exactlythe way they wanted to and then find exactly their niche and how they could do itdirectly through through their artand through their music.
And so there'sthis guy called Beeple. If you haven't heard of people before, he'sbasically an artist and particularlydigital art. He'll do some 3D renderingand things like this. But mostly it would be what you wouldimagine is a JPEG image. And he's been doing thisfor a long, long time. I listenedto this interview with him and he was, you know, creating the stuffand he was like, okay, well, I've put it on YouTubevideos, but it wasn't reallygetting much traction. I was trying to direct people to my website, butyou know, that was hard. And then he realised like, well, I can justput this on Facebook and I'm just gonnaput my art there.
There was no wayto pay for it. There was no monetaryreason. He was doing this. He was giving it awayfor free. What this led to wasa lot of people becoming very interestedin what he was creating and it ended up turning outthat he would get How would he makemoney from his art? Well, he would actually getthese opportunities to work on and create forthe Super Bowl halftime Justin Bieber concerts. You know, the the backgroundimages behind him when he's on the big TV screensand things like this and and allof these sorts of things. So he's indirectlymaking his his money through the AC oneand the testing.
Michael Joseph Winkelmann, professionallyknown as Beeple, American digital artist, graphicdesigner and animator and this is the part knownfor selling Nfts. You know, like an NFT iswhat the hell is up? NFT standsfor Non-Fungible token and basically meansthat he could sell his art directly on the blockchainwhen the time was right. So he was creating all of this stuff,giving it away for free. He somehow made found a wayto make money from it, but it was through thisvery indirect method of, you know,getting paid for, getting renownedand then paid for his art, but for other people's installationsand things like this.
It's kind of similar to, you know, musicianscreating all this music and then only getting paidwhen they're doing concerts and sellingmerch. Interesting. And then he found this wayof when when Ethereum was coming upand he realised, you can actually put your art as a, as a digital imageon the blockchain. And it's like aone of one thing and it's,it's stored there and there's a way tomake it digitally scarce that, okay, he could now sell itdirectly to his fans and his fansreally liked his stuff and he ended up sellingthis piece known as Everydays,which was a collage, a collaboration of of everythingthat he'd created for like once a day, for yearsand years and years, maybe a decade. I'mnot sure how long.
And he ended upselling this one thing for like, you know, 63million or something. So Headlines. Amazing. I think the lessonto take away from this is delayedgratification. You know,he created his stuff. He put it out therefor free. He found a way to like,grind and make money through alternativemethods before he found a way to connect directlywith his audience and and be able to, you know, not only make money from them,but connect directly with them. So this is an interesting aspectof where you can see a digital artist has donesomething similar. Now, obviously with music you can maybe do NFTor things like this.
I wouldn'tparticularly recommend it. I've lookedat a lot of this stuff for the pastcouple of years and I still I think thatthe way forward is through the the mechanisms. I talked about RSS because it'sself-sovereign, it's decentralised,it's permissionless, and you can do valuetransfer through that and then through valuefor value and Bitcoinon top of that. So I think the main thing to take away fromhim is definitely just putting your, yourart out there for free. Grow growing,creating a brand, connectingwith your audience will lead to opportunityis further down the line.
And then this gets into my final section here,which funnily enough, why Bitcoin? Why? Why would you you know, I just talked about ittheorem and Nfts. But why? Why would I say thatIt's, it's worth focusing on Bitcoin. And I say Mr. Robot in the chat, except that anyone cancopy and paste any of it. NFT is, it's a scam, you know, the same argumentcould be made for putting music up in an RSS feed. Anyone can copy itand and put it up. We're not seeingthat behaviour here and I think it'sultimately it's, it's, it'skind of about this delayed gratification.
And so, you know, what is the ultimatedelayed gratification? It's saving your moneyand this is where I very much goingto stay away from the financial advice and I view BTC as the bestway to do that. If you're new, you're going to hear about this thing called Hodling,which is holding on for dear life, the acronymif you want. Or basically a guy got drunk andspelled holding wrong and which is ultimatelyjust forgoing a quick win now for something betterlater. Once again,delayed gratification of is what I'm arguingthat musicians should do. Certainly what I'm doingwith putting all of this stuffout for free.
I could be advertisingright now. I choose not tobecause I think ultimately in the end, giving it awayfor free is better. And I will get I will get more laterin the end and I will feel better about doing it. So this is just one of those oneswhere it's like, I also just want tocaution people are selling houses to buy this stuffand I wouldn't particularly recommendthat. And I knowsomeone who is doing this and I've known someonethree years ago, four years agodoing the same thing. It ultimately givesyou more options and thereforemore freedom.
I think justjust be very careful. Don't take itto the extremes, because if you'relistening to this for the first timeand you're like, streaming micropayments, Bitcoin,you can get caught up in the investingside of things. I think that's interestingand worth looking at. I also just wantto advertise caution and that if you're lookingat these things through the micropaymentlens, we're using it as money. So it's not really you shouldn't be thinking of itas like an investment. It should be looking at as more of an incomeor things like this. So, you know, Samsonite in $100, I don't view thatas a as like X amount.
And Bitcoin is like, okay, he sent me that muchthrough, throughbitcoin and insights and I do appreciate it,but I'm not going to hold that particular thingfor the long, long term. I prefer to use thatto help support other people like Burberry is doingand things like this. So, you know,just don't do it. Take it to the extremes,be be careful. You know what, makes itvaluable is the the peer to peer transactions. And so you'll alsoperhaps hear never part of the Bitcoinand things like that. But I think it's worth supporting your favourite artists and and helpingpeople like that.
So let's go onto the last section here. I've got time,talent and treasure. This is howyou can support the show. So what I wouldreally love is if you could share thiswith a digital creator. Also come join me livelike one has, like Mr. Robot has likeChad has like coal has all very muchappreciated. I love saying these the comments downdown on the YouTube video. You can also just listen in live on any of the podcastingapps which support it which in particularare found in podcast guru pod verse true fanszero cost and not full cost money. Yeah those oneswill do us for now.
You can also comewith some talent. So is there anythingI can do to make this better?What annoys you? What resourcesare similar to this? If those bookrecommendations similar to this,which you think highlights how the digital worldis changing and this is changingthe way that, you know, content creators,particularly digital ones, interactwith their audience. And if you have any book similar to the inevitableby Kevin Kelly or three by Chris Anderson,please send them my way. I would love to knowthese. And we also sawfrom DS Lofts last week, you know, if you want to helpcollaborate as well, I'm downfor it and yeah I'm we'll see if I can fit youinto for this season but definitely for the future.
I'm looking foropportunities to do something like that and then try to threeoptions, do it through a new podcasting app. I just listedquite a few and do it through directlythe podcast index website. One of the thingswith true fans I should mention, as soon soon they will have the ability toto top up your wallet with with ApplePay or Google Pay, which will be very,very much a niceonboarding mechanism because it is kind of hardto get Bitcoin is SatoshisI get it, I get it. It's confusing. And so that just just know all of thisis getting easier and it's becomingmore mainstream.
So the check out that there's also a PayPallink down below one and I have agreedthat this will just send this directlyto developers working on thingsand like Sam who's like you mentioned,it's it's a hard gig. It's not it's not easy. And so I very muchappreciate it. If you want to help mehelp support the show, all of the splitsI've got going, 5% is going to developersand you know, another 30 or 40%is going to call seven and the downfallsfor helping provide music. And speaking of music,speaking of music, we're coming to our last section here,which is we're going to be talking about we'll playing a song,in fact.
And you know, this this this episode has beenfocussed on freedom free. And the songwe actually have today is, is Freedomby Valley Ramirez. And she actuallyreminds me of one of my favouriteartists who is an inner voice, is very, very, very similar.So I was like, I have to play itfor this one. I actually got to give a shout out to ColeMcCormick through America. Plus this is howI found her, because she playedone of her songs there and it's really interestingseeing how artists are creating andfinding ways to not only, you know, talk about and create the art themselves,but express it showcasewhy they were doing it.
She's actually got a podcastabout her songs, which is really,really cool. So I and I speak Spanishrelatively well so and can understand it.So I went into it. And so this song isabout risking everything. And I and I think this isa perfect timing for this episode. You know, it's worthtaking that risk, worth taking that gamble, putting your music outfor free. For her, the riskingeverything was leaving Colombiafor the first time, leaving her comfort zoneand trying something new. And, you know, this is whythis song is just a one. It's it's a great song.I love it.
But I think it's also fits in nicelywith this theme. So this is Valle Ramirez,I believe her Colorado co artist is Dave. And in general, whichmeans Dave, the engineer. And she'sgoing to take us away. And thank you very muchfor joining me live, 10 a.m. Australian EasternStandard Time on a Thursdayis where I am sorry, on a monday. That's that's a bookreview is when to go live on a Thursday. And I really hopeyou join me for next week. Please send in a boost. And if you send in a boostnow, you're going to be helpingsupport Valley. So here we go.
MotherOmalu, Omalu, Omalu. Are you. Watching that? I want a damn black. Cause I. Think that the fight onozone was kind. Of anger and misled us and did a littlethat did them with. Football again. On Shut You know, SS three four SS At Boston College, where I see them,you seen them in the AFL battlewith Gary Salo three He thought this and w they complained And Sullivan astronomy professor Douglas Sally, Mr. McKillop saidthey know and. He hasn't. Done the opposite of that all I knowbut I'm supporter that they'll be offered. Hockey cigars and I'dbe able to see a guest.
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What does the musicindustry have to teach us about giving away musicfor free? Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome everyone to another episode of theValue for Value Podcast broadcasting live hereon the 18th of March 2024. This is the podcast for Digital Contentcreators who want to connect deeper with their audience,perhaps look at some differentways of monetising. Although you might bewondering like monetising and you're talking about giving away stufffor free, how does that work? Well, we'regoing to dive into that in this episode today.
So we'regoing to be learning from the bookFree by Chris Anderson. I have previously donea book review of this on the main models, book reviews, if you wanted to dive intothe full book of that. But we're going to befocusing in particular from about pages 153 to 161, and we've gotsome juicy quotes from from Cole coming upto help explain that. So what we're going tolearn in particular is a marketing slashgrowth tactic, if you want to put itthat way. Some counterintuitivebehaviour that you'll see from your audienceand your friends, and alsohow to face the feel, the.
Feel. Of free. So let's just jump right into thisand why make it free? Why should you makeyour music free? If you are a musician, you're putting stuff outthere. Doesn'tthat that sounds weird. Why would you do that? Now this is linkeddirectly to the next point that I'm going to make, which is opposing it, coming at itfrom the fan side of thingsand why they would pay. But we'll start here. We'll start from the creative side first,because this is the, you know, the Value for Valuepodcast, mostly directed at peoplewho are trying to understandif you're a creator, why you would do this.
You've got to do thisfirst, and then you can get the value backfrom your audience. Now, the reason to offer your creation for freeis that wide interest in your product will ultimately ultimatelyallow you to to make more money offof it. Or perhaps even freedom is the better wayto to categorise this. And then once you havefreedom, you can choose to make moneyhowever you want. You know, essentially,once you get to a high enough levelas a musician and I'm goingto be focusing just on musicians today,but these these apply broadly toother types of creators. But we'll focus onthe musician niche.
You can dowhatever the hell you want once, onceyou've got freedom, once you've got enough money,it's like now you just get to choosewhat you choose to create, how you go about doing it,and trying to find the most exciting,interesting ways. And you might be thinking,okay, well, I'm not the you know,I'm not Kanye, I'm not ye I'm not at this the high enough levelwhere I can just do whatever the hellyou want. Well, I think a lot of the valuefor value concepts will allow you to get to that levelif you want. If you're aimingfor stardom, if you're aimingfor things like this.
And it's essentiallythe acknowledgement, I think if you're givingsomething away for free that you could makea small gain. Now if you were tojust keep it locked in and like,here's a price on it, I want to create this and I want some immediategratification from that. But it's going to reallystunt your growth. Or you can have, you know, none of the upfront payments,but you have much larger in the future. Once you have grown, once you can do whateverthe hell you want. So we're goingto start off with a quote from page 155here of the book. And we're going to learnhow Prince did something a little bitcounterintuitive of not only just giving his his music away for free,but actually paying to give it away.
So Cole will take us awayhere. How can a music CDB free? In July 2007,Prince debuted his new album Planet Earthby stuffing a copy retail value $19 into 2.8 millionissues of the Sunday edition of London'sDaily Mail. The paperoften includes a CD, but this wasthe first time it featured all newmaterial from a star. How can a platinum artistgive away a new release? And how could a newspaper distribute itfor Free of charge? Prince spurred ticketsales. Strictly speaking, the artistlost money on the deal. He charged the Daily Mail a licensing fee of $0.36 a disc ratherthan his customary $2.
But he more than made up the difference in ticketsales. The purple one sold out21 shows at London's O2 Arena in August,bringing him record concertrevenue for the region. The Daily Mail boostedits brand. The freebie bumped upthe newspaper's circulation 20% that day. That broughtin extra revenue, but not enough to coverexpenses. Still, Daily Mail execsconsider the giveaway a success. Managing editor Stephen Miron says the gimmickworked editoriallyand financially. Because we're pioneers,advertisers want to be with us. Carl will love that.
That'sexactly how I imagined, thoughit would sound as well. So it's interestingto note with this this kind of explanation,with this deal that happened, thatneither party actually made moneyout of this in terms of the strictfinancial dealings between Prince giving awaya CD to the well, you know, selling his CD,I guess, to this newspaperand then the newspaper actually distributing it. Neither of them actuallymade money from it, but they both had thesekind of like intangible tick,you know, branding slash, you know, prints, selling more ticketsat the O2 Arena that that they enabled this toto be a financial venture.
If you look at the broad scale of things,and I think that's one of the problems with musicalmusicians perhaps the you know, the focusto tightly narrow on this like one little thingof I've, you know,I've got to try and do thisand I'll be successful. Whereas it's it's, it's the broaderthings, you know, travelling aroundthe world might not help your music in this one particularinstance of like, I'm not actually creating music,but I can give you exposure to all sortsof experiences, sounds, thingswhich will enable you to create better stufflater on.
And I think this sort ofthing is happening here and I'm going to caveatthis, that this all requires ayou know, I feel like it's a rathertiny leap of faith because measuring secondor third or other effects of what they've done here is going to be very,very hot. You know,how how we hear that he sold more tickets,but how much did he actually morewould he have sold or not have soldif he hadn't done this? So, you know, we're doingsome kind of like, you know, counterfactuals. If this had not happened,what would have happened? That sort of deal?
But I think in these cases and I've got a coupleof more examples of this, which is layering on thisthis kind of, I guess, evidence arguments of whyyou should maybe do this. And I think by gainingmore exposure at the, you know, cost of some smallpotential profits he could have madefrom the the the advertisersfrom the actual Daily Mail itself, Prince made a huge windfallwith the concert. And perhaps he had bigger,bigger revenues then in comparisonto selling suit. Who knows? Who knows? But this is why I advocatefor similar reasons for podcasts as well, that sticking your contentbehind a paywall where it's impossibleto get to without paying all being exclusive, for example,on somewhere like, you know, Spotifywas trying to do this and we've seen recently all these podcasterswho are exclusive, they're jump ship and wantedto be everywhere because you're stuntinggrowth.
You'rereally hurting yourself by narrowing your niche to likeyou can only get it here or you have to pay for ithere. And the only timesI've really seen this work is for really large creators who already have a verywell-established audience, and I don't even thinkthey do it for monetary reasons, to be honest,I'm pretty sure they pay well theircontent and put things behindbehind stuff like that. Not becauseit pays the most, but for other reasons, such as wanting to limit their their messageto a certain set of people or to not have, you know, feedbackfrom X number of people, which I know for a factis what happens with a content creatorI followed called Andre Antonopoulos, a Bitcoin guy who's a Bitcoin educator who's been doing it for like ten years, and he is exclusive onPatreon pretty much for all of his stuffbecause he just doesn't want to dealwith all of the, the random noisethat he gets.
So this is why we see,okay, this is maybe why should give it away for freefrom the creative side, but then let's go onto the next point, which is, well,why pay if it's free? And if we see creators are willing to work for free? And we'vedefinitely established that in the last episode,why would fans pay if they can get itfor free? And I was actually having a chatwith a lovely young lady named Hannah, who was she's doinglike an article on on one of the placeswhere you can listen to thisvery podcast on true fans. You can listen to it livethere or post at Post Hoc and she's doing thisarticle and she was doing on on micropayments and in particularon true fans.
And one of her questionswas was basically piggyback of this if you're giving away this stufffor free, why would people payfor it? And I think this ismy answer to this was somethingthat we learnt last week. People do thingsfor credit status, reputation, enjoyment,satisfaction and experience. Paying away paying can be a way to getto all of these things, expedite the processin getting to some of these things. And I think that's a very,very strong reason why people will pay for stuff. And now you'd be like,okay, car And that's nice andhypothetical, but give me give me an example,give me something real.
So, well,we're going to get as real as we can get here with this next quote from page 253 and we'll see some peoplewho who did it. Well. If the video gameindustries of business racing towards freeto accelerate its growth, music is a businessstumbling to freeto slow its decline. But the early experimentsare encouraging. By nowthe success of Radiohead's name your own price experiment with InRainbows is legendary. Rather than release itsseventh album into stores. As usual, the band released itonline with the requestthat you pay as much or as littleas you wanted.
Some chose to pay nothing,including me, not because I didn't think it was worth something,but because I wanted to see if that was in factallowed. While otherspaid more than $20. Overall,the average price was $6. So, yeah,this is what we see. Okay. And this is theclassic view. If you heard about thisbefore In Rainbows by Radiohead was essentially they gaveaway their music free. They put it upon a website, you could just goaccess it. And I'd heard about thisfor ages. If you're in the valueto value world, you would have heardof this example. And what's reallyinteresting about this is if pure upfront monetarygain was the play, they wouldn'thave actually done this.
They wouldn't have givenaway their music for free, was they,you know, overall the average price was $6. I'm pretty sureback in those days, you know, paying for afor an album of something waswas much more than that. And so telling ontoI was like I'd heard about thisso many times and I wasextremely intrigued as to what actually went into thisbecause it's it's kind of like toosimplistic in a way. You know, when you hear people will bring upan example of something and you're like, Yeah,yeah, okay, but is that? And then you learnlater on like, no, the real the real lessonto be learned from this is not whatit appears on the surface.
And if you look into theStanford Prison experiment or the Milgram shockexperiments, for example, this is where you alwayshear like, it just showcaseshow bad humanity is. But if you look into the actual studiesthemselves, the science, what actuallywent on there, it was cherry picked data. It was, you know,they were going for to to prove out this thing rather than doinga scientific experiment. We won't get into that. But essentially this waswhere I was like, okay, I've heard of this In Rainbows thing by Radiohead too,so many times. What's actuallygoing on here?
So I found this interview and it's called Tom and Ed talk about In Rainbowsrelease and it's just, you know, it was someone who found a randomI think it's BBC baby C or R2,it's some sort of English station, TV station. And this interviewwas really illuminating. It's onlyhe's about 7 minutes long, but definitely worthchecking out. And we'll have thatlink down below and you'll learn a coupleof things from this. So one,they were very careful about their wordingon their website, so they actually really explained the valuefor value philosophybefore it was even, you know,called value for value.
Then it was pay. What you wantis another expression, which is kind ofinterchangeable with this. And they were veryexplicit like, Hey, this is we're doing thisthis way. This is the reasonswe're doing for it. We would very muchappreciate it. We would you know,there's it's not an expectation you can get this for freeif you want. And as the authorand we found of that quote there, ChrisAnderson he he did it and he just wanted to test it out if he could do it. They didthis very specifically. So they're very careful aboutthey asked that pitch. We know how much importantthat is.
They were very careful. They cut out middlemen,for example, and could releasedirectly to the fans without meetingsand without promos. It was hilarious watching this clip and then them just talking about howmuch they detest meetings. And it's like, yes,thank you. Thank you. So the the actual interviewitself would have been publishedrelatively recently after the releaseof the actual album. Not that I'll have to goback and check that. I'm just responding to a a comment here in the in the YouTubechat at the moment. Another thing wasthey didn't have to wait 3 to 6 monthsto actually release it.
They could do itas soon as it was done. And I'm sureif you're a musician, you know, you've createdyour work of art, you've created this piece,and then and thenyou just have to wait because you need approvalby this place. You need the, you know, marketing budgetto get approves this to be done,this to be done. And that would talk abouthow they would finishthe album, you know, do all the editing lost you know sampleschopped everything's good this is exactly howwe want it. And then six months, you're just sitting on it and just go like twiddlingtheir thumbs like, And so they said, No,this is why we could release itstraight away.
And the benefitof releasing it straight away was they didn't have to worryabout the inevitability of it getting leaked. And so by releasing itlike this, they could actuallycontrol the distribution mechanism because these thingsalways get leaked. Once you've createdsomething, it gets leaked outsomehow. And so they released it for the not to be greedy,but for the spirit of music. And funnily enough,you know, for the spirit of musicand doing things this way actually ends up resulting inmore of a monetary gain. Because if you read the book,the next page talks about how the album wasthe most successful, how it did so well.
This could be, you know, adjacentto the actual pay, what you want for the philosophy, but it certainly didn't hurtwhat happened. So all of this is veryv v esque and if if you go to the paywhat you want article on on Wikipedia, it also shows how it's known as the valuefor money model. And it goes links to a blog posttalking about no agenda. So pay what you wantvalue for value. They're very similar. And once again, another example of sayinghow, okay, something's being given away for freeand you know, you would expectself-interest. People would just,you know, pay zero if you can get itfor free.
Why wouldwhy would you not do that? But now we see, you know, they actually got,you know, $6 on average, which is pretty,pretty bold and pretty amazingconsidering it was one of the first first times that they didthis. Now, I think it's worth talking aboutwhy this seems so scary. And I just mentionedWikipedia there. And as a as I mentioned, I was doinga bit of research on this album itself. And if you go intothe Wikipedia page of this album, it talks about theirresponse to what they did for this Paywhat you Want released and they've kind of got two sections,the first sections talking about how peoplewere praising it.
You know, Bono was saying is courageous,imaginative. Courtney Love was saying,you know, the kamikaze pilot of me wants to dothe same thing. I'm grateful rainbowsRadiohead for for making the first moveand doing this. And then we see the other side of it,which was the criticism. And this isreally interesting because a lot ofthis is really fear based. So we've got some quotesfrom Lily Allen saying the release was arrogant and sent a bad messageto less or less successful acts saying you don't choosehow to pay for eggs. Why should it be differentfor music?
Sonic Youth bassistKim Gordon said it seemed really communitycommunity orientated, but it was wasn't catered towards the musician,brothers and sisters who don't sellas many records as Radiohead makes everyone else look bad by not offeringthem music for whatever. And then The Guardianjournalist Will Hodgkinson arguedthat Radiohead had made it impossible for lesssuccessful musicians to make a livingfrom their music. And I think this is worthaddressing. Like, why does this seemso scary to other people? You know, it'snot it's not Radiohead who were or theiror their fans who were criticisingwhat they did.
It's just these like other relatively well-knownmusicians as well. And it'sbecause they have this zero sum mentalityof like it's it's all the criticisms themselveswere all about money as well. You noticethat, you notice how the it was all about the moneyand it wasn't the, the spirit of the music,of releasing of, of giving it directlyto fans to have this, you know,direct interaction, of being able to be in controlof your own music and doing whatyou want with it. None of it was addressedtowards that. It was all aboutthis money side of things. And I think theywere afraid of change.
And having to adaptis the is probably the, the main argumentI would be saying there. And we're going to learnfrom, from someone as well. And page157 teaches us about this. So we're going to have another couple of quoteshere. What'sparticularly interesting is that the same pragmatismabout the need for the industry to embrace new models is shared even by the biggestwinners of the Old way. Interviewed in 2008about the impact of file sharing on his label,G Unit records, the rap artist 50 Centhad the advantage of perspectiveof also being an artist. Sure, file tradingwas hurting his label, but there was a larger warto be won.
The advances in technologyimpact everyone and we all must adapt. What is important for the music industryto understand is that this reallydoesn't hurt the artists. A young fan may be just as devoutand dedicated no matter if he bought itor stole it. The concerts are crowdedand the industry must understandthat they have to manage all the 360 degreesaround an artist. They, the industry, have to maximisetheir income from concertsand merchandise. Yeah, I think this teaches a couple of things on both sidesof the equation. Thank you Mr.
50 Cent for for that quote and for Colefor writing it out. So the problem isthe radio guys, Radiohead guys mentioned is that'll get leakedone way or the other. And you know,this was particularly I supposeprevalent in 2008. I'm not sure how with, with file sharingand things like that. I'm not surehow much it is nowadays. My fingeron the pulse of the of the music sceneis, is not super strong. But I thinkbeing proactive, getting ahead of thesethings is necessary. Adaptingto change to technology and free might scare you, but ultimatelyyou have to work with it.
And a lot of thisnext season we're goingto be looking at particularly,you know, the book, The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly,which I covered a little bit last week. Some of this stuff isinevitable. You know, file sharingcould not be stopped. The distributionof of music at a super, super lowcost is happening. You know,there's a small vinyl, you know, resurgent. But we're not going backto the days of CDs. We're not going back to the days of vinylbeing everywhere. It is digital. It is going to be ondemand streamingand things like this. And I think as a musician,you have to acknowledge that it's not worthfighting it.
It's not worth trying to, you know, lambaste peoplefor for getting the music however they want it. As 50 Cent mentioned the a young fanjust because he's he stole it doesn't mean that he doesn't love the music or that he hates the musicianor anything like that. He could be justas dedicated and devout no matter if he bought itor stole it. That was a quote. And I and once again,with the value for value model, we can find waysto use this dedication and and devout fansfollowings if we are a bit creative,if we think more about how we can actually goabout doing this word of mouth,you know, campaigns, just because they don'thave money doesn't mean they don'thave things to contribute.
So this is where it whereI definitely think that the arguments for freeis essentially the you need to do itbecause it's going to happenno matter what. If you try and fight the technology andthings that allow things to be distributedlike this, it's ultimately goingto be a failing venture. And so it's worth thinking about how you can get the message across that even if you don't pay in a monetary form,you can actually get paid in other ways or you can get valuein other ways from your from your audience. Now, this will ultimately gets usonto the last point I wanted totalk about here, which is the money is in merchant touring,so why is the money there?
And much of the pagesin between the quotes of this bookwas really focussed on analysing the declinein the record industry, but overall growthin the music industry. And you're like, okay, well aren'tthey the same thing? Record industry, musicindustry? No, the record industrywas solely concerned about the distributionof music, whereas the music industryis obviously it's just about musicas a whole. Is music getting outand getting played and we said yes, it was. Is getting played in TVshows and movies. It was working its wayinto more and more genres,areas of the world, you know,elevator music, gyms, shopping malls,all this sort of stuff.
You know, there's musicbeing played everywhere all the time, basically. And now look at, you know,TikTok and Instagram and all these placeswhere you can just click a button, you can puta song into it. Okay, it's everywhere. Now, the thing is, how have musiciansmaking money? Well, when this transitionwas happening, all of it was basicallybeing like because the CDS saleswere declining because vinyl and those sorts of thingswere declining, you know, cassette tapes,all that sort of stuff. The musicians were having to do itthrough touring and, and through much,which is, you know, to two ways where once again, it's kind of like a physical product almost,you know, I would have to physicallygo out to a venue or I would geta, a physical shirt or something like this and I believethat this was probably the waythat had to be done.
And that made sensefor musicians to to monetise their workin some sort of way, consideringthat they couldn't do it through the recordindustry, couldn't do it anymore,it wasn't making sense. The technologyhad moved on and changed. File sharing hadbasically destroyed that and so they had to do itthrough the through touringand through much. I am arguing thatI think the case is now that with micropaymentsbecoming a viable option, that this is allowinga new way, it won't completelydominate, you know, these othertwo mechanisms. But I think that micropayments, it'sworth having a look at and thinking aboutif you're a musician, because there arecertainly many people who don't want or can't consumethe physical things.
And so let's take me,for example. I don't particularly enjoylive music and concerts. I've been to a couple, butit's not a regular part of my living and livinglifestyle, I guess. And the last one I went to wasprobably in 2019, 2018, maybewhen I was in Mexico, I went to a big concertthere. That was the last timeI've been to one. I don't particularlyenjoy them. I'm rather minimalist, so I actually don't enjoybuying merch. A lot of times by desperation. I have sometimes bought tshirts to support people. Other podcasters,for example, sending money to the UKvia the banking system.
So awful. I hated it. I wished I wishedmy friends at that time had accepted bitcoinbecause that would have been so much easier. But it's but I also liketo support artists. I like to do these things. So let's take one of my favourite musiciansin a for example. Now you know. Yeah. Create some amazing music. I, I, I rememberbeing a kid and hearing some of her musicand loving it and she was alsoreally hot and I had a crush on herand probably still do. And you know, she's oneof my favourite musicians. Even if I wantedto see her live the last timeshe was in Australia, I was looking this up,I believe was in 2018.
So it's like, okay, well, you know,it's been a while since I could havesupported her in that way. I went on to ourwebsite just the other day and her shop was down, so if I wanted tobuy merch, I couldn't have even doneit like that. There's no donate buttonthere. And I was struggling to think like,okay, how can I how could I get some moneyto her? And I'm guessingthat there is a way of still buying musicsomehow, maybe through, I don't know, iTunes orAmazon music or something. I don't have iTunespersonally, I don't haveAmazon music personally, so I would have to go really out of my wayto to do these things.
But man, if she was Vfor V enabled, if she had her music upas an RSS feed, she and with with youknow, wallet splits and a way for me to domicropayments to her, she would make bank bank of meI would be sending her all of my money because I would be just listening to itall the time and boosting and streaming and all thesesorts of things. So this is where I wasgoing to just say like, if you're a musician, giving it away for free,I think it's a is a good is a good way of thinkingabout this, doing this of putting your music uponline. It's up online everywhere.
You know, peopleare accessing it for free. Now, if you want to thinkof it through Spotify, it's a very convolutedmechanism. I'm sure Spotifystill pays out, but it's, you know, we're getting there'sincreasing steps moving. The technology is movingus further and further towards like everythingbeing available If you are creatingcontent online. And I just argue,you know, if you if you haven't thoughtabout micropayments and you haven't thought about getting directsupport from your audience, it'sworth doing that. I argue the best way to doit is through the the triangle of RSS,v2 V and BTC, as we've saw pretty muchin the last season.
But you know, it's worthjust looking elsewhere if you're a musician and havingto think about that. So that is my argumentfor today. Free, free. Let's jump onto the gremlinsand I really want to thank some peoplefor helping support this show from last week. So Mr. Adam Curry,please take it away. Welcome to the value for value histogram. Yes. Sothe booster gremlins for those who don't knowis where I think the peoplewho help support this show and in particularin the monetary aspect. We'll talk a little bit more about how you can supportin a non-monetary aspect at the end.
And this is by doinga boost to ground which you can senddirectly through one of a newmodern podcasting app. There'sall sorts of reasons outside of the valuetransfer you can do. I go live so you could be listeningto this live the on on onone of those apps. I put chapter images there so that you can haveinteresting things and you'll see stufflike spends bitcoin gifts, whichI put in there to help brighten upmake it more interesting. You canget transcripts in their notificationsas soon as the podcast goes outin this release, all these sorts of things.So good reason to check outsome of these apps.
If you gave me a modest podcast dotcom search support, you'll see a listthere of where you can actually goand find these apps. I've done a run through all of thesesorts of things and you can send a messagedirectly with an app. That message will reach me and this is just a classicexample of how these micropaymentswork. You can stream inand you can also do it via sending in what is known as a boost, which is just a one timepayment or booster. Graham Same thing, but you have a messageattached with that. So I'm going to readsome of these out here and I'm just going to dothem in sequential order because it will lead upto the big the big one.
So we had these laughscoming in with a thousand sets sent using fountain. He says Good show. Would loveto make your end of show tracks one day fire. Hey,thank you, mate. Thank you. I am very muchin this moment of I've got my structurefor this season, but I will hit you upfor next season because that sounds likea really fun way of being able to collaborateand do something interesting andand change it up. So, yes,more and more on that in I'll also like six months time, I'll get back toyou. That's probably what I'll be doingthe next season. We have a message herefrom Chad and he says, Hugeshout out to what Barry is doingfor live concerts.
I did mentionthis last week. If you enjoyedVoice of Music and want to help it grow, please considerdonating some sets sets of upto Thunder Road. And then he's got a a clapping emoji 3333 setssent using fountain. Thank you very much,my friend. And the link there isThunder road dot media and then forward slashlive of what is that the it's not colonthe square hyphen livehyphen is hyphen lit. I'm going to have the link to that in the show notes. I've also included themas a 5% split to this very podcastin this very episode. So yeah, I really lovewhat what Barry is doing for the live musicof creating these concerts where you can essentially do what I'm talking about.
This is, this is whatwe're talking about. The musicians are doingthis concert for free. You could jump into the live streamat any point and just watch the whole thing without having to paya single cent or you can jump inand contribute. So show some support likeI will be doing as well unless I'mflying in mid-flight to Brazil,which is possible, I will be doing that and it's just areally exciting avenue of of I think the future of music,of things are changing. I did see a lot of streamscoming in here from Sam, Sam Sethi,the founder of True Fans. And then check this out.
Sam Sethi 100,000 sets. Cent using true fans, although a Bola bolaI don't have any of the sound effects,but thank you very much. So my God, thanks. And he says,thank you so much for your kind wordsand support. Building an appat the bleeding edge of tech is superhard, often rewarding, but sometimesvery frustrating. And once again that. So if you're wonderinghow much So I'm talking micropaymentsand you're like, they're sendingthese stats. What are theserandom things? The equivalent of thatat current prices is about 105 AUD. So, Sam, thank you.
Thank you very much. You know, you've paid myhosting for a half a year. A year? I don't know. Thank youso much for doing that. May I really doappreciate that and I highly recommendpeople check out true fans because it's it's one of these placeswhere an app progressive web app so can be used on yourdesktop, on your iPhone, whateverphone you're on Android and it's got allof these functionalities. He has everythingin there. It's a it's a sweet app. I'm going to berecommending it more because he's he's really creating somethinginteresting there. And like I said,I did a little interview for someone who was alsovery interested in it and writingan article on it.
So I will also link thatwhen it comes out. Chat offices in the chat. That's me. Thank you, Chad,very much. Appreciate for joining usin here as well. So let's jump on to,I suppose, some current developments, latestdevelopments. Things are interesting. Like I said, Thunder RoadMedia at get al Bitcoin. If you wanted to helpsupport that, live things that are going on, it really gives methe same vibes as what was going onwith Able Craft when Iwas tuning into that show like two years ago where it was just,you know, so Spencerand this guy Abel Kirby, and they were creating basically the first music,the first album specifically to be ableto release it in a value for value format.
And that was Abeland The Wolf. I will be playingone of their songs in the near future,and I think this is just it's a pillar in what's going to besomething that is really, really bigand be for the music. That's why I'mtalking about it today. I thinkit's really interesting. Now, this is slightly offtopic from music, but it's it's very muchon the same trend of someone who was doingsomething digital and having to adapt with the times change, make their money through not exactlythe way they wanted to and then find exactly their niche and how they could do itdirectly through through their artand through their music.
And so there'sthis guy called Beeple. If you haven't heard of people before, he'sbasically an artist and particularlydigital art. He'll do some 3D renderingand things like this. But mostly it would be what you wouldimagine is a JPEG image. And he's been doing thisfor a long, long time. I listenedto this interview with him and he was, you know, creating the stuffand he was like, okay, well, I've put it on YouTubevideos, but it wasn't reallygetting much traction. I was trying to direct people to my website, butyou know, that was hard. And then he realised like, well, I can justput this on Facebook and I'm just gonnaput my art there.
There was no wayto pay for it. There was no monetaryreason. He was doing this. He was giving it awayfor free. What this led to wasa lot of people becoming very interestedin what he was creating and it ended up turning outthat he would get How would he makemoney from his art? Well, he would actually getthese opportunities to work on and create forthe Super Bowl halftime Justin Bieber concerts. You know, the the backgroundimages behind him when he's on the big TV screensand things like this and and allof these sorts of things. So he's indirectlymaking his his money through the AC oneand the testing.
Michael Joseph Winkelmann, professionallyknown as Beeple, American digital artist, graphicdesigner and animator and this is the part knownfor selling Nfts. You know, like an NFT iswhat the hell is up? NFT standsfor Non-Fungible token and basically meansthat he could sell his art directly on the blockchainwhen the time was right. So he was creating all of this stuff,giving it away for free. He somehow made found a wayto make money from it, but it was through thisvery indirect method of, you know,getting paid for, getting renownedand then paid for his art, but for other people's installationsand things like this.
It's kind of similar to, you know, musicianscreating all this music and then only getting paidwhen they're doing concerts and sellingmerch. Interesting. And then he found this wayof when when Ethereum was coming upand he realised, you can actually put your art as a, as a digital imageon the blockchain. And it's like aone of one thing and it's,it's stored there and there's a way tomake it digitally scarce that, okay, he could now sell itdirectly to his fans and his fansreally liked his stuff and he ended up sellingthis piece known as Everydays,which was a collage, a collaboration of of everythingthat he'd created for like once a day, for yearsand years and years, maybe a decade. I'mnot sure how long.
And he ended upselling this one thing for like, you know, 63million or something. So Headlines. Amazing. I think the lessonto take away from this is delayedgratification. You know,he created his stuff. He put it out therefor free. He found a way to like,grind and make money through alternativemethods before he found a way to connect directlywith his audience and and be able to, you know, not only make money from them,but connect directly with them. So this is an interesting aspectof where you can see a digital artist has donesomething similar. Now, obviously with music you can maybe do NFTor things like this.
I wouldn'tparticularly recommend it. I've lookedat a lot of this stuff for the pastcouple of years and I still I think thatthe way forward is through the the mechanisms. I talked about RSS because it'sself-sovereign, it's decentralised,it's permissionless, and you can do valuetransfer through that and then through valuefor value and Bitcoinon top of that. So I think the main thing to take away fromhim is definitely just putting your, yourart out there for free. Grow growing,creating a brand, connectingwith your audience will lead to opportunityis further down the line.
And then this gets into my final section here,which funnily enough, why Bitcoin? Why? Why would you you know, I just talked about ittheorem and Nfts. But why? Why would I say thatIt's, it's worth focusing on Bitcoin. And I say Mr. Robot in the chat, except that anyone cancopy and paste any of it. NFT is, it's a scam, you know, the same argumentcould be made for putting music up in an RSS feed. Anyone can copy itand and put it up. We're not seeingthat behaviour here and I think it'sultimately it's, it's, it'skind of about this delayed gratification.
And so, you know, what is the ultimatedelayed gratification? It's saving your moneyand this is where I very much goingto stay away from the financial advice and I view BTC as the bestway to do that. If you're new, you're going to hear about this thing called Hodling,which is holding on for dear life, the acronymif you want. Or basically a guy got drunk andspelled holding wrong and which is ultimatelyjust forgoing a quick win now for something betterlater. Once again,delayed gratification of is what I'm arguingthat musicians should do. Certainly what I'm doingwith putting all of this stuffout for free.
I could be advertisingright now. I choose not tobecause I think ultimately in the end, giving it awayfor free is better. And I will get I will get more laterin the end and I will feel better about doing it. So this is just one of those oneswhere it's like, I also just want tocaution people are selling houses to buy this stuffand I wouldn't particularly recommendthat. And I knowsomeone who is doing this and I've known someonethree years ago, four years agodoing the same thing. It ultimately givesyou more options and thereforemore freedom.
I think justjust be very careful. Don't take itto the extremes, because if you'relistening to this for the first timeand you're like, streaming micropayments, Bitcoin,you can get caught up in the investingside of things. I think that's interestingand worth looking at. I also just wantto advertise caution and that if you're lookingat these things through the micropaymentlens, we're using it as money. So it's not really you shouldn't be thinking of itas like an investment. It should be looking at as more of an incomeor things like this. So, you know, Samsonite in $100, I don't view thatas a as like X amount.
And Bitcoin is like, okay, he sent me that muchthrough, throughbitcoin and insights and I do appreciate it,but I'm not going to hold that particular thingfor the long, long term. I prefer to use thatto help support other people like Burberry is doingand things like this. So, you know,just don't do it. Take it to the extremes,be be careful. You know what, makes itvaluable is the the peer to peer transactions. And so you'll alsoperhaps hear never part of the Bitcoinand things like that. But I think it's worth supporting your favourite artists and and helpingpeople like that.
So let's go onto the last section here. I've got time,talent and treasure. This is howyou can support the show. So what I wouldreally love is if you could share thiswith a digital creator. Also come join me livelike one has, like Mr. Robot has likeChad has like coal has all very muchappreciated. I love saying these the comments downdown on the YouTube video. You can also just listen in live on any of the podcastingapps which support it which in particularare found in podcast guru pod verse true fanszero cost and not full cost money. Yeah those oneswill do us for now.
You can also comewith some talent. So is there anythingI can do to make this better?What annoys you? What resourcesare similar to this? If those bookrecommendations similar to this,which you think highlights how the digital worldis changing and this is changingthe way that, you know, content creators,particularly digital ones, interactwith their audience. And if you have any book similar to the inevitableby Kevin Kelly or three by Chris Anderson,please send them my way. I would love to knowthese. And we also sawfrom DS Lofts last week, you know, if you want to helpcollaborate as well, I'm downfor it and yeah I'm we'll see if I can fit youinto for this season but definitely for the future.
I'm looking foropportunities to do something like that and then try to threeoptions, do it through a new podcasting app. I just listedquite a few and do it through directlythe podcast index website. One of the thingswith true fans I should mention, as soon soon they will have the ability toto top up your wallet with with ApplePay or Google Pay, which will be very,very much a niceonboarding mechanism because it is kind of hardto get Bitcoin is SatoshisI get it, I get it. It's confusing. And so that just just know all of thisis getting easier and it's becomingmore mainstream.
So the check out that there's also a PayPallink down below one and I have agreedthat this will just send this directlyto developers working on thingsand like Sam who's like you mentioned,it's it's a hard gig. It's not it's not easy. And so I very muchappreciate it. If you want to help mehelp support the show, all of the splitsI've got going, 5% is going to developersand you know, another 30 or 40%is going to call seven and the downfallsfor helping provide music. And speaking of music,speaking of music, we're coming to our last section here,which is we're going to be talking about we'll playing a song,in fact.
And you know, this this this episode has beenfocussed on freedom free. And the songwe actually have today is, is Freedomby Valley Ramirez. And she actuallyreminds me of one of my favouriteartists who is an inner voice, is very, very, very similar.So I was like, I have to play itfor this one. I actually got to give a shout out to ColeMcCormick through America. Plus this is howI found her, because she playedone of her songs there and it's really interestingseeing how artists are creating andfinding ways to not only, you know, talk about and create the art themselves,but express it showcasewhy they were doing it.
She's actually got a podcastabout her songs, which is really,really cool. So I and I speak Spanishrelatively well so and can understand it.So I went into it. And so this song isabout risking everything. And I and I think this isa perfect timing for this episode. You know, it's worthtaking that risk, worth taking that gamble, putting your music outfor free. For her, the riskingeverything was leaving Colombiafor the first time, leaving her comfort zoneand trying something new. And, you know, this is whythis song is just a one. It's it's a great song.I love it.
But I think it's also fits in nicelywith this theme. So this is Valle Ramirez,I believe her Colorado co artist is Dave. And in general, whichmeans Dave, the engineer. And she'sgoing to take us away. And thank you very muchfor joining me live, 10 a.m. Australian EasternStandard Time on a Thursdayis where I am sorry, on a monday. That's that's a bookreview is when to go live on a Thursday. And I really hopeyou join me for next week. Please send in a boost. And if you send in a boostnow, you're going to be helpingsupport Valley. So here we go.
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