The Art of Making Music Won’t Survive the Model of “Free” Much Longer

Nora Germain
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

It’s 7 a.m. here in Berlin. I’m too jet-lagged to sleep any longer. I’m here at RCon3, a blockchain conference that two blockchain based co-ops I work for are hosting. One is RChain, working on building a scalable solution to blockchain technology that the whole world can use, and the other is Resonate, an ethical streaming service working to make the music industry more transparent and efficient for artists (as well as everyone else).

Before I arrived in Berlin this week I was in Seattle working with 25 musicians from around the world for nine days on a heavily improvised recording and performing project called Tiny Orchestral Moments, and before that I was in San Diego performing with the legendary jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater with an all female cast of musicians. Yesterday I found myself eating Italian food near Alexanderplatz in Berlin with some friends, one of which included Adrian Belew, guitarist for King Crimson, David Bowie and Frank Zappa.

Adrian is here at the conference performing with his own group, The Adrian Belew Power Trio, which has featured for the past ten or so years Julie Slick. She is an amazing bassist, a good friend of mine, and someone who has participated multiple times in the Tiny Orchestral Moments projects with me. Her band EchoTest was also invited to perform at the conference, and I’ll be a special guest performing with her tonight playing violin on some of their songs.

What’s my point here? Everything is all connected, folks. Everyone knows everyone. There is a web (or a network), of musicians around the world that transcends borders, gender, generations, ethnicities, languages, and time. As I was eating lunch yesterday with Adrian, we inevitably got onto the subject of the blockchain and how it’s going to help musicians and the music industry to function, one of the chief concerns of the RCon3 convention. If this is at all new to you, I wrote an introductory article about this a few months ago which you can read here.

When I talk to musicians about this stuff (and I do it a lot), there is both an inevitable and paramount statement made each and every time by someone in the circle. “If we don’t get people to pay for music, music is not going to last.”

Now I don’t mean to be dramatic, but honestly, this is a serious issue. We can make all the best apps, we can make all the best music. We can put together amazing tours and have the most beautiful mixing and cover art and music videos and so on, but if we don’t get people to pay for our music (which currently does not happen), then music as an art form just won’t survive.

The music industry already doesn’t function. Payments come years late, or get totally lost. There are multiple inoperable databases collecting rights. Taxes are an issue. Getting the right visas to tour is an issue. Collecting rights in multiple countries is an issue. To quote Adrian, “They send you a 17 cent check in an envelope with a 38 cent stamp on it.” You get my point. There are memes circulating around the internet comparing the artists that frequented the Top 40 (or the equivalent) in the 1980’s when people paid for music, compared with the artists that frequent the Top 40 now. Without starting an argument about what art is and should be, one can easily see that the difference in quality is startling.

When you drive the price of music down to zero, the quality goes with it. Let me make this quite clear. With the rise of piracy in the early 2000’s, the film and TV industry noticed they were losing money, but they decided to make people pay for their products. They didn’t cave in. They stood their ground. There is no totally free version of Netflix. Or HBO. or Hulu. Or Amazon Video. This was smart. People followed.

The music industry went the other way and said, “Ok! It’s all free from now on!” Because of this decision, we see the iTunes store deciding to end paid downloads in 2019 (a little known fact) and artists surviving on crowdfunding and Patreon. We’ve got the totality of music being streamed for free around the world, and there is literally no central place to sell it without making your fans sign up on an external website or something else.

I’m going to wrap this up soon because I have a long day ahead of me and honestly, my point is very simple. I can’t understand how we’ve normalized the idea that music should be free. Musicians are literally only making music on tours, and even that is extremely difficult to do. Let me give you some analogies.

Imagine you make wine, but you can never sell it. All you can do is charge tickets to tour your winery. Or imagine growing vegetables, but you cannot sell the vegetables anywhere. You can only make money charging admission to sign autographs at the farmer’s market (people really freaking love your vegetables). Or you make clothes. You’re a fashion designer. You can’t sell your clothes, but you can charge admission to the fashion show.

Do people see how ridiculous this is? I hope we do soon. Resonate and other companies are working hard to figure out how we can merge the models of “stream for free” and “buy it when you love it” (a model called #streamtoown), and there are dozens if not hundreds of others projects and ideas and models out there. We need to find the right ones and I’m sure eventually we will, but this is the big deal: If we don’t make the public (the whole world) understand that music will not last if people don’t pay for it, we’re doomed. We can make the best platforms. We can have VR. We can have holograms of Michael Jackson singing you a customized rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

But if people don’t pay for music, and soon — holograms are all we’re going to have. That’s why I’m here in Berlin, and that’s why I make music. I want to make the world a better place with my art, in whatever form it takes, and I want to help musicians to enter a new golden age, one that we’ve deserved for so long. I have faith in the art that human beings make, and I believe it’s been better, and it will be better, than a hologram you watch for free.

Nora Germain
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade