… and probably never will, is that people aren’t only willing to pay for music, they even donate for music which is given away for free.
Musicians like Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead showed us that fans do pay for music even if the could get it legally for free. NIN for example released The Slip under Creative Commons, so everyone could (and still can) download it for free from their website and legally share it with friends. If someday NIN won’t provide it any longer by themselves, it would even be legal for me to upload the album so that people can keep downloading it. At least if I don’t do it commercially. How they got money out of the free album you’re asking? Well, NIN did the same before with Ghosts I-IV where the prices are still on the website. You could buy a CD for $10, a deluxe edition for $75 or a ultra-deluxe limited package with vinyl for $300 of which there were 2.500 numbered copies. Guess what, these 2.500 packages sold out in only three days. So this makes $750,000. There were 2.500 people willing to pay $300 for music they could have downloaded for free. Amazing, isn’t it?
But what’s really amazing is the College Fund Professor Kliq started about a weeks or two ago. He has been releasing music under Creative Commons licenses for several years, downloadable for free from his website, Jamendo, SoundCloud and I mentioned him two times before. Now he’s at his last semester at Columbia College Chicago and can’t pay for it. So he started the college fund where everyone can donate via PayPal. By now he has collected $1,570.03 of the $5.000 he needs.
So what? Still thinking people don’t want to give money for music? Really? Go buy yourself a strait jacket! 😉
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Professor Kliq – Ode To Charles from the album “Guns Blazin’” (2007) released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
