The idea of selling your music is over...

Why would your target audience buy your CD? Your a local/regional act who is striving to fit into some genre right? That way you have some semblance of a target audience? some semblance of a marketing strategy to sell those Cd's your band blew all that money on?

The day has come when all of your target audience can simply download every album by every artist who ever influenced your band in less than 5 minutes on the Internet. Albums that were recorded in multimillion dollar studios by big name producers and engineers. All free for the average kid with even half a clue and an Internet connection to download. There are even free programs that let you record directly to your computer anything that you can stream (play) on the Internet. basically if you have whole songs up to listen to anywhere on the net, people can get copies of it for free pretty easily.

Thats pretty stiff competition for the local band trying to sell the EP they recorded down the road and barely mastered for 10 or even 5 bucks a pop. You wonder why you are selling less and less?

Here's what your selling now...the idea of patronage, the package (i.e. cd booklet), what i like to call slice of the local scene, culture.

So now where are we? We aren't in a bad place man. Just different. The new deal is your selling the style of it, the culture of it, the collectability of it. There is no collectability in digital downloads in case you haven't noticed.

You might have noticed all of my music is available for free at:
http://suicideseven.bandcamp.com

Why would I sell you something you can find for free? I wouldn't. What I will do is make all my albums available to you for free in the highest digital quality I can. I will hope you listen to them and like them. I hope you find a song that moves you. I will make available T-shirts, stickers, buttons and whatever else seems relevant to the music listener. maybe coffee mugs?

My motto is give the music, build the culture. sell the merch. I'm not Steve Jobs but it seems a little stupid of me to try and sell you my new record for 10 bucks when you can download the entire pearl jam discography in 20 minutes for absolutely nothing. Not that I'm pearl jam or trying to be any of those artists I have names in this article but still...


Thats my word,

-KAM