Why Indies Should File Share Their Own Music
“Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers. Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning. Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there. Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts. Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure?”
THE INTERNET DEBACLE - AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW, Janis Ian
If you are doing music for the "art" and just want to share your music with the world, why aren’t you sharing your music already? Just skip ahead to the guide to "pirating" your own music.
For those that wish to make money off of their music, it may seem counter-intuitive to put your music up on file sharing services. How can you make money off your music if you are giving it away?
The simple answer is that it can expose your music to millions of potential listeners, which can translate into people coming to shows, CD sales, and merchandise sales. Don’t forget that you lose control of what happens to your music moments after you proudly sell your first CD. Your music will be on file sharing services whether you like it or not. The MP3 files of your music act as the ambassador of your band to millions of people. Sharing your files is too important to let a random fan do it for you. You want to make sure that your band name is spelled right, and that the MP3 is of a decent quality. You also have the opportunity to fill in the MP3 tags with information such as your band’s website, so the people who don’t know about your band will know where to go to find out about you.
But this doesn't answer the question of why you should file-share if you want to make money off of your music. This requires us to look at what making money off of your music really means. There are four major ways1 that an indie band makes money off of their music:
- Selling recorded music on a CD, or through digital distribution (i.e. iTunes and similar services.)
- Playing live shows.
- Selling merchandise, like T-shirts, plush toys, key chains, stickers, lube, or anything else that can be branded with a band’s logo.
- Selling the rights to use your songs in a creative work. For example, a producer pays you to use your music in a film, commercial, or video game.
File sharing helps all of these sources of income by increasing awareness of your band name, and getting your music in the hands of people who have never heard of you. It raises the chances to make new fans, sell more merchandise, and to connect with that movie producer who is looking for the perfect song. It may even convince someone who’s never heard of you to buy your album, since many file sharers use the networks to listen to new music before they buy it. Think about it from the point of view of a new band in 1985: If you told them that they could get their music heard by potentially millions of new listeners, you could probably get them to pay for the privilege to do it. We have this available to us as free promotion today by putting our own music up on file sharing networks.
You should also analyze this based on where you make most of your money in these four main areas. If you are like us, your biggest revenue generator is probably the money made from live shows, and second to that, it’s the CD sales that happen at those live shows. File sharing will only help you draw more at your shows by introducing more people to your band. Also, it’s unlikely that the file-shared versions of the songs will make a difference in the decision to buy an album right after you've rocked out on stage.
File sharing also has hidden benefits. The fact that people will read your band name, even if they don’t download, enhances your name recognition, which is something that large companies pay tens of millions of dollars for in ad campaigns. It can take quite some time to gain notice, and being constantly in view of people can help you succeed. In other words, your band name is now a brand, and having your name on these networks, where they might come up in random searches, is free advertising.
File sharing is an overwhelming opportunity for indie bands, with little downside. If you decide to share your own music, we recommend that you read our guide to "pirating" your own music.
(1)We are consciously excluding anything that you could make off of the performance right of your music, such as from BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC. Indies have never generated significant money from these organizations, mostly because indies are shut out of commercial radio.
Next: “Pirating” Yourself: A Short Guide to Sharing Your Own Music