The Times have raised something of a stink recently by announcing that they are going to start charging for the online content of their newspaper.  This isn’t new, exactly, because a lot of newspapers started out that way on the web, but quickly dropped all these clumsy logins and memberships and payment schemes because in the face of free and unlimited services like the Guardian and the BBC they quickly realised that they were losing out massively in the scramble for eyeballs, which is the one criterion everyone on the internet seems to agree is the key to influence, importance and, eventually, monetisation.

This kind of thing was reinforced by the same basic behaviour taking place in the real world, where newspaper prices plummetted and free papers like the Metro became everyone’s commuter read of choice, leveraging their impressive distribution to pull in the kind of advertising that rendered the price an individual might pay for the paper itself trivial.

You can see the same happening in music.  Bands are repeatedly told by the evangelists of the new e-conomy that they should largely turn a blind eye to torrent sites and p2p sharing which basically distribute their content for nothing to a wide audience, with zero income finding its way back to the band; directly at least.  And yes, that applies to Spotify too, particularly if you’re independent or on a small label – there’s just no money in it.

The money, for bands, is supposed to be on the gig circuit, which is quite simply one great big gigantic load of old bollocks.  It’s fucking expensive to drag a band around the country and, until you get pretty big, promoters simply aren’t willing to pay the fees.  It may be true for some bands, but for the vast majority it is not.  People are asked to play in-stores for free, sessions for sites like mine for free, and, not unusually enough, the gigs themselves for free as well.  The rationale is the same: give away the value – the content – for nothing, but in doing so win an audience, which then can be exploited.

But it costs a lot to make music, just as it costs a lot to generate quality news coverage. Read the rest of this entry »