Turns out the brilliant Chicago musician Saul Williams is also quite a businessman as well. He gave away his best album and was rewarded handsomely. He released The Inevitbale Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust online with two payment options. One could download it for absolutely free, or one could pay $5 for a high fidelity version that also included a .pdf file of original art and some other goodies - but the same exact songs. Over 200,000 downloaded it for free and only 60,000 paid for it, so he lost out on a lot of revenue - right? Well, actually he had never sold more than 30,000 copies of any of his previous releases, and his live shows started frequently selling out. And, most importantly, he reached thousands of new ears who had never heard him before - and likely would not have otherwise. He says he has also had the added under-the-table revenue of a bunch of kids at his shows who give him $5 bills saying they didn't have a credit card, so they couldn't pay to download it online. When is the record industry going to realize that downloading isn't a threat? In fact, they might still be saved if they rise from their death bed and use their remaining energy and resources to fight for downloading instead of against it! Why are so many artists able to figure out how to make money through free and cheap downloading, while the buggy-whip selling industry execs can only waste their time siccing their lawyers on people they should be courting as customers? And BTW, if you haven't heard the album - you really need to download it, buy it, steal it, rip it or do whatever you have to do - it's a masterpiece!
Posts
