The more observant of you will have noticed that all of the paid downloads on thesoundoftheladies.com/music are now available for a “pay as much as you like” fee (apart from Songs About Science and Live in Gipsy Hill, which are free, at the time of writing). I actually don’t mind people paying under the odds, and I don’t even mind giving away content (the free podcasts and EPs should convince you of that), but I’d resisted giving everything away for a couple of important reasons. Firstly, I wanted to include mechanisms so that, if people liked the music, they could support it by buying downloads of the older recordings. Obviously, I benefit from this, but I think good-hearted people out there who have been given a bunch of free stuff and enjoyed it want to support it, and make sure more can be created. Not everyone will feel like this – but being one of those people who is actually helping to support the artist, being part of something not many people know about – that can feel pretty good.  Secondly, and more pragmatically, I really worry that people see something low-cost as something low-value and ultimately not worth having. I don’t want giving away free stuff to mean fewer people listen to my music!

But attitudes are changing. Do people increasingly see recorded music as something you don’t pay for? If that’s true,  free no longer means valueless. Well I’m not so sure. I love live music, but I love recorded music too and it would be a shame if it just became an advert for the gig* (as many have suggested). If people responded to the decline of the film industry by saying theatre will cover the shortfall, you’d think they were nuts. Well, what I want and what the world wants are two different things, but I think there are enough people who enjoy recorded music and want to support independent artists to keep us indies going. I suspect I’m about to find out…

So. The Radiohead model. Pay as much as you like. But do download! Do share it with people you think might enjoy it, do come along to gigs and buy the mug, but most of all… do have a listen. And then do tell me what you think.
* incidentally, I know maybe one or two acoustic musicians who ever get paid for gigs – and they are very successful and/or very niche