STOP giving away your music for FREE!

[Desire Inspires]

I like giving my music for free. I dont do it out of nessecity, on the contrary, I had many chanses of going "commercial". But, I feel that giving away art in general is the most proper way to deal with it.

I mean, lets cut to the chase: art is expressing your thoughts and emotions and dreams and fears and sharing them with the world. If everytinhg would be 100% commercialised, that would mean that the poorest people could not afford the luxury of hearing what you have to say. So you are left out sharing your thoughts with only the richer parts of the society. But I dont want to share my ideas with them, at least not exclusively.
I want to share my views with the people of the struggle, the working class people. Those that create the whole world and are still left with nothing.

Of course that view has some limitations, low budget, hard to push your music to bigger audiences, but I have been blessed in that issue. If not with my personall carreer, when I was with my old band we managed to become one of the biggest bands in Greece even though we were DIY strictly anti-commercial. Never did an interview for mainstream media, never had our records and gigs covered by them, but still managed to play to the whole country and fill every place we did and be as big as every mainstream artist. It is 10 times harder to do everything, but at the end of the day, you know that everything you achieved its on you and the people that are close to you. Not someone that could give a rats ass about you but he is being paid to do so, so he does.

I know that most of the people in here just want to become pros and **** everything else. I m not saying that going pro is a bad thing. But I think we have to always remember what the essence is in all that. And keeping your music as close as it can be is not a part of it I think.


That's just an opinion.

​You are awesome!

 

[robertdaviddean]

I agree. It's all about equal energy exchange. We create a piece of enjoyment for others, and they can compensate back. It doesn't make sense to give music away for free if we're already balanced in the exchange (IE. I'm making huge amounts of profit already and I should give more back to balance out the scale so I'm not abusing the public), or unless your return is equal to giving the music away for free (IE. If you're unknown and a blog gives an MP3 away for free and you get 500 fans in return who then go on to buy your other music). Anything less is just an abusive relationship with ourselves and doesn't show ourselves a lot of respect when we currently live in a monetary society. If we don't take ourselves seriously how can we expect others to? A doctor doesn't perform heart surgery X times per week on the basis of getting some promotion out of it. At the same time I don't see that it's worth releasing singles for 69cents on iTunes which took you 4 weeks to create and you have no audience. 4 weeks of time spent for 5 sales is not equal exchange either and a different game plan needs to be constructed that honours and respects you

 

[Box Gem]

I feel ya

 

[Olie]

Tip to rappers: if they ask you what you're budget is just walk away they don't know how to price their music.

 

[Spaceman_Ant]

I pretty much agree wit RDD above.... Rappers wanna get paid.... Even the most conscious (Talib & Mos) dont speak to the world for nothing...
Not to mention Engineers get paid pretty quick, the mixing engineer also... So why is it that we sit for hours until our eyes, ears & ass are fatigues to the point of camo to get it just right.... So the rapper can spit over it and possibly go on tour (paid after session).... so he can get the engineer to mix it once he's done.. paid after session.... get signed the label collect theirs off the top...

On a different note: If everyone charged 100 per beat it would weed out the sorry producers and bring in brand loyalty making it an actual business...

Brand loyalty.... Iphone anyone???

We make the beats first yet get paid last.... So keep giving them away for free and it'll never change

Without us they have nothing not the other way around

 

[ProducerJC]

what do you mean? and wow what a coincidence. i just responded to you on a thread you left two years ago lolol.

I was just wondering if this post helped in feeling better regarding other producers continued sales failure with mediocre marketing tactics. Sorry for the delayed response, i'm not logging as many online hours these days. My career buries me neck high in work these days, thankfully with gratitude.

Most beat makers create for the fun of it, hoping to make money one day. They apply little effort to the actions required for selling beats, or themselves for that matter. They don't understand value or how to apply it, some beat makers never will. That's why they give their beats away free of charge and this happens even though they hope to get money for their works when working with others; instead of getting money for their beats. They give their beats away hoping that someone will do things their unwilling or unable t do for themselves, which seems to be their natural way of music business stuff for some musicians. Hopefully they figure out that free stuff, in most cases, remains worthless forever. Until then, I'm having fun making beats for money at the same d*mn time.

Lol, Future reference...

 

[ProducerJC]

the number of people who make their raps to an mp3 version of the instrumental is nuts

id3 tags do not do anything to safeguard your rights, they are simply another labeling tool that can be subverted with a quick trip to cnet.com to download the latest id3 tag editor

the only decent way to safeguard your audio is to watermark it

CIVOLUTION.COM - *Digital audio and video watermarking

Technologies - Audio Fingerprinting and Audio Watermarking

Audio Watermarking using MATLAB - YouTube

http://www.isi.ee.ethz.ch/teaching/courses/ak2/audiowatermarking-english.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_watermark

How does watermarking appear when others chop and add layers to the recordings?

 

[Cyko]

Water marking wont do anything unless you're using the sample from it's water marked source (which most don't)

 

[bandcoach]

it depends on the form of watermarking - but any form is embedded in the snippet regardless of how much it has been chopped or added to - the concept of watermarking is that you cannot remove it or obscure completely

one method involves recreating the audio using a wavelet transform of some part of the original audio - sort of a granular resynthesis and very easy to prove that the sample contains either of the wavelet forms used in the resynthesis - convolution/correlation/autocorrelation usually is sufficient to prove this

another method involves adding a signal that can be extracted by autocorrelation - i.e. an inaudible (on the surface) tag that can be extracted from the audio regardless of the snippet length (well almost regardless (something that is 205ms would be sufficient in all but the most obscure cases of sampling))) - the trick here though is to get the snippet to align - with 250ms of audio that is about 1 in 11025 samples to synchronise to quick work with a computer

 

[acetheface954]

it depends on the form of watermarking - but any form is embedded in the snippet regardless of how much it has been chopped or added to - the concept of watermarking is that you cannot remove it or obscure completely

one method involves recreating the audio using a wavelet transform of some part of the original audio - sort of a granular resynthesis and very easy to prove that the sample contains either of the wavelet forms used in the resynthesis - convolution/correlation/autocorrelation usually is sufficient to prove this

another method involves adding a signal that can be extracted by autocorrelation - i.e. an inaudible (on the surface) tag that can be extracted from the audio regardless of the snippet length (well almost regardless (something that is 205ms would be sufficient in all but the most obscure cases of sampling))) - the trick here though is to get the snippet to align - with 250ms of audio that is about 1 in 11025 samples to synchronise to quick work with a computer

wow. you make it sound like watermarking is 100% audio dna no matter what form it undergoes whether its a hard copy or software to me.

this thread has really gone in another direction. but i just know that if you want to be taken serious, talking to anyone reading this who want to make this more than what it is for you, you're going to have to stop working without being compensated. i love to create and share but baby love doesn't pay bills.

 

[acetheface954]

I was just wondering if this post helped in feeling better regarding other producers continued sales failure with mediocre marketing tactics. Sorry for the delayed response, i'm not logging as many online hours these days. My career buries me neck high in work these days, thankfully with gratitude.

Most beat makers create for the fun of it, hoping to make money one day. They apply little effort to the actions required for selling beats, or themselves for that matter. They don't understand value or how to apply it, some beat makers never will. That's why they give their beats away free of charge and this happens even though they hope to get money for their works when working with others; instead of getting money for their beats. They give their beats away hoping that someone will do things their unwilling or unable t do for themselves, which seems to be their natural way of music business stuff for some musicians. Hopefully they figure out that free stuff, in most cases, remains worthless forever. Until then, I'm having fun making beats for money at the same d*mn time.

Lol, Future reference...

i love reading this comment.