There’s light at the end of the tunnel. And we plan to draw the curtains. The light is the daylight of Sunday and we don’t have to get up till they’re ready to kick us out of our hotel room and after a full week of 7am mornings (if not earlier) and four to six hour long performance days, we’re really, really ready for a cliché Sunday: i.e., a day of REST.
But tonight we’ll play one last show to what is usually one of our most enthusiastic audiences, and I’m all too glad to send them the last ounces of energy that I’ve got. I’m looking forward to sending it all out, maybe saving JUST enough to make it back to the room tonight and crawl into bed.
Or maybe I won’t save nothin’ and they’ll have to just let me sleep at the bar. As I remember they do a pretty decent breakfast.
Speaking of breakfast – over eggs and French toast this morning we were talking about how Bob Dylan songs were one of those rare things that you couldn’t get on Youtube because of how aggressive Dylan’s lawyers were – I’d been reading that some people found it “off-putting” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
I think it was Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails that first made me aware of a “pay what you want” release – something that I thought was really, really threatening at the time. For all that it made a huge artist’s latest album instantly available to absolutely anyone – it also set this horrible precedent for large artists to just give their music away. Maybe he was ahead of the curve and had seen how Youtube and other non-music retailers would undermine an artists’ ability to control their catalog, but I think it was something far more altruistic but short-sighted… in wanting to spread his music as widely as possible, he gave the perfect argument for anyone not feeling like you should pay for music to do just that.
So the idea that an artist as big as Bob Dylan (or, the other place I think we’ve encountered this : the Eagles, Prince too I guess) would clamp down on their creative output in such a way is kind of heartening – here are respected artists – huge artists – deciding what they want to do with their content and showing that they’ve got the right to do just that… but of course there’s also the feeling that you’ve GOT to be that big to be able to enforce that right.
ilyAIMY doesn’t buy into a lot of the streaming services, and our most recent albums aren’t available there. Spotify and Pandora, Google Play, Youtube, et cetera – maybe we’re undermining fans’ ability to access and share our music, but the math is kind of stacked against that model. In order to get paid on Spotify or Pandora you have to accrue thousands and thousands of plays – youtube’s even worse as now they have requirements of a thousand followers and x amount of generated content a week to even monetize your content – and even when you hit the threshold to be paid, those thousands of plays are only netting you pennies.
Or, you know, I can sell one mp3 and get two orders of magnitude in payout – or sell one CD and get 15 times THAT. Yeah – I only make $15 off a CD sale, but in order to make that amount on Spotify I’ll need you to play my song 214,000+ times…
So yes, if we went viral in some way we could make money off of streams – but when someone tells me they wish our current album was on Spotify so they could support us… well, I hope that they understand that in order to “support” us as much as the person who buys a disc they’re going to have to buckle in and listen to cicada end-to-end non-stop for the next 686 days…
So, you know…. Get on that. Oh. And, could you do that twice please because we haven’t pegged the minimum payout for most streaming services yet – kthanksbye.
