Nothin' for Money (Portfolio.com)
October 31, 2008
Coldplay has been trying really hard to convince fans it's hip. Last spring, the band allowed free downloads of its new single, "Violet Hill," and then offered two free concerts in New York and London.
Then, at its first free show, in London, the band reminded the audience three times that the concert was on their dime. In an interview with Reuters, lead singer Chris Martin hinted at the need to satisfy the convention of selling through a label while looking altruistic: "All that other stuff we have to do because we're in contract"—presumably a reference to the chore of selling CDs through their label EMI—"that's all going to happen, of course."
The British stadium-pop band had joined pop icon Prince, who gave away the album Planet Earth to around 3 million people in the U.K. in 2007 through the Daily Mail. "It's direct marketing," Prince said. (Time magazine used more hype, writing of Prince that he was, "setting music free: could be a Sign O' the Times.") Other musicians who have given away some of their music for free include Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, and, of course, Nine Inch Nails, whose lead singer Trent Reznor, who exhorted his fans to "steal" his music by downloading his latest album for free, even letting fans remix digital tracks from the band's albums.
Even the bland and withered eucalyptus plant that is the Eagles had the moxie to portray themselves as innovators by dissing their label and putting out their first album in 28 years this year by partnering with Wal-Mart to sell it exclusively. AC/DC and Guns N' Roses followed.
Such overhyped posture of "free culture" are part of what I call "MPFreeism" (a word celebrated and disseminated in the frightening song "MPFree" by former Clash guitarist Mick Jones: "I believe in MPFree/I believe in P2P/I just burnt my own CD/...a billion downloads can't be wrong"). Although it can seem like the only thing a band can do to appear "with it" and commercially viable nowadays, it often rings hollow, with the most mainstream, insipid acts feeling the need to partake in MPFreeism: giving away tracks and shows, and going "independent." It can all create some confusion, even within a band's own network. Los Angeles hard-rock band Buckcherry sent out an irked press release after its latest single was ostensibly leaked to BitTorrent. But it turned out that the track's uploader was not some nerd with a thing against Mötley Crüe wannabes—it was the band's own manager trying to promote his boys.
In the last two years, MPFreeism has also grown into something full of contradictions. Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" was a conventional rock success, yet the band knew it needed to act charitably and vaguely autonomously to give its profile a bit of an edge. In this digital age, even musicians like the now romantically independent Madonna are eager to be called "radical" and "independent" by the press. And they get these honorifics simply for leaving their major labels, as Madonna left Warner Music, to sign "360 deals" with Live Nation, a touring company. In the case of the Kabbalah Girl, a 360 deal means that Live Nation profits from Madonna performances, as well as her sidelines—say, Madonna perfume or a rabbi-approved bustier.
For sure, there's a tension between the old music model—in which everything must be sold, there are huge profits to be made, and the artists tend to be the thrall of their labels—and the new model, in which everything must be free and there are not such huge profits to be made, but, if the pose sticks, can lead to even greater sales. Ironically, MPFreeism may not offer the artistic integrity it implies, yet be simply more packaging and phony ploys. There's also a possible Faustian aspect to the new dynamic—whether giving away tracks makes your listeners more connected or more indebted—that listeners "owe" performers their livelihood.
But what else can a crumbling industry do? MPFree is the music business's response to free downloads and drastically reduced album sales. According to Nielsen SoundScan, physical album sales dropped by 19 percent in 2007, following a similarly grim drop in 2006. As the traditional CD market melts away, the industry needs something to lure listeners—and their dollars. MPFreeism relies on the "razor-blade model," in which a manufacturer gives a razor away for free and then earns money from selling expensive refill blades. In the music version, a band may offer a free track and then sell the pricey collector's edition of a CD, getting fans to pony up $82 or so, as some did for Reznor's pay-as-you-will approach, out of affection intermingled with guilt.
Coldplay is a wannabe, if that. Such artists, typically signed to big deals at major labels, give away one track in order to seem like they are sharing. As Pitchfork.tv's editor in chief Scott Plagenhoef puts it, the bands who give one song away and then claim free cultural status are not really participating in free culture. "Giving away one song doesn't do anything: It just seems like you are giving something with one hand to try to discourage people from going out to get the whole thing illegally with the other," he says. "It's a step in the right direction, but it's too late for that gesture."
In contrast, Plagenhoef sees rap artists like Lil Wayne as a legitimate example of free-music culture. For years, Lil Wayne has distributed mix tapes, giving material away to fans not as a commercial stunt but to see which ideas would stick—road testing them, if you will. Giving out a high-quality free product, and increasing his fan base rapidly by doing so, has also paid dividends for Lil Wayne. When his latest album hit, he sold a million copies in a week.
Radiohead is harder to place on the spectrum—between those that gesture at free culture and those that embrace it. Famously, Radiohead sold its 2008 CD In Rainbows through a pay-what-you-will scheme. Buyers could pay anything, from nothing or up to $212, to download the album. The New York Times kvelled, "Radiohead has put in motion the most audacious experiment in years." While Radiohead murmured to the Times that signing a new major-label contract "would have killed us straight off. Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote," the model for the band's giveaway was more "controlled leak" than it was a brave new economic or cultural model. Three months later, they were no longer offering their music for free.
"There's lots of fake free culture nowadays," says Eric Steuer, the hypervigilant creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers licenses with some protections for artists. His most recent phony free-culture irritation, he says, was with a Radiohead remix contest on iTunes: Fans bought multitracks of the band's songs and then remixed them, but they ultimately didn't have a copyright to their own versions as posted.
Ultimately, though, while Radiohead and Coldplay elegantly work the free-culture angle to sell loads of merchandise, new bands have also used the ease of free distribution in a more organic fashion than larger bands to build up their reputation and popularity, including Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, M.I.A., and Black Kids. When megabands like Coldplay give one song away and shout out their membership in the MPFree Club and seem a bit callow for their efforts, there are others—even the slightly ridiculous Carbon/Silicon—who are making good on their MPFree promise by giving it all away. While there's been a rise of what I call "minor cultures" filling in the spaces of a now more-fragmented mass culture—thousands of small, original musical, film, and media taste-worlds that aren't made to dominate a media landscape but to coexist within it—only a few of those deploying MPFreeism give a damn about disseminating, say, math rock—or any other niche sound—to an uneducated but willing audience.
For bands and labels and managers used to the old major-label system, it's tricky to turn the lemon of free downloading into the hard lemonade of genuine and genuinely shareable expression. Whether bands, labels, or managers give music away or sell it, it's more authentic not to trumpet either choice too loudly, just in case you pull the metaphorical shag rug out from under your fans. To put it another way, the MPFree movement has proven yet again something that many of us know all too well: that being truly free is a lot harder than just saying you are.