Benn Jordan

I’m not going to report on the download vs. donation results yet (I want to wait a week before coming to any statistical conclusion), but I do want to say something:

Out of tons of Myspace (and elsewhere) messages I got, there are a couple people who might have some misconceptions:

1. I’m not super cool for doing this.
I honestly did it from a conservative perspective. Not as an artist or as a public relations stunt, but as the owner of a small business that is facing mortality from piracy and the state of the music industry. I did it as an experiment to find out if the results prove this to be a better way to conduct business. If the results do indeed come out shining, then I’ll be hiring people to make nice little digital packages and upload them all over the place whenever an album comes out on the label. There will be no need for other people to rip the CDs, and more importantly, there will be no worries about getting sued for having the material on your MP3 player.

2. I didn’t “give STAVL away for free”.
I think some people never bothered to read the HTML file all the way through. My label (and career as a releasing musician) cannot sustain itself by giving music away for free. Trust me when I say that if I could, I would.

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The point is, record labels aren’t meeting the demands of their customers. That’s why music piracy is destroying the music industry. No matter how many people you sue, how many torrent sites you take down, or how many idiotic methods you come up with to protect the date (Key2Audio, DRM, etc)…people will always prevail at doing what they want to do. At some point the industry needs to come to grips with that fact that their business model is changing, and they have to devise new business plans inside the parameters of the situation.

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I don’t think donation is the long-term answer, but it is hell of a lot better than pretending 85% of your audience doesn’t exist.
More later, I’m buried in snow and want to take pictures of the mess!