| an argument for free music: exhibit A | |
In summary [ripped from their wikipedia page]:
Team Love is a New York City-based independent record label founded by Conor Oberst and Nate Krenkel in 2003. It has released albums by musicians including Tilly and the Wall, Mars Black, Jenny Lewis, David Dondero, Craig Wedren, and Willy Mason. A distinguishing marketing tactic of Team Love has been complete albums for download in unprotected mp3 format at no cost on their website in addition to traditional record and CD sales.
So that’s all find and dandy you say for the label right, what about the artists? Glad you asked. The following two paragraphs are taken from an interview with Team Love Records’ Tilly and the Wall that appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of under the radar
Like the band’s previous effort, Bottoms of Barrels is available for free download on Team Love’s website. It is a marketing strategy that the label uses for all its artists and one that Jenkins [Note: She’s one of the band’s three vocalists and one of its two bassists] sees as impacting Tilly and the Wall’s relationship with its fans.
“When we go to shows and we play, people are like, ‘Yeah, I downloaded your album,’ and a lot of times they’ll be like, ‘And I want to support you,’ so they’ll buy the record too,” says Jenkins. “And i feel that a lot of our fans have done that, have listened to it and been like, ‘I really like that’ and want to help us out. So they buy merch and stuff, which helps a ton. For this new record, we were like, ‘What could we do that’s a little bit different and would make people interested in buying it instead of just downloading it?’ So we put on a making-of-the-record [documentary]. We just took a camera down to the studio and added that as a little bonus.”
Business Week ran an article and interview with Team Love founders Nate Krenkel and Conor Oberst back in September of 2004. Considering their views then they could almost be called visionaries in the music world that still finds most stumbling about trying to come to terms with the current situations the industry finds itself dealing with today.
Their whole philosophy for running Team Love Records is a model for anyone looking at starting an artist friendly label. Even 2+ years later much of what they say stands and can benefit someone starting today. But one of the best comments was:
Krenkel: We thought downloading could be used more as a promotional item. Something exponential is going on. The more music is downloaded, the more it sells. There will always be more copies downloaded or shared or put on tapes than copies sold. But when someone looks at how much a record has been downloaded and equates that to lost sales, that has always been backwards to me.
The flip-side to that of course, from the same response, is:
It isn’t something that we think will work for everyone, and we’re not absolutely certain it will work for us. It will take a good year of practicing this to attempt to measure what’s going on, but there are things out there that suggest it’s not as bad as people say.
The verdict, 3+ years after starting the label though would seem to state it does work for them as you can still download any complete album from Team Love Records. So do so, and:
If this is music you like and you want to support, it’s not that much money, you should do it.
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*In a previous post, Giving It Away, I wrote:
Some indie labels make it their policy to make albums [all of them] available as free downloads [looking for the example/source to back that up].
Team Love Records was the label that was escaping recall at that time.
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< ![CDATA[[...] I first mentioned Team Love Records previously just because I heard about their philosophy on free music [they make all tracks from all releases available for free on their sites]. [...] ]]>
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