The best things are free, add music to that?

So Radiohead have released their new album, and theres a twist. You can go to their site and download, then pay however much you want for it, even a big fat zero. It’s been a topic that’s interested me for a long time. How much should we pay for music? You can base it on how much it costs to produce the music which is silly money. I was recording at the weekend with my other band Spook Club. For two songs it took 12 whole hours at something like £25 an hour (which is cheap by the way compared to a studio I know that charges £50). So that’s £300 for just the recording, not including mixing or mastering, so even in the digital age if we forego the cd duplication and artwork and just release it online it’s still a hefty whack.

Then there's promotion on top of that which usually doesn't come for free. Based on this if a person wants to listen to an album of new music they should pay over a grand (£1000) for it but that would be a tad insane. A tenner for an album really doesn’t seem that bad now does it?

This never used to be a problem but now with the old internet the music industry is losing out on lots of cash. The problem I think goes back to the general public not realising how much time and money (not that they should) goes into making music. Most non musicians i’ve spoken to have been amazed how long it takes to record a song.

Then you have the fact that for years the public thought that they were getting a raw deal from the record companies. When compact disc prices jumped substantially from that of records it was easy to think that the records labels were just being greedy when in fact they had priced lp's for too little and were making a loss for years. . I think that this has made the public very blase about stealing music (including myself when I should know better) .

So whats the solution, wish I knew but I can easily see a time when musicians make all of their living from performance and licensing and music is just released to the public in order to promote the act and their live shows. I don’t think this would be a bad thing, in fact for a lot of us it would be just the same as it is now but without the guilt.

So you’re thinking, great, that means i’ll be able to get the full your scarecrow back catalogue for free then. Well, maybe at some point but the problem with that is that i've been informed that the public thinks of free things as being worthless and not desire-able. So I’m going to keep charging for now but if you can find a way to download our songs for free then you have our blessing. For now there’s a free mp3 instrumental download of ‘from anyone’ on our music page. This is free by the way because I recorded it in my bedroom.