NASHVILLE — I attended an interesting panel here this afternoon on the use of blogs to promote your music. It wasn’t about an artist creating his or her own blog; it was about getting a music blogger to write about you.

Almost a quarter-century ago (man, am I dating myself) I worked at my college radio station and we were bombarded with promotional LPs and CDs. Few of them received airplay. It turns out the music bloggers on the panel — some appeared not to have been born when I was a DJ — are now the ones bombarded, by mailed CDs but also emailed MP3s (which it turns out they prefer, less clutter). They also review only a bit of what they receive. With radio playlists becoming formulaic, these blogs are where many find new music.

The moderator, JT of Thirty Tigers/Oh Wow Dang (yes, most panelists didn’t use full names and had oddly-named companies or blogs, get used to it), asked the panel if artist should give work away. “Oh yes,” was the universal chorus. “It’s just going to be pirated anyway,” said Janet Timmons of OutTheOther.com.

I asked about this in the Q&A. I noted how a band, when first starting out, would have every incentive to give works away, not just to bloggers but to the public at large, to build a following. But I said at some point, when they had a following, they would actually want to make some money off of their sound recordings. (I often think of the woman in the eatery who stands by one of the food vendors with a tray of Bourbon Chicken on toothpicks, encouraging a free sample in the hope you’ll buy their lunch special.)

Dodge of MyOldKentuckyBlog.com (oddly enough based in Indianapolis) was quick to answer. “Sound recording revenues are on the decline,” he said. This music critic — who in a long tradition of critics knows much about what he covers but doesn’t necessarily practice it — said artists should make money from touring and merchandise. We hear that a lot from people not in the music industry, but the audience would have none of that. There was immediate hissing and heckling. A woman in the back threw out statistics showing how hard it was to make a decent income off of touring compared to even modest sales of recorded music.

Then a transformation occurred. The other panelists quickly went a different direction. Recording artists should give some songs to music bloggers, they said. They should let those bloggers post the songs. They should put out a song or two out on the Internet in broader ways. But they shouldn’t put whole CDs, let alone a whole catalog, out there for free. Even Janet Timmons, who had raised the specter of P2P piracy, insisted that artists continue to seek income from sales of sound recordings.

I was pleased both by the reaction of the audience to Dodge’s remarks, and to the reasoned position of the other panelists, balancing the use of free as a marketing tool vs. the right to continue to pursue income from recorded music.

Those outside the music industry who claim to love music but think it’s wrong for musicians to try to earn income from the recordings those so-called music fans are listening to have always struck me as, well, a bit isolated from reality, and definitely a bit selfish. How is it they can tell someone else how to pursue a living? I wish they would, every once in a while, step away from their laptops and go talk with some songwriters and recording artists, and learn what it’s really like to make a living from one’s creativity.

They’d learn that an artist has the right to pursue any business model he or she chooses, including one emulating Bourbon Chicken.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 6:31 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, copyright opponents, creators, internet, market forces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.