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Musicians who offer select MP3s for free?

C

cwright

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 5, 2004
573
0
Missouri
I'm writing a paper on file sharing and its effects on album sales, and I'm looking for examples that support the fact that file sharing increases sales.

I know I've seen articles about musicians who believe this and offer MP3s on their websites for free, in order to get free publicity, but I can't remember any of the band names, and haven't had any luck on Google yet.

If anyone could give me some bands/musicians to work with, I'd greatly appreciate it!
 
Amiina are one. You can download all their music off their myspace, although they have only recorded one song so far. In fact, there are thousands of groups on myspace offering this...
 
Every one of these 81 artists agreed to let Apple make their songs free for a week. Since their other music is sold commercially, they presumably agreed to the giveaway as a way to promote themselves, thinking that the advertising would lead to increased sales overall. I count 333 artists who have done this with the iTunes Store this over the past 3 years.

Note that the songs were temporarily free, but will subject to the iTunes DRM, whereas a free MP3 on the artist's own site would probably be freely distributable.
 
Labels big and small routinely drop and MP3 or three for just about every "artist" these days. Sometimes it's a simple download link on myspace etc., sometimes it's by way of street team "leaks".
 
Alternative Tentacles has tons (and I mean TONS) of free mp3s on their site. They're a record label that promotes a lot of "spoken word" artists (including founder Jello Biafra), but they also have a really good roster of punk and underground rock bands. I discovered one of my favorite bands through the free mp3s on the site... and have purchased all of their albums as a result.
 
Possibly the most high-profile case of a band giving away a whole album was when Billy Corgan decided to give away a whole load of new Smashing Pumpkins material just after they disbanded, rather than let the record company cash-in on it.
 
check sig (JjR) for my bands 2 free song downloads. more are to come soon.

warning; recording done via internal mic of a macbook in a tin shed :p
 
Dunepilot said:
Possibly the most high-profile case of a band giving away a whole album was when Billy Corgan decided to give away a whole load of new Smashing Pumpkins material just after they disbanded, rather than let the record company cash-in on it.
Click to expand...

And it's a fine album too!!
 
Yeah, MySpace is the place to look. A band called Dopamine on there, they gave away free CDs a Lostprophets gig and said you could download some more stuff on their MySpace... So I did... It's ace!
 
cwright said:
I'm writing a paper on file sharing and its effects on album sales, and I'm looking for examples that support the fact that file sharing increases sales.

I know I've seen articles about musicians who believe this and offer MP3s on their websites for free, in order to get free publicity, but I can't remember any of the band names, and haven't had any luck on Google yet.

If anyone could give me some bands/musicians to work with, I'd greatly appreciate it!
Click to expand...
If you find musicians who do that, you also have to find them stating that they do it because they believe file sharing (I assume you're meaning the illegal kind) increases sale. Distributing free MP3 samples on a website and illegal filesharing isn't the same, in the same way that giving out free food samples in a grocery store and shop lifting isn't the same.

I'm not necessarily saying that file sharing doesn't increase sales, just that the existance of bands with free samples doesn't really do anything to support that theory.

I know at least two mostly-amateur-but-wanna-go-pro bands that have free samples on their web-sites. Diamond and Elias Jung.
 
Markleshark said:
Yeah, MySpace is the place to look. A band called Dopamine on there, they gave away free CDs a Lostprophets gig and said you could download some more stuff on their MySpace... So I did... It's ace!
Click to expand...

And if you hear a new band and like what a band does, then you're all the more likely to buy some of their stuff in future, or go to a show.

As long as people don't start to expect all music to cost them nothing (and I can think of several of my friends who haven't paid for music in years and have tens of gigabytes of music they really like) then it's fine. It relies on people having the maturity to remember how much it costs to get music out there at all, paying for the stuff that they really value, and supporting live music. I also have a problem with copying music from bands that aren't on major labels. At that level, most of these people really need to sell their recordings or they never get enough finance to make any more

There's another site that I post on where people generally give each other the mp3s of music that they already own on vinyl. That's what I'm really interested in these days: mp3 or AAC for portability/backup and vinyl for proper listening at home.
 
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