The great thing is you have options. If you don’t want people to stream it for free, you can always sell direct-to-fan on your website and BandCamp.

I know this was awhile ago, but why should I concede to just blatant thievery? Let’s just call piracy what it is. There is no “free market” for music if consumers aren’t willing to pay for it and would rather steal it. Almost all the paid revenue from users in Spotify go to the majors, not the indies, because of the rigged pro-rata system. It might damn me to poverty, but I refuse to put my entire body of work on Spotify. Musicians need to grow some balls and stand up for what is right. Thievery is not right.

I agree with you Jonny. This is Basic Capitalism 101. We’ll post 2 songs for free and then post “robust” snippets of all our other songs. Give them a good taste of what we’re about. But after that it’s just basic sales strategy. If the fans can’t make a simple decision after that then we don’t want them as fans. We’re not running a charity. This is business! This isn’t the Netherlands or Sweden. We are living in the most dynamic capitalistic entity the world has ever known! We are proud of our songs not only because we created them but because they are some of the greatest rock songs on the market today! We stand behind that 100% and always will! Give everything away for free? Oh hell no! Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave! We are “Dark Capricorn Rising” and we are forging our OWN destiny. This is the true spirit of Rock and Roll and of music in general – and always will be!

Thanks for sharing Jonny! Definitely legitimate concerns.

No one says you have to give anything away for free if you don’t want to. There is another music business model you can employ that allows you sell your music for however much you want, as long as you don’t put it on Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music, or any digital streaming service where people can listen for free. You just use Facebook Ads to drive people to a landing a page to offer a sample of the music and let them decide if they want to pay for it. Can it work? Possibly, but I think it’s very outdated and not reflective of consumer behavior today. People are not really buying physical music or mp3s much anymore. That’s just the fact of it.

People need to find other ways to monetize if it’s something they really want to do. It’s okay to have a day job to fund your passion in music. If you don’t make enough as a musician to go full time, then don’t it. If you complain about doing free shows and not having enough money for merch, you should find other ways to make money. Just because you want to be a musician full time doesn’t mean you are entitled to anything. There’s 10 billion other artists just like you.

I don’t think you can blame yourself or other artists for this. This societal shift is bigger than any single person or group of people. If you’re going to blame anything, blame the internet, blame advancements in technology or blame the monetary system. But it would hypocritical if you are enjoying the convenience and usefulness of having a smart phone or internet access. The internet has really disrupted all facets of our society and drastically changed things for better or worst. You can choose to complain, romanticize about the way things use to be or you can adapt. I’m an advocate for adapting because more changes are on the way.

This is nothing other than lowering the BAR and without monetary income, starving artist will just starve more. I realize this is now the way of the world, but just as musicians and artists have been giving away their talents forever in lieu of “exposure” (which rarely works), now we are giving away the very thing that is our greatest asset when it comes to monetary gain. So, once again, musicians shoot themselves in the foot by allowing this kind of shit to go on…

We have only ourselves to blame. Now we do Free Shows, and give away the music for Free… And unless we sell a T-Shirt and a Hat and a Sticker (which we shelled out a lot of dough we didn’t have because we’re not making any off of shows or music sales (hello?!?) we don’t make ANY money. So now we just rely on a persons need for shwaag. And if they have no need for that, we just go hungrier.

This is an extremely sad change in the music industry.