Pay What You Want

I came across this article last night from Digital Music News (Maybe Radiohead Was Right After All...) that talks a bit about how the Radiohead Model may not have really done much for music, but the idea seems to be spreading to other sectors.

I'm not so sure the donation model hasn't infiltrated the music industries more than the author suggests. Sure, there were only a handful of high profile examples (NIN, GirlTalk, The Charlatans) that tried to replicate the stunt, but the more lasting effect has been the way independent and emerging bands price their albums through sites like BandCamp and Garageband. At Midnight Poutine, I get a dozen or so emails a week from bands asking me to check out their tunes. At least half of those acts have bandcamp pages that have variable pricing, and in many cases, suggest-your-own pricing.

Radiohead said their model was never meant to be a grand solution for everyone in the industry. Nor do I really think that all musicians can pay their bills and create their art sheerly based on what people think they should be paying. But these kinds of experiments re-engage both artists and users with music’s commodity form and its meaning. They ask us to reconsider our relationship with music: how much is music worth, what do we use music for, where do we want to access music and what should it look and sound and feel like when we do?

This kind of critical engagement with music is the moment afforded to us by the digital music commodity. As one of Radiohead’s managers notes about In Rainbows: “The industry reacted like the end was nigh. ‘They’ve devalued music, giving it away for nothing.’ Which wasn’t true: We asked people to value it, which is very different semantics to me” (qtd. in Byrne 2007). Free music does not mean music without value. In this case, free or the possibility of free forces a questioning of the relationships between users and the objects that circulate around them. The promise of digital music is precisely that it turns our attention towards the process of commodification.

Digital music, like countless other technologies, may never live up to all its promises. It may not disrupt the industry entirely or reduce the number of intermediaries standing between artists and their listeners. But digital music’s less grandiose promise — to turn our attention back to the meaning and form of the music commodity and to re-engage us with the role of music in our lives — is already being realized.