Ramp-Music.net

My first rejection!

Jul 5, 2010 Uncategorized
Posted by irfon

As all of you know, I release my music for free download here using a Creative Commons license.  This is something important to me.  I have a lot of bones to pick with capitalism and the way we value things in large part due to price, to some degree or other.  (Try selling milk half-off.  Or see how seriously people take freeware video games vs. commercial video games.)  I don’t think that there should be no market or that nobody should charge, but I think that a vibrant gift economy is also important.  In particular, I think that people making things with no commercial expectations are freer to explore and innovate, and that these kinds of explorations and innovations are a crucial part of the creative ecosystem.

So I try to do my part by creating, and giving my creations away for free.  I do it here with music, and, usually in smaller ways, it’s a common theme across all my creative projects, whatever medium they may exist in.

I was talking to my good friend BC Holmes not too long ago about this, but also about the idea of submitting to a record label or going through sites like The Sixty One which, while it’s not a label, has a strong aspect of ranking.  I also talked about popularity, getting comments on the site, knowing if people are listening.

She asked me some really good questions, poking at why I was doing what I do and why I begun to care about measures of approval so much.

There is a certain amount of ego tied up in that.  I can’t deny that.  But one thing that I said there that I still think is key to me is that to be said to be contributing to the gift economy, which is an important aspect of this work, I need to feel like what I do make available has value.  There’s no real contribution if I take a piece of paper, draw a scribble of no value to anybody who sees it on it and leave it out front of the house with a sign saying, “Free.”  I mean, I suppose to some degree just doing it contributes to the idea, but it also might devalue the idea in the sense of reinforcing the idea that only things of no value are ever free — “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

I ran into this headlong when the first Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day came about.  Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day is a day in which people celebrate the vibrant online gift economy and the important role it plays by giving away works for free online.  It’s important and dear to my heart, so I put together a track specifically for it — you know it as Pixel Pt. 1.  I had thought that I might write elaborations on the theme in future years as Pt. 2, etc.  But what happened was that the submission of the track was ignored.  Not just ignored in the passive sense of putting something out and having nobody notice, but actively ignored in the sense that people collecting Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day submissions in my community and putting together link roundups of them omitted my contribution from those lists time and time again, despite my submitting it to be added.  Initially I had assumed that this was in part because I wasn’t in the primary demographic of participants and I wasn’t working in media or styles that were popular with the people most actively engaging with the celebration.  However, when I re-read the posts about the origins of it, I saw that indeed, although it had been often left out of the way the meme got repeated around the blogosphere, the original had specified that only free works released by those who ordinarily (successfully) charged money for their work were relevant.  While this didn’t seem to be the case for many other people participating in the link roundups, it did seem to be part of the initial description, so that may have been another way in which I didn’t qualify.

And that really was the core of the perceived value argument, to me.  In order to show that we have a vibrant gift economy, we need to show that there is a good deal of free content being made available by artists or artisans whose work has been in some way or other marked as being worth paying money for, if it weren’t being given away for free.  A great example would be the works of Cory Doctorow, whose books are available simultaneously for money and for free and do well in both incarnations.

Well, what’s the equivalent for a studio musician?  You can put out tip jars and donation buttons or have PWYC online stores in addition to downloads. Tip or donation buttons have been on the site in the past — I think there’s still one on it now — but haven’t seen any activity.  PWYC online stores to me eat away at the feeling of sharing something for free.  But moreover, if I really dug in my heels and asked people to please donate or pay if they like the music, then that mitigates the degree to which it can be said that it’s free.  At some point it becomes “guiltware” rather than “freeware”. 

Probably the best alternative would be to offer free downloads but have professionally-pressed CDs for sale, and I may look in to that at some point.

However, and I realize this has been a long tale, there was also the opportunity of Magnatune.  Magnatune is like a record label, but as opposed to most record labels, they accept Creative Commons licensed music, they distribute using the exact same Creative Commons license that I do, and they charge their users under a subscription model that makes micropayments into the accounts of artists who those users download.  Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, though, they act as gatekeepers.  They want to offer their users a unique service, and given that a lot of the music is likely to be available for free elsewhere, they need to make a value proposition for their users.  The value they bring is in having people who review submissions and accept or reject artists, so that they can be said to be only offering their users music of suitable quality — music that they deem has value.

So it was mostly for that gatekeeper service that I decided to submit to Magnatune.  Their licensing is non-exclusive, so I could still offer tracks for free here, but people who use Magnatune could download my music there as well. 

I submitted a sort of Magnatune-only album which consisted of Orchard Days and Fountains minus certain tracks that have somewhat … complicated licensing issues.  (I have to think about how those tracks work on my own site as well.)  And I heard back today.

The response: “Unfortunately, while your music is very good, it isn’t the kind of thing we’re looking for. Sorry!”

My friend Chris seems to feel that there’s a lot of music on Magnatune that’s in a similar style or genre, so I imagine that that’s a form letter rather than a heartfelt evaluation, but who knows? 

I should note that I’m not angry that they rejected the music and I don’t think people need to tell me that they were wrong or misguided in doing so.  (I am kind of bummed out.)  They’re business people who presumably know what they’re looking for, and in fact, it’s that ability to say no that gives their ability to say yes any value or meaning.

So I’m not sure where the portion of what I do here that was aimed in that direction goes now.  Do I just try to translate that into a drive for achieving excellence on here and in the other non-discriminating venues (Jamendo primarily at this time) that I currently use?  Do I try to see if there are other “record labels” that can dovetail with Creative Commons online releasing?  Do I try to get a professional run of CDs pressed and sell them through the site here?  (Do I take this as a sign that the stuff I’ve got at present isn’t ready for that, and try to improve?)

There are of course other options that are less positive, but would be more melodramatic than practical.

I’m really not sure.