Fun Stuff > BAND
Do you buy music?
Jackie Blue:
There are many srtists who make music which is not ever going to make anything more than gas money from touring (and not because it's bad or unpopular).
Anything in the realm of ambient-indie: Windy & Carl, Labradford, Christmas Decorations, etc. etc. I'm pretty sure almost none of those bands even bother touring.
Anything that is difficult to reproduce live without just using a bunch of pre-recorded tracks - M83, for example.
And merch? Really? Pretty much everyone I know stopped buying band t-shirts once they hit 22 or so, unless it's a very special band or very special occasion (or very special shirt).
I know many musicians who make a good amount of scratch from selling CDs, either through small indie labels or their own Myspace/website.
As far as the whole "If I could buy more music, I would, but I'm poor so I steal it" argument: That's generally valid, because I'm sometimes guilty of it myself, but again I'll refer you to before the days of high-speed Internet, Napster and everyone having a CD-burner: I was poor back then. Exceedingly poor. This forced me to make choices about the albums I bought, which in turn made those albums exponentially more special to me, and I'd argue that it made me appreciate the music more because, with a limited influx of music into your life, you listen to, analyze and think about what you have, instead of having thousands of songs and hundreds of albums you listened to once and didn't ever re-visit.
The first time I listened to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I absolutely despised it. If I had downloaded it for free I'd have deleted it and likely would have been deprived of eventually appreciating one of the ten best albums of the entire 1990s.
Johnny C:
--- Quote from: zerodrone on 29 Dec 2007, 12:11 ---Pretty much everyone I know stopped buying band t-shirts once they hit 22 or so, unless it's a very special band or very special occasion (or very special shirt).
--- End quote ---
Is there a motivating factor behind this or is it more a Logan's Run-type scenario?
The last point you make is actually a really great one and it makes me glad that I do still buy albums. Once I've sunk the money into a record I can't really bring myself to sell it. I own it so why not keep it? The result is that I've wound up not only appreciating albums that take a while to get into or albums that were underrated and largely missed (see: Twice by The Tyde), but I've also heard some remarkably bad records that were released by bands I used to like and it's helped me to understand what makes that particular record so bad.
Being stuck with an album really isn't that terrible and it's an integral part of the experience.
People without nearby record stores, do you try doing mail-order from the label? Most albums can be bought directly from the label via the internet. Dischord in particular is famous for having uniformly low prices on its products but everyone from Sub Pop to Secretly Canadian to Matador Records do mail-order and for the most part they're affordable. The latter label has been pricing a number of its albums in the $8-$10 range as of late. My next paycheque is going in part to Dischord probably, and after that I have to place a big order from Jagjaguwar.
Tom:
Matador doesn't ship to Australia, so I had to go and search for a store that would. On top of that, postage is a bitch and PayPal didn't work the first time I tried to pay at least the executive edition of Challengers was worth it.
KharBevNor:
You are happy because your obsessive hoarding tendencies mean you must own bad music?
Hipsters, lol.
In my case, I'm rather sure that, without the internet, I pretty much wouldn't listen to music. So, pretty much every CD, vinyl and bit of merch I've ever bought, every gig or festival I've gone to is pretty much pure profit from the record industries point of view.
Johnny C:
I'm happy because as a musician I've learned how to avoid some of the traps that make records into absolute crap. The last Alexisonfire record, for example, showed me that making a "return-to-roots" record isn't always a great idea because it sometimes means putting aside clear growth that you've demonstrated in favour of selling more records.
I mean, I was initially pissed because I'd spent money on it, but at least I got something out of it.
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