Josh McNeill

Tag: free art

Esoteric profitability.

May 9, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I am obviously not prone to buying music but I’m honestly considering buying Ashtray Nagivations’ new release Cloud Come Cadaver. Why? Because there aren’t nearly enough people listening to this stuff to make it find-able online for free. I’ve tried already, and I’m good at this; I’ve been pirating software since BBSes (I’d say music since then but this was before MP3s existed).

This creates a weird sweet spot in selling-your-music land. On the one hand, if you’re just completely unknown, you’ll be lucky if people find your music to begin with; while if you’re fairly well known but not being played in shopping malls, your music will probably be too easily accessible to the people that listen to it for them to buy it. (I’m leaving out if you are one of those people whose music is played in shopping malls because they’re part of a whole different world of music business issues.)

But you have this place between completely unknown and well known among music lovers only that allows you the option of actually selling music. I come across it more and more as my tastes continually lead me to noise, glitch, and contemporary classical music. The last category is almost uniformly inaccessible to the file-sharer, with the exception maybe of Nico Muhly and the NOW Ensemble, the latter of which has actually offered their albums for free at one point. Nope, when my Soundamus feed tells me a new Kaija Saariaho release is coming out, I don’t even bother adding it to my calendar because I know I could only listen to it if I bought it.

That last point typifies a couple issues. First, Ashtray Navigations is only selling the album for ₤3 and I imagine they’d be pretty lucky to get even 500 sales (correct me if you’re in the know). That’s ₤1,500. I’m not sure how they go about their recording process but if it’s anything like what I’ve previously described about packaging and distributing music, that money could be 100% profit. Even at that, though, it’s not enough to go into making music as a full time job by itself. They could maybe raise the price but it’s likely that a curve would be created where the more the music costs the fewer people there are that will buy it and so the profits will even out. I certainly wouldn’t pay $10 for the album, because I can still listen to their old music and save that money for bus fare. This is reality for a lot of consumers, which is the second issue typified here. I get probably 10 newly released albums every month but there’s no way I could afford a $100 bill each month. I buy store-brand peanut butter. I can afford $3 a month for a single album that I particularly want to listen to that isn’t available through any others means, though.

I think Ashtray Navigations’ Bandcamp is pretty fair, but the above often leads me to the “lets just make all our music free for fuck’s sake” conclusion. It reminds me of a thesis project a classmate of mine was recently proposing. She’s an economics major and wants to look into altruism in the market and one of the points she made while discussing it is that studies have shown that people will offer their resources much more willingly when it’s not made into a business deal. Blood donors, for instance, were more willing to donate if they weren’t offered cookies or money or anything in return. Maybe this is why those pay-what-you-like albums seem to be turning into a thing these days.

The cost of art.

January 4, 2013 / / 1 Comment

The Chris Bennett posted recently about an argument he had with Jim McCann on Twitter. They spent an hour or two bitching about each other over the merits of purchasing comics versus downloading them for free without permission. Chris, who at least arguably could be called an aspiring comic book artist himself, was surprisingly arguing against the former. His argument seemed to be mostly based on the cost while Jim’s argument was that it takes a good amount of cash even to just put out digital comics.

To me, Jim’s claim seems pretty unlikely to be true. I can’t speak personally about the cost of creating digital comics but I can speak of the cost of creating digital music. The cost there is $0. Ok, that’s an exaggeration but it’s also almost the literal truth. In my case, for instance, I’ve purchased equipment over the years that allows me to record whatever I want. Let’s go over what’s necessary on that list.

  • A half-decent computer: This is something most people own now anyway as it’s used for, I dunno, everything one might need to do in life. But, in the unlikely case that this isn’t already owned, you can get a fully capable laptop for $379. The only requirement, really, is 2GB of RAM and a USB 2.0 or Firewire port. You can certainly get even cheaper if you find something refurbished or just look a little longer.
  • An audio interface: This is what gets sound into your computer. The interface I use is discontinued but there are plenty of others out there, like this Tascam US-1800 that I found pretty easily. It’s $300 and has more inputs/preamps than you could ever need outside of recording an orchestra. It also includes pro-quality DAW software (Cubase).
  • DAW software: This is where you do all your work on the computer. Like I said, this was included with the interface I picked out. If not, you can get the acclaimed DAW Reaper. And it’s $60 unless you’re making quite a bit of money off your work, in which case it’s still only $225.
  • Microphones: This can cover a pretty huge range of costs but you can really get away with only using SM57s if you’re careful with mic placement. Eight of these, more than you could ever need outside of recording an orchestra, are $810.
  • Speakers: You can get away with using your regular computer speakers that you bought for $25 but, to be fair, let’s add decent studio monitors to the cost. You can get M-Audio AV30s for $100 and they have a frequency response plenty flat enough to use for mixing.
  • Cables, mic stands, etc.: All these accessories can add up, sure, but if you can get by pretty cheap. For instance, I make my own XLR cables and you can get 100 ft for $50. I’m positive you can do this part for less than $400.

Outside of these costs, you may want to add in instruments, if you’re doing that kind of music to begin with (the above gets a lot cheaper if you’re only doing electronic music) but this is the cost of being a musician period, not of recording and distributing music, so I’m leaving that out. As for distribution, torrents mean you don’t need to pay for bandwidth. You can also use sites like Bandcamp which not only give you a free way to distribute and sell your work (for free), it also provides methods for promotion. Then there’s promotion. Really, this can be done for free in the age of viral videos and internet memes. When was the last time you learned about a song by listening to 101.5 The Lame? You don’t need to be on the radio or TV anymore; those are antiquated forms of publicity.

So that’s it. $2214 max to create professional quality music, distribute it, and publicize it. And that’s a one time cost to boot. After that, you’re home free.

Certainly, there are materials that one needs to repeatedly restock if they’re an oil painter, for instance, but if we’re limiting ourselves to digital art, this factor is completely erased and the only cost is the initial cost of purchasing equipment, which has been getting cheaper by the day as technology has gotten more powerful and widespread.

I get the impression that what people really mean when they say that it costs a lot to create digital art is that their time costs a lot. That’s it. I mean I get it, artists want to live off their art because it allows them to focus exclusively on creating and, potentially, create better things. This is a different argument than what’s usually made, though. I’m totally open to a debate on whether art should be a hobby that one does outside of their day job or whether art should be the domain of professional creators. That sounds like a fair conversation. What is ridiculous to me is the idea that artists need to make money off everything they create because the costs of doing the work that they do are just so great that they couldn’t continue without financial support. That sounds like bullshit to me.

And for anyone who’s interested in the hobby versus job debate, let’s not be unrealistic about where financial support should come from. Check my previous post on that matter.

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