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Comment by foulmouthboy | Hacker News Reader

Ridiculously short sighted analysis. So you sell 143 CDs and make your thousand bucks. Good for you. End of the road. Then you sell another 155 CDs on CD Baby. Make another thousand bucks. Yep. End of the road.

In the time that it's taken to sell 298 CDs, and effectively reach 300 people, you're telling me you wouldn't (for free) make the music available to thousands of users and then just share the hell out of it? How much music gets streamed by Spotify users just looking to try a track out? That too counts as revenue.

If it were me, I'd distribute across as many channels as quickly as possible and hope that I catch on as opposed to "burning out" each channel one by one in the most painfully slow marketing campaign ever.

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Well, a lot of new media companies, including Grooveshark, have made exactly that argument. It might work for larger artists with a built-in fanbase, which makes virality easier to achieve since it'll start with some sharing momentum. But for indie artists with very small fanbases (I'm talking hundreds of fans, not thousands), having your music available for free doesn't do as much for you. The fans who would have bought your album will now listen for free and not buy it, and nobody else has heard of you. Plus, explosive virality will be harder to achieve - in general - with such a small number of people to begin with.

Again, I'm sure Spotify pays out a significant amount to the record labels and major artists, but I'm talking here solely from the perspective of a small indie musician with a, say, 200 person fanbase. In that case I don't think your argument makes sense.

Even Coldplay just announced last week that their new album would not be on Spotify. They released it this week, it went to #1 by a landslide and a huge % of it was in digital sales. If it were available on Spotify, you can only imagine that's not what would have happened.

Good point. I'm curious to see if there's more of this from major bands. I love Spotify, but as a musician, it does make sense to capture all the sales you can at first, and then open up your album for free streaming later. Some fans will do whatever it takes to hear an album when it's released, and if you give them a free option upon release, you're losing those sales.

Why can't you do both?

The people who are finding your sell pressed CDs would probably buy it whether it was on Spotify or not. If those initial buyers then wanted to share the music with somebody else, I would think Spotify would be a MUCH preferred option compared to ripping the CD and sharing it on a torrent site.

As an indie musician, your goal shouldn't be to milk as much money as you can from your 200 person fanbase, right? It should be to double and triple that fanbase. Self pressed CDs seems to be one of the slower, more painful ways of doing that.

It is a ridiculously short sighted analysis but the point is that the thousand bucks you cited is likely to be a fraction of that if anyone can go listen to the album whenever they want for free. There are plenty of ways to market your music without making it pointless for anyone to purchase it.

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