Don't give everything away for free!

I am passionately pro you giving your music away for free.

There's a great article on that on Mic Control here. You should definitely be doing it.

But, I love this other piece about a new company that will allow you to stream shows to your fans, but get paid for them!

It says that the experience of engaging with your band, for the fan, is the one part of you as a musician that can't be replicated - so don't give it away for free.

Not sure that I agree completely as you can do some for free and some paid, but the mindset is important.

Yet this presents us with a potential dilemma.  Many of us have fully embraced giving away our fixed content as a way to promote our real revenue generating events: touring and appearances.  But what happens when we're given the ability to literally tour the world from our laptops?  Should our 'shows' be free because it's the internet?

My message is that it should not and cannot be free.  If you utilize an online broadcasting website that doesn't offer you the ability to get paid, you will be effectively devaluing the only asset we have left.  The only asset that is not replicable and cannot be saved to a hard drive: yourself.

Read it here.

And check out the StageIt service here.

NME's 10 digital music predicitions for 2011

What it says on the tin.

Check them out here - 10 Digital Music Predictions For 2011.

I'm not convinced by half of them!

Streaming is the answer to music distribution. That we haven't yet found a way to make ad-supported services like Spotify pay isn't the end of it. Nor do I agree that MySpace is over. It's over as a hub for your musical online presence, but it is still a very highly trafficed (sorry - I know that's not a word!) place to hang out your musical schill - so you'd be daft not to.

Some of the points I do agree with - like the one on fan funding!

Well, I don't ever really expect the NME to know what it's on about, do you?

Streaming music is the only way for the future

I saw this article on streaming yesterday and realised that it must be right about our future consumption of music. Will it affect how you promote your music?

Probably! If the majority of fans end up not buying digital or standard physical copies of your music then you're going to need to monetise your career in other ways. That will include special editions and deluxe sets of physical prodcut with music on them that isn't available in the cloud plus the obvious routes of more live work and hence income together with merchandise.

Start thinking about that now as streaming is coming fast!

Have you noticed that you’re streaming more audio and video? That your purchase of CDs and DVDs has dramatically decreased? That your DVD cabinet and CD racks have a layer of dust on them (literally, or otherwise)? That your digital CD/DVD cabinet (i.e. iTunes) is being opened less frequently? (Apple knows this, by the way, it’s why the new AppleTV has no hard-drive; it’s all streaming…really think they’re not going to do the same for music?)

Read the article here.