How cheap is free?
That’s a question music fans have been pondering for the past decade as the digital revolution has driven down the price of music to, in many cases, close to nothing.
And it’s not just a narrow concern about artists getting paid, or label executives lining their pinstriped pockets.
It’s about the value we place on art and about the relationship that consumers have with the people — and processes — that drive popular culture.
This has been an especially hot topic since Amazon pulled off its too-good- to-be-true Lady Gaga promotion in May. Fans were able to download her entire new album, “Born This Way,” for 99 cents for a limited time. The stunt doubled as the launch of the Web retailer’s cloud music service, and it was one from which Amazon “lost” more than $3 million in paying Gaga’s label for the discount.
Gaga even endorsed the move in a Rolling Stone article: “If anything, I applaud a company like Amazon for equating the value of digital versus the physical copy, and giving the opportunity to everyone to buy music.”
A whole album for under a buck. No surprise, brick-and- mortar music retailers are calling Gaga’s bluff. This isn’t about music at all.
“Art is worth less to our culture,” said Paul Epstein, owner of Denver’s Twist & Shout record store.
“The Lady Gaga promotion is a symbol of how art has taken the place of elevator music. It’s just something that’s in the background to sell something else, and that’s very sad.”
Artists who pour their hearts into their albums, films and books — only to see them sold digitally for pennies or traded illegally online — are watching their financial lifeblood run dry.
The bar has also been lowered for what used to constitute quality. As consumers, we’re content listening to less-than-CD-fidelity MP3s. We’re OK with watching $100 million Hollywood blockbusters on smartphone screens the size of a playing cards.
Why? In part, because we can get them for free. So free seems like a good thing. But in many aspects, it’s still not as good as paid.
Has the move toward free really made it impossible for the average creative type to make a living? Is digital convenience trumping good art?
Or, to paraphrase Newsweek writer Steven Levy in a 2007 article that got this conversation going, is it less conscious than that? Does digital technology ultimately just “want” things to be free — even when those things might be better off if they cost a little money?
“Right-pricing”
These days, the market doesn’t bear a $15 CD. For decades, record labels controlled the price of albums, but digital technology has made it seem ludicrous that anyone would be forced to buy an entire album or pay more than 99 cents for a song.
“That’s an unnatural and unusual situation to be in,” said Storm Gloor, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver who teaches and researches the music business.
“The food industry doesn’t have to compete with people getting food for free, nor does the gasoline industry. But with digital media, you’ve got people there who have the option of whether they’ll even pay.”
By now everyone knows the Radiohead experiment. The British band asked fans to name their own price for a download of its 2007 album “In Rainbows,” and many lauded the move as forward-thinking. See how useless record labels are? Et cetera.
It moved units, but Radiohead already had an established fan base. Still, it changed things.
Even though Apple’s iTunes store set the standard for songs to be 99 cents a decade ago, the Radiohead experiment freed up the standardization of pricing. It allowed some retailers to start charging more (or less) than 99 cents, and it reinforced the fact that there is no universal price that makes sense in every context.
And it obscured the fact, once and for all, that music has intrinsic value, regardless of what people pay for it.
“The devaluing of music is in some ways a misnomer because I think the phrase is right-pricing,” Gloor said. “I don’t think the value of music to consumers or artists has decreased. If anything it’s increased, since music is more prevalent everywhere in TV shows and commercials — everywhere we go. More people have access to new artists than ever before.”
Of course, musicians don’t make much money off album sales anymore. Chart-topping artists get most of their cash from lucrative merchandising and endorsement deals with big promoters like Live Nation and AEG Live, and artists big and small often make a splash (or at least tread water) with revenue from touring.
The music and film industries may seem under attack in general, between the lack of fidelity — aural and visual — in downloaded media played back on smartphones and the destruction of rituals like playing vinyl records or going to movie theaters.
But digital media’s advantages are undeniable. It doesn’t take up space. Its intangibility means it can be everywhere online, given enough memory and bandwidth. The fact that so much of it has become free is an unexpected but revolutionary side effect.
Certainly it’s a boon for those who have no problem downloading tunes and films illegally. And that’s a lot of us. Last year, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry claimed that global music sales have plummeted by 30 percent since 2004 because of digital piracy and that illegal downloads outnumber legal by a nearly 20-1 ratio.
Been there, done that
Retailers and distributors have often battled over the “correct” price of products, usually to the consumers’ benefit.
“There was even a controversy when drugstore chains started charging different prices for the sheet music, which sold millions of copies,” Gloor said. “We’ve been here 100 years ago, and in 1979 (music) retailers were talking about getting out of the business because of home taping.”
Gloor was formerly director of music operations for the 150-store chain Hastings Entertainment, so he’s sympathetic to retailers such as Twist & Shout’s Epstein.
“I’m optimistic, even for people like Paul, because they have a niche, and they manage it very well,” he said. “They’re responding to an economic reality. That’s what businesses do.”
For his part, Epstein recognizes that this is just the new environment.
“I do not relish sounding like a crank, but my father’s an author, I’m friends with many journalists, and I’m in the business of selling art,” he said. “Art should not be free, but it should not be overpriced. The market should determine what the price is going to be, and I guess if the market has determined that the price is going to be free, then the artist is going to have to suck it up. But I don’t like the sound of that.”
Some artists are pioneering ways to add value digitally. And we’re not just talking about the litany of reissues of Elvis Costello’s first three albums or the latest, greatest incarnation of “Casablanca.”
Bjork, for example, is implicitly asserting that her new album is worth something — anything — because it comes tricked out with smartphone and tablet apps designed specifically for each song, allowing listeners to customize and create new sounds with the same virtual tools she used.
How low can we go?
There’s another, more absurd-sounding question raised by the free-versus-cheap discussion: Can something be cheaper than free?
Absolutely, if we consider the notion of companies paying us or providing other no- strings-attached incentives to buy their products.
Of course, there’s always a catch because promotional campaigns seek only to get a brand stuck in your head and your money out of your wallet. But P.T. Barnum-style bravado, as Epstein calls it, isn’t limited to Apple honcho Steve Jobs.
E-book retailers are experimenting with digital giveaways, too.
Gregory Hill, a book buyer at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library, recently won an Amazon contest for his unpublished novel “East of Denver.” Amazon is already offering a couple of the chapters for free online — even though it won’t be published until 2012.
Hill likened it to putting up a 30-second song sample.
“It’s (hopefully) enough to get people interested, but not enough to make them feel like they’ve experienced the thing as a whole,” he said via e-mail.
If it’s true that you can make money giving things away, as some marketers contend, the music industry may be in for a surprising rebound.
But for now, free is more costly than it seems.
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
