Releasing Your Stems

or: Why Giving Away The Parts Of Your Music Is A Good Idea

As I've mentioned before, I got my first real taste of making music back in 2002, releasing mash-ups. I can still remember Churchill and others getting cease and desist messages from Missy Elliot's people after using parts of her tracks in new ways.

We were making art that could land us in court. And not in the sense of it being greatly offensive, or spray-painted all over the side of a church or something. No, this was illegal simply because artists didn't like us playing around with their tracks.

I can understand why not, but first I want to digress onto the simpler case of music being downloaded without the artist being paid. Lars Ulrich, a decade ago now, jumping up and down and threatening to sick the internet police on everyone because he was losing money.

Was he really losing money because of Napster? Well, Napster only had a tiny user-base back then, and not everyone was downloading Metallica, so I suspect that at the time any reduction in sales due to downloads would have been pretty minimal. Worse, Lars had been misled into assuming that every download was equal to a lost sale. But it wasn't. Just because someone would download a track for free, that didn't mean they would ever have parted with money for the track in a record store.

More than that, a lot of people started to view such downloads as an opportunity to preview a CD before they bought it (because very few of us had any portable way to play MP3s back at the turn of the century) and figure out if it was worth the purchase. I know I certainly did this. In fact this was probably more responsible for more lost sales than anything else; fans finding out an album didn't have any good tracks on it apart from the singles would just buy the singles instead. P2P began to remove the incentive to just cram CDs with filler tracks, because you couldn't dupe people into buying them any more.

However, in addition to this negative effect, there was also a positive effect. Once people were able to try things for free, they could explore a much wider selection of music without the limitations of their budget. So fans could point each other to new stuff, they could listen, and if they liked it they could buy that thing that they might never have heard otherwise. P2P wasn't just bad advertising for crappy music; it was also good advertising for good music.

And this brings us back to the problem with musicians pursuing amateur remixers making bootlegs out of their tracks. I can't speak for every bootlegger out there, but I found I couldn't polish a turd. I couldn't make a remix that sounded good out of a song I didn't like. In a way, every remix I did was advertising which songs I liked to an audience of like-minded peers.

When I heard good tracks in other people's mash-ups, I bought them.

The whole mash-up scene was brilliant advertising. A bunch of music enthusiasts all out there, promoting your song and trying to do brilliant things with it, working entirely for free.

And best of all, unlike P2P, mash-ups didn't compete with the original track because they weren't direct copies of it. All they did was showcase it in a new light to a new audience.

And the labels were threatening to sue. Of course.

So I swore that when I started releasing singles, I wouldn't block anyone who wanted to remix anything I'd done. So long as whatever they were using my original work for wasn't commercial, I decided I'd be happy for them to do whatever they liked. And if they did want to do something commercial, well, I'd be happy to re-negotiate for appropriate compensation.

Surely this is the obvious thing for any artist to do now? Encourage fans to not just passively listen to the music, but to interact with it if they're interested.

So, to that end, I've now put all the stems for Sonnambula onto my Bandcamp page. You can download them for whatever price you feel like, including $0. You can do whatever you like with them so long as you're not making any money, and if you are then get in touch and we can come to an agreement that's mutually beneficial.

Am I worried that I've now made the sources to my single available to anyone for free? It's true that they could take these free files, combine them in a DAW, mix them down, apply the necessary dynamics processing, and re-create my single for free. But y'know what? Anyone who was reasonably determined and had a DAW could do that anyway, far more easily, by streaming the track, playing it through their soundcard, and hitting record.

I think we need to accept that once a track is out there in the wild online, if people want to copy it then they're going to.

The key thing artists need to do now is to show their fans that they respect and appreciate them. People don't have to pay now. Artists need to encourage them to want to pay (and make that process as easy as possible).

This is what the business model of record labels still needs to take to heart. But if they can't, fine; that leaves the door open for little guys like me, and whilst the playing field still isn't level, it's a whole lot flatter than it used to be. I'll be interested to see how they respond.

Seej 500

Yorkshire, UK, 4/8/2010