An open letter to indie musicians
Dear indie musicians,
Yes, I am part of the Napster generation. I download music, but there is good news–I also buy music. I will not give money to a label who will give some of that money to the RIAA. I will not finance lawsuits against people who are not content buying music blindly having not heard it. I am not content financing an organization who claims to initiate legal action on behalf of musicians when, in fact, the musicians do not see any of the proceeds resulting from these lawsuits. I realize there are people online who share music simply to have free music with no intention of ever paying for music. I anticipate the claims that these people are why we must diligently prosecute anyone sharing a single sliver of intellectual property. I also believe these people are the exception not the rule. At the very least, there are as many of me out there as there are of them.
I am not a fan of my music collection occupying physical space. I am a savvy computer user. Hard disk space is cheap. I am in the process of purging all my discs and keeping only the music in a lossless format. I do not want to pay for your songs in lossy mp3 format even though they are dreadfully convenient. I am not content shelling out hard-earned cash for part of something even though I might not be able to tell the difference between my FLAC compressed file and your 320kbps mp3.
That said, follow these simple steps to get my money:
- Rock
- Rock hard
- Do not affiliate with an RIAA-member label
- Sell FLAC downloads
Thank you.
I think the reason most indie bands and labels don’t generally include FLAC format files is because they’re cumbersome, the difference is subtle or, if you’re one of the millions of listeners not fortunate enough to have thousand-dollar top-notch speakers or studio-quality headphones, imperceptible, and there would be little market for them outside the hardcore audiophile/technophile/pro-piracy RIAA-antagonophile demographic, of which I’d have to guess you are one of the only members.
How is wanting the option of buying FLAC “pro-piracy?”
I’ll admit FLAC lacks support right now, but I’m sure there is a tipping point. Once FLAC is offered by artists and people start buying it, there will be demand for support in devices. In the meantime, FLAC can easily be converted to MP3 for greater portability and less disk space usage while it remains more future proof. You have a reproduction that is 100% accurate. As disk space continues to get cheaper, the fact that FLAC is several times larger than its MP3 counterpart becomes irrelevant. Someday you will have a 5TB portable media player that will hold 1,000,000 MP3s or 165,000 lossless FLAC files. What’s the point of reducing the file size at that point? Maybe today you don’t have high-dollar headphones, but someday you might.