Torrentfreak’s Ernesto crunched the artist donation numbers on Jamendo, the awesome Creative-Commons powered free music community:
Of the 423968 users, 1650 have donated something, little under 0.5%. In total, these users were good for 2712 donations adding up to just over $36,000. This translates into an average of little over $10 per donation. The largest donation on Jamendo thus far was 200 Euros ($250) [...] Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation.
(If you doubt Ernesto’s figures, see for yourself). Even factoring in Jamendo’s sharing of advertising revenue with artists, it’s pretty clear that there are not many indie musicians out there supporting themselves through Jamendo donations. It’s hard to draw general conclusions about this future of the music industry as this sample is heavily biased: Jamendo probably attracts more serious music lovers, who donate more than the average music consumer does or would, while there is large volume of utter crap on the site which never had much hope of drawing a profit, deflating the average donation per artist.
Nevertheless, I take this as weak confirmation of my belief that donations will never significantly replace old-media sales as a major pillar of artist profits. As Enernesto points out, a lot of minor and\or independent artists are realistic about this and choose to release their music through Jamendo or similar free channels in order to capture other benefits such as acclaim, merchandise sales and concert attendance. I’m not all that confident about the merchandise-and-concerts model either: there are only so many concerts even a die-hard music lover can go to. Many people have tried to convince me that only a handful of megastar artists were scraping massive profits from music sales anyway, and the inevitable (and largely complete) shift to free media will not affect the living wages of indie artists for whom it has always been a labour of love. I’ll believe it when I see the statistics.
In related news, I was intrigued by the decision of Magnatune, a creative-commons music store, to switch to a pay-what-you want model for their DRM-free all-you-can-eat subscription. I particularly loved the subtle bit of behavioural framing below the text box for the customer’s chosen price. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, although as far as I know Magnatune is not particularly open when it comes to sales figures. I was tempted to sign up myself, until I remembered that the limiting factor on my own Jamendo addiction was not catalogue range or quality, but time and bandwidth.
Musicians generally make much, much more off of admission at live shows (plus merchandising at shows) than they make off of album sales. I think a lot of people who promote their music through channels such as Jamendo are looking to disperse their music to a lot of new ears and gain some new fans. Ideally, when they get around to touring this gamble will pay off. I am one of the members who has donated.
I’ve donated to a couple of jamendo artists but really, 1) jamendo’s downloading process is a pain; 2) the donation process is a pain; 3) most of the music is crap. I’ve bought a few dozen magnatune albums at 8 usd a pop (even though free mp3 downloads are available), and that’s been a much more pleasant experience. My feeling is when I download something from jamendo, I don’t feel much duty to donate unless I listen to it and feel likely to keep listening to it multiple times. That happens pretty often with magnatune (so I buy the albums) but most jamendo items I’ve downloaded haven’t been worth a second listen.
I guess I shouldn’t have said “crap”, it’s not so much about the quality of the music but that the musical styles available at jamendo mostly don’t interest me very much. I guess the quality of what is there is fine if the style is to your liking. But I find much more that interests me at magnatune.
At archive.org they don’t even ask for donations. However there are only a few bands there that I have any interest in listening to. I like the old grateful dead shows but how many different recordings of the exact same songs does anyone want to hear?
It’s worth noting that artists discovered on Jamendo, not only may receive donations, but, listeners may, additionally, purchase their downloads and CDs (either on the Jamendo site, or on iTunes, Amazon, the artist’s own website etc.). That’s been my experience.
Thus, even when number-crunching, there’s more to Jamendo than what can be determined from the published figures. And, of course, the value to an artist extends well beyond these immediate pecuniary measures.
Overall, it’s a great site and community. Here’s hoping it maintains its culture and integrity as it continues to grow.
Many more are simply sceptical that real change can occur. ,
Monbiot is clearly trying to narrow the terms of the debate unilaterally and unfairly, blah blah blah. ,