Almost, But Not Quite
This TechCrunch article is quite right on its initial assessment of slotMusic.
- Physical media is on its way out as a distribution system for music
- The economics of this just don’t make sense
- There are better alternatives already on the market
It’s just the part at the end where it derails horribly.
The future of music is free streaming and (also free, eventually) downloads, not physical media.
There’s also a link to a previous TechCrunch article that has the entire Internet doing the small musician a favor by forcing their material to be free and flinging it about wildly. I responded to that article here, so feel free to peruse that.
There’s no doubt that publicity and marketing on a theoretically open and level field gives smaller artists huge advantages they never had before. But all of that publicity and marketing doesn’t help the artist if they’re unable to sell their products (and no, not all artists can or should rely on merchandising and live performances to make a living - for some it’s impractical, for others impossible). At least subscription models or the “music like water” model proposed in The Future of Music compensate musicians for their work, unwieldy as it may be. Simply demanding music for free and saying you’ll help them with their merch and shows in the future means a lot of broken promises and artists who can’t continue their careers.
TechCrunch seems fond of pointing out that economics demand zero cost for electronic copies of music, but they ignore that artists that can’t support themselves equals less music on the market for them to get for free. Suffocating the source of your product isn’t a good way to promote production.