He Who Hesitates is Disincentivised

March 2, 2009 7:02 PM

Omaha rockers Cursive are selling their new album for just $1... No wait, it's $2... $3... $4... WTF?? In yet another twist on the whole, name-your-price (Radiohead), fan-financed (Jill Sobule), take-shrooms-and-cruise-hollywood (Josh Freese) tiered pricing experiment being carried out by what's left of the music industry, Cursive are increasing the price of their new record by $1 each day until its "official" release. Given the popularity of sites like Did it Leak (and the corresponding file-sharing forums that I won't link to here) it seems to me like this is a pretty good way to reward well-intentioned but impatient fans who might otherwise resort to less honorable means of getting the latest stuff from their favorite bands. Or maybe it's just another hare-brained scheme that will only hasten the end of record labels as we know them. Either way, they got my $1... And that was after I already got my hands on the mp3s!
posted by idontlikewords (23 comments total)

I'd sell my album for a buck.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:08 PM on March 2, 2009

Amie Street has been doing prices where downloads start for free, and as they become more popular they become more expensive (up to $.99). It's an interesting way to encourage people to discover and review new music. I got bored quickly with buying cheap, unreviewed stuff that I ended up not liking. I haven't been back to the site in a year, so I don't know if it's changed.
posted by Science! at 7:09 PM on March 2, 2009

You can still...rock in OOOOHHH MA HAAAA Oh Yeah.. Alright!!
posted by spicynuts at 7:11 PM on March 2, 2009

I quite liked the sample song, and two bucks ain't bad for 320 Kbps MP3 potluck. What the heck. Thanks!
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:17 PM on March 2, 2009

Good luck to them. I might buy an MP3 album for $1 on a whim, but I'd have to really suspect that the band would be really exciting to me. I still buy a lot of CDs. $9 for an album of lossy MP3s is a pretty poor deal in my opinion.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 7:18 PM on March 2, 2009

I regularly download leaked music because I am impatient. This is an awesome idea and Cursive just got my $2 even though I haven't liked their last few albums.
posted by bradbane at 7:21 PM on March 2, 2009

Didn't know Cursive was still together (gave up reading Pitchfork for Lent* last year and never bothered going back, so I missed the memo), that's good to hear. I wish them well. Curious to see how this is received.

* Kidding, sorta.
posted by joe lisboa at 7:29 PM on March 2, 2009

Isn't the point that we can obviously get things for free, but maybe people should occasionally pay for music still?

Anyway, the most exciting thing about all of this to me is seeing an ever-growing number of artist-driven pricing and distribution structures. Yay!
posted by nosila at 7:45 PM on March 2, 2009

Worked on me.
posted by sswiller at 7:49 PM on March 2, 2009

Oh, big whoop. I just posted an entire album of naughty garage rock songs by a tattooed sailor puppet -- for free. Suck it, Cursive. You've got nothing on this former Omaha boy.
posted by Astro Zombie at 7:59 PM on March 2, 2009

nosila: "Isn't the point that we can obviously get things for free, but maybe people should occasionally pay for music still?"

I thought the point was to get Internet publicity with a cockamamie pricing scheme.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:05 PM on March 2, 2009

You couldn't have told me about this yesterday? I liked the sample track. I'll give that a try, I never heard of these guys before. I'll also pay for it, seeing as how they are asking me to, I would think that the courteous thing to do.
posted by nanojath at 8:15 PM on March 2, 2009

I think I tiered up for a moment there.
posted by dhartung at 8:17 PM on March 2, 2009

Re: all the people who posted about all the great music available for even less than a buck on the web... I'm totally with you on that! I mean, to some extent, what makes deals like this work for Radiohead, Cursive, et al. is that they already have a sizable fanbase or some other way of attracting attention. I think the question of how to introduce unknown bands to new listeners is a much more difficult nut to crack than the one of how to make the most of an existing audience. Seems like the micro-payment thing for iPhone apps & downloadable games is starting to be a viable model. Maybe the online music industry needs to set up some kind of "micro-payola" scheme to break new acts? I'm sorta joking about that, but having spent a fair amount of time poking around in indie banner-ad networks (e.g. Project Wonderful & etc.) I feel like a similar, pennies-per-listen form of broadcasting might actually make sense. (i.e. A band or artist sets up an ad budget & pays other musicians to share their songs with their own fans) Or hell, the artists could even pay the listeners directly, so that by listening to internet radio all day, you could make 5 or 6 bucks. Plenty of possibilities for gaming & exploitation of course, but stranger things have happened (for example, millions of people all listening to the same exact artists for 50 years!)
posted by idontlikewords at 8:31 PM on March 2, 2009

Science! - so that's how it works. I paid $75 for $100 this morning, with the purpose of buying The Long Lost's new album (and their two singles), because I'm a bit infatuated with Daedelus, and hope I'd find more interesting things in the future. Now I'm really intrigued.

The ratcheting up is interesting, but I really like Josh Freese's payment options. If I wanted a Volvo station wagon, I'd be stoked. My only question is: what if the first person to cut his hair gets most of it? The next 9 people will be missing out.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:45 PM on March 2, 2009

the gang at saddlecreek are personal heroes of mine. most of the albums i've bought from them have come with great art and bonus stuff. if anyone can keep me interested in buying music, it's them. Most of the artists tend to write concept albums or at least albums with a very particular sound. This is a far better way of saving the album than gimmickry.
all this being said, i'm not buying this. cursive's last album was just way too shit, and this single doesn't give me a lot of hope. i'll buy the new Good Life, tho.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:07 PM on March 2, 2009

filthy light thief: "Science! - so that's how it works. I paid $75 for $100 this morning, with the purpose of buying The Long Lost's new album (and their two singles), because I'm a bit infatuated with Daedelus, and hope I'd find more interesting things in the future. Now I'm really intrigued.

The ratcheting up is interesting, but I really like Josh Freese's payment options. If I wanted a Volvo station wagon, I'd be stoked. My only question is: what if the first person to cut his hair gets most of it? The next 9 people will be missing out."

I have no idea what your talking about. Really.
posted by Science! at 9:43 PM on March 2, 2009 [1 favorite]

They should charge $0, $1, $1, $2, $3, $5, $8, $13 and call themselves ReCursive.
posted by Ritchie at 9:43 PM on March 2, 2009 [6 favorites]

I still think that the problem is not so much the cost, it's the payment mechanism.

I'd buy a ton of music at $1 an album; if I was even faintly intrigued by the band, or a recommendation or rating it had gotten from somebody, I'd spend a buck without much of a second thought. Not to sound like a spendthrift or anything, but a buck's really not that much if there's any chance of getting some good music out of it.

But most payment systems make it a real PITA to spend that buck. The two successful ones that come to mind, for music anyway, are the iTMS and Amazon's MP3 store, and both of them accomplish ease of payment by making you sign up for an account and associate a credit card with the account, and then aggregating charges together and making one bigger charge out of them. This is fine if you have enough content to get a lot of users to establish accounts, but it doesn't scale down at all. (I've "walked out" of a lot of online stores because they want me to set up an account; I'm sure I'm not the only one.)

PayPal is really the only game in town once you step down from actually accepting credit cards yourself, and while they're not terrible from a pure number-of-clicks perspective, they have a lot of downsides: high fees, hostile customer- and client-service policies, arbitrary restrictions on content, intimidation factor to unsophisticated users, and general shadiness. It's really unfortunate that they're the "best there is" for micropayments, because if we had a better infrastructure I think you'd see a whole ecosystem of new business models sprout up overnight.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:00 PM on March 2, 2009 [2 favorites]

Kadin2048: isn't that what Google Checkout is aiming to be?
posted by jacalata at 11:13 PM on March 2, 2009

Too true, Kadin2048. These are cash-like transactions, stuff you'd normally never use a credit card for. Although I have to say, this one did itself no favors - requiring me to enter my name, email, tel. and address info in order to charge me through Paypal for a digital dowload? What the hell, people.
posted by nanojath at 11:13 PM on March 2, 2009

Good luck to them. It may even make money. It's an unsustainable mass market sales model.
posted by MuffinMan at 1:50 AM on March 3, 2009

To sound less crazy: I didn't understand why the price per file at Amie Street varied so much, or what was meant by "the community determines the price of music" - I imagined some vote or poll. But then you clarified it for me. And the site requires you to pay for at least $3 USD of music at once, but you can pay $75 and get $100 of purchases, as an incentive to pay a bunch up front. I did that a few days ago, because I figured I'd buy a bunch of music from the site, eventually.

And one of the many purchase options for Josh Freese's new album was:

$10,000 (limited edition of 1)

* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Signed DW snare drum from A Perfect Circle’s 2003 tour
* Josh gives you a private drum lesson OR his and hers foot/back massage (couples welcome, discreet parking)
* Twiggy from Marilyn Manson’s band and Josh take you and a guest to Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles in Long Beach for dinner
* Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror)
* At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please.

I am not a loon, just not always the best tying ideas together. The end.
posted by filthy light thief at 6:50 AM on March 6, 2009