lets not fight

so a bunch of Canadian musicians got together to say that they’d rather not have an adversarial relationship with their fans, that they’d rather not drag downloaders to court. In fact, Broken Social Scene made the best darn point:

Broken Social Scene member Jason Collett credited his band’s international success to the Internet.

“The time and place of a band like Broken Social Scene historically could not have happened without being facilitated by this radical new technology,” he said.

source: ctv.ca

This is exactly the kind of reasoning behind indyish, in case you were wondering. We don’t mind if artists put their whole album on line or whatever they want to do with it. We think like Courtney Love- real fans will want to own the record to hear the true sound, and to support the artist. Especially if the artist isn’t waving a finger at them and dragging them to court for wanting to listen to their music. and especially especially if they know the band is making the money from sales of cd’s, not the multinational corporation…
Anyway, it’s interesting stuff. Jason Collett’s point is the kicker: there is a positive network effect involved in giving something away. It lets people open their minds to it in a new way, maybe, or else it just lets the material slide around the stops and blockages of those who just don’t like it, into the happy lives of those who do. As in the world of open source software, giving something away that’s good links those people who like it together, and allows that network to grow rapidly. this is also embedded in the thinking about indyish- we want to take as little as possible from artists. nothing even, as soon as we can do that, and to generally focus on being a nice and useful place. because then people might use the site, link to the site, promote the site, and with anough people enjoying the site it’s possible that we’d be able to make a steady income from advertising. and if we could get one steady income comin in, that’d be good.