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Should You Stop Selling Your Music!!????


Damian Keyes is a Welsh musician, teacher and founding director of The Brighton Institute of Modern Music and I came across a video that he had on YouTube.

He has an idea that us as musicians, producers, and artists need to stop selling music.  He has a unique perspective on music and how we treat music nowadays.

He made a video saying that we should stop selling music, then he created a video dealing with the fallout of the first video he made and then he made a 3rd video clarifying and going into detail really what he means.

I’m going to play a little bit of the 3rd video so you can get the gist of it then I’m going to give you my thoughts on it. And I’ll link all 3 videos below.  Let’s look at what he’s saying.

Basically Damian is saying that music at some point in time was connected to something valuable which in other words gave more weight and validity to the music it was connected to.  This is similar to the US dollar being backed by gold…. Yea worthless..

He also goes into the stats of the number of people who actually purchase albums nowadays and the number of people who do so are declining everyday.

I kind of have to agree with Damian but maybe not to the extent of stop selling music total.  But I totally agree with price of music compared to the value it’s actually worth that he mentions.

I work with some artists and I question them when they want physical CD copies of their albums made because the price that you pay to get them made won’t add to up to the number of CD’s you can actually sell, not too mention not too many people have CD players anymore.  So I can agree with Damian in most areas.

My producing career really started taking off when I got with a group of producers and we started talking about some of the business models that other industries have that the music industry has not yet adopted yet.

One of the techniques I’ve learned is to give incentives to the those I want to do business with and then reciprocity would kick in after a minute and they would have no choice but to support me because I subconsciously have been supporting them.

One incentive I offer is a bundle of Free beats, an ebook and tips for recording for absolutely free.  Shameless plug if you would like free beats, a book and tips for recording click the link in the description below.

The thing is I sell the items but over time I have understood that by me giving it for free I gained more leads which then turned them into clients over and over.  There are many other companies and businesses that do this, even with software you are offered a free trial and version of the very thing they are selling.

Now I’m just talking about incentives and discounting or very rarely give your product for free at different times, but I don’t think Damian is still off.

I have a Multi-platinum producer friend name AD from Annodomini beats who has introduced a model to me a long time ago and It’s the subscription model.  The same model that Netflix used to put blockbuster out of out business.

So he has a group called the inner circle where he is able to give instrumentals and tips for free but charge artists per month for the access to the beats.  So instead of charging someone $50 for a beat lease one time, you can charge them $10 a month and they’ll keep the subscription because they love the access to over hundreds of beats and the community for $10.

Then you could sell them a  t-shirt, vip experience, concert tickets, coffee mugs,  you name it.

It’s the idea To give your product for free in bulk or at a real discounted price but to charge them monthly for having access.  I do believe that sooner or later we will realize that our name and our brand is the actual product and that we won’t miss out on sales from music because we are monetizing our music in a different way.

I have recently been building up my own subscription group to artists right now as we speak.

The idea is to not sell music because we thing it’s worthless because it’s not, it’s actually priceless so maybe should think about selling the things around or music or the access to our music.

What do you think?

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