Why all our Damon & Naomi downloads are free/pay-as-you-wish on @Bandcamp - it seems worth discussing on this Friday, when Bandcamp themselves are working for free https://damonandnaomi.bandcamp.com/ 

First of all, it's amazing Bandcamp has free as an option. They work on a straight revenue share with artists, so there was no need to make this possible but they did

I can't speak for their reasoning, but it has made sense to me from the start because digital music has been free from the start. Napster was free. That freaked the industry and they have been fighting it ever since

But what did musicians and music fans get from that battle? "Free" music that earns profits for Spotify (value of corporation est $54 billion) or YouTube (owned by Google why even list the value it's beyond imagination anyway)

True free is about sharing, not giving a service away in order to collect data and then build value based on that (read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by @shoshanazuboff)

Sharing is beautiful! Don't argue against it! Napster was a program that enabled sharing between listeners. It screwed up the music industry because it screwed up the idea of music as a tangible product (there's more about that in my book The New Analog)

But is music a tangible product...? If it were, we wouldn't be in this mess! No, it's not. It's shareable for free. It always has been. Play your instrument and people hear it. You're going to have to build walls to stop them

So Bandcamp has a free option, which means no walls for recorded music. It's an option - but be real, there are no walls for digital music. Take fifteen minutes and you can download most anything for free. Not to mention "free" via Spotify and Youtube

Now here's the good news I can bring you about sharing and money: our Damon & Naomi albums are free, and consistently - consistently! - one in four downloaders choose to pay something, even though they don't have to. And the avg payment they choose is $4. So we avg $1 an album

$1 per digital album is approximately a gabillion times more than the rate at Spotify or Youtube

And it's SHARING. We share our digital music. Listeners share their money. It's volunteer, and it works. This is the internet without surveillance capitalism. And it fucking works. Thank you @Bandcamp for making this experiment possible