Fans will get your music whether you charge for it or not. The only question is whether they get it from you, where you learn who they are, or from a pirate site, where you learn nothing. This argument was written in 2017, and the logic of it hasn't moved.

"I buy CDs to support the band"

Good instinct, wrong target. If the band is signed, most of what you paid for that CD goes to the label, the distributor and the store. Depending on the deal, the band might see a small fraction of the price, and often nothing at all for years.

Here's why. A label advance isn't a gift; it's a loan against the band's royalties. Recording, videos and marketing costs get charged back to the band's account, and the band earns nothing on record sales until all of it is paid off. Many bands never get there. On paper, they owe the label forever.

Advances themselves are usually sized on past sales, not on how many people show up at the gig or follow the band. So a band that draws well but sells modestly gets a small budget for the next record. That's the model working as designed.

It gets better. Some deals have the band buying its own CDs from the label at wholesale to sell on tour, so the band's margin at the merch table is whatever's left after paying the label for its own record. And labels have largely stopped funding tour support, so the road that builds a career is on the band's credit card.

Want to support a signed band? Go to the show. Buy the shirt. Even the beer counts: bar sales are part of how a venue decides whether to book a band again. Merch money goes to the band.

"If you give it away, how do bands get paid?"

By using the free download as a trade instead of a loss.

Put the record on Bandcamp with a name-your-price option and turn on the setting that requires an email address for free downloads. Now every person who takes it for nothing gives you something worth more than the price of a download: a way to reach them.

Then ask for one more detail on your own signup form: a city or ZIP code. Once you have a few hundred, you have a map of where your fans actually are.

Use the list to route the tour

That map changes how you book.

  • Play the cities where your list is thick. Skip or shorten the ones where it's empty.
  • Email the people near each date before the show goes on sale, not the week of.
  • Announce merch and preorders to the list first. Those are the people most likely to buy.

Better-targeted dates mean bigger rooms, and bigger rooms mean a busier merch table. That's where a band actually makes its money on the road.

The fans who won't sign up

Some people will skip the form and pull the record from a pirate site anyway. Fine. They're still listening. Some of them will turn into the fan at the barrier who buys a shirt every tour. You were never getting their money for the album anyway.

So the choice was never "people buy the album or they steal it." It's this: do you want a few more album sales, or a few hundred more people in the room buying merch?

Put your next release up as name-your-price with email required, add a city field to your signup form, and look at the map before you book the next run.