The blog got an average of 200 hits a day, and of these 200 hits, 35 were converted into comments of some sort, most of which were well-made and useful.

As it turns out, 14 people asked for a CD for free. One person did shell out £80 for the album. For that price, I felt that I had to offer them a guarantee that if they didn’t like it, that they could return it and get a refund. The order didn’t come from Birmingham, or England, but far across the Atlantic Ocean, then over the whole stretch of the USA, to Santa Monica in Los Angeles. As The Wizard says in the Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver “They’re way ahead out there in California.” Or maybe they’re just crazy. Two weeks after sending the CD, I’ve not heard back from the buyer, so I assume that she’s happy with it. Interestingly, no one bought the CD for the standard price.

On reflection, my hypothesis was proved: That if someone wants to pay for an album of mine of CD, they are willing to pay for it at a premium; the high pricing piqued someone’s interest, they thought the album might be worth the high price and they paid £80 for it.

With hind-sight I whole-heartedly admit that the Created in Birmingham shop was entirely the wrong context in which to carry out this experiment, or if it was I went about it in completely the wrong way. Offers like the one I made perhaps can only work within the context of the internet.

The comments and the results of the offer have helped me to work out strategies for recording and releasing my next album, Festive Road, and they have informed how it will be packaged, priced and sold.

Go to bencalvert.com if you are interested in listening to some demos to see how the album is shaping up. Thanks for getting involved in the experiment.

I agree also about the brief life of the album as an artform (a number of tracks making up a whole). But I do think that the online offer has compromised it also as a “product”.

A few years ago, if you’d have heard a great track on a radio show, chances are it was something like Track 3, Side 2 of someone’s last but one album. The only way you could own that track was to get down to your record shop (whether that was an indie or a HMV… they could all order it in for you) and buy that album. And you got the other 9 tracks whether you wanted them or not (chances are, you were happy to give them a listen). But more importantly, you PAID for them… whether you liked it or not.

With itunes, file-sharing, etc., that is now not the case. Somehow or other (other being “Google”), you’ll find that track on its own. So, where previously the artist and distributor could count on your £5.49 (that’s how much I paid for albums in HMV etc. in 1988). Now they can count on 79p for the single track AT BEST. At worst, of course, they can count on nada, if the track is illegally downloaded.

To return to the origins of this thread: for Ben to fly in the face of this by trying to sell a CD (album) at £80 is a Canute-like endeavour.

The CIB shop has a lot of footfall, and therefore needs to sell products for the target market and CD’s priced in this way would not have worked.

Personally I think the music industry is fucked and got out of it a long time ago, the only way you can make money from it is touring, a sponsorship deal with Burger King or by selling your instruments.

Both these retailers offer a range of CDs, many of the bands featured within these will have started out as local independent label acts. The idea that because a shop is large, the artists featured within it’s catalogue must be ‘dross and mediocrity’ is incredibly stupid. Would you consider Nick Drake, say, as ‘dross’. You’ll find his music in both these stores.

I’d imagine any musician would be only too happy to find their work within the shelves of these stores and therefore available to a wider audience.

I-tunes and its ilk have done two key things in this respect: 1) disaggregated music from the album form down to individual tracks;

the period of ‘the album’ was a very short one indeed – late 60s to early 90s (if even as late as that), & comparatively few artists really embraced the album format as a curated whole; for the most part albums have always been just delivery vehicles for bigger collections of singles; whereas itunes etc might have made it harder for artists to sell the songs people didn’t really want to buy anyway, i don’t think it has killed the album as a concept because the album barely existed as a concept in the first place.

and 2) virtualised music, dissociating the content from the carrier, making it non-tangible

again, i don’t think you can blame itunes for this – even if you don’t count radio as having done this, filesharing platforms such as kazaa, napster, & even usenet did this over a decade before itunes was ever thought of.

as the creator of the music, i enjoy it most when the music gets played on the radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes and people recognise it from their ipods / computers / etc… i’m happier that it is out there being enjoyed rather than gathering dust on a record shop shelf

it’s unfortunate that the nature of the industry currently is that people don’t pay for music that they can download or copy for free. the money is in performing.

i’m fortunate enough to have been booked to perform at several festivals and a lot of nightclubs that pay me on the strength of the music that i’ve released and the attitude behind it. that’s where my revenue comes from.

please have a copy of the album, here’s the link

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2jg5km

If we fill the shop with things that won’t sell then pretty soon what we’ll be in charge of is an art installation and not a living breathing shop. I’m all in favour of art installations by the way, it’s just that they don’t give £30,000 to local independent artists over a three month period like our shop has.

Exactly. CiBshop has done a fantastic job in introducing independent artists to consumers with cash to spend. But this requires artists to accept a degree of populism, both in terms of the art and the pricing. Basic Supply & Demand. There is no demand for £80CDs. CiBshop are being very generous with their 75/25% split, I beleive typical retail and commercial galleries have a split more like 50/50. That might sound unfair, but CiBshop provides the market. Without them you have supply but no demand.

I thought a lot of stuff in the shop was good value too, maybe if prices were hiked 25% and CiBshop kept the extra, they’d have enough head room to keep going?

but beyond that, there are two fundamental points you’re completely missing.

1) the difference between commercial physical art & commercial music is not in how much the artist gets paid, but in how that payment is distributed. putting it crudely & simply (& i realise this is a very sweeping generalisation, just go with me on it), a physical artwork has one person paying – say – £5,000 for that single piece of sculpture to the artist (maybe or not via a dealership chain). in commercial music, a record company pays the artist £5,000 to make a recording, & then sells multiple copies of that recording to many people for £10 each. the ‘product’ is not the piece of plastic, it’s the recording – so the value of the recording & thus what the artist gets is still £5,000 either way. your attitude here, rather than defending the true value of music actually panders to the populist view which complains about the retail cost of cds compared to the production costs of the piece of plastic – you’re linking how much you should be paid to the physical product rather than the artwork itself.

2) you’re also ignoring the plain fact that nothing in the world has any intrinsic value at all – everything is worthless. ‘value’ is an artificial construct being the point between what a seller is prepared to sell an item for & what a buyer is prepared to pay for an item; production costs, labour, how much your weekly food bill comes, everything else is irrelevant.