Artists-to-fans-to-artists site now online
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- a2f2a.com is now online underpinned by the vital principle: Artists need to be paid, and fans want to pay them.
It’s the Internet’s first, and so far only, site created specifically to put music lovers together with music makers.
Co-founders Billy Bragg and Jon Newton say the site has three goals »»»
- Help each community better understand the other;
- Help find a practical and workable system which offers artists fair remuneration in exchange for access to material by fans; and
- Help set the agenda for discussions about the role P2P can play within the emergent digital record industry.
“The internet has huge potential for artists to make a living on their own terms,” say Bragg and Newton in their first post, going on »»»
Previously, they’ve been forced to rely on the recording industry to fund recordings, manufacture and distribute their art and collect money for them. Without industry help, it was almost impossible to find enough fans to support a career.
Fans have also had to rely on the corporate recording industry to provide the music they wanted to hear. They listened to the radio in the hope of hearing the artists they loved, they bought weekly music mags to find out where and when their favourite bands were playing, and they went to record shops to get the music they wanted.
But fans can now do it all with the click of a mouse – and significantly, increasing numbers of artists are learning to do the same. Fans can get all the information they need about their favourite artists, and artists can find their fans online, without the scattergun approach of putting product into every record store in the country — and then keeping their fingers crossed.
But most important of all, fans can now support artists by paying them directly.
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
October, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
October 20th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Well done.
Sounds very promising.
But, just as people should not be dismissed as couch potato consumers to be fed the lowest common denominator, also bear in mind that we are all artists and all fans. We may well sometimes be fans of more artists than we have fans for art of our own, but fundamentally we are more than simply an either/or ‘artist or fan’, we are individuals. The term ‘artist’ or ‘fan’ denotes a role or relationship, not a political status nor a social caste.
As creative individuals, we are all artists and many of us would welcome a financial incentive to produce our art.
As individuals appreciative of creativity, we are all fans and would be pleased to offer our favourite artists a financial incentive to produce their art.
We have to get back to such fundamentals before we can recognise that the recording and publishing industry have been built upon foundations of 18th century permafrost that have now all but entirely melted.
The fundamentally sound facilities we build from this day forth must be back on the same bedrock that mankind’s cultural heritage has been built on since the stone age and as relatively recently as the renaissance.
We need to get back to an ethical incentive: money for art, liberty for people.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
So I haven’t fully read the new website yet, but would you say it like this:
Cory Doctorow Joins The CwF+RtB Experimental Crew
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091019/1334396594.shtml
(found the link in the world headlines).
Is that the concept?
Or is it more of a verbal-connection concept?
October 20th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
jamendo.com and creativecommons.org …. the first is the ideal business model and the second is the ideal alternative to ‘copyright’ …. if the artists havent ‘figured it out’ already and actually -need- this ’21st century for dummies’ website then they need to put away the gear and call it quits IMO….
October 20th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Jamendo and CreativeCommons are stepping stones to the future. They are like big toes being dipped in the water. They demonstrate that the water isn’t ice cold or acid, that it can actually be beneficial to restore liberty in whole or part to your audience.
However, complete immersion is something not yet seen in the music industry. Even the Free Software industry is mostly wading.
It won’t be very long before we pass the mid-point of this revolution, that point when free cultural exchange is embraced by the majority, and those who threaten filesharers in their audience with prosecution are in the minority.
Ultimately, we become completely immersed, swimming freely without fear. We lose sight of the copy for all the art we once again freely share and build upon.
Swimming means being supported (financially). It is still very early days in terms of business models that support artists whose work may be freely copied or performed without needing license or royalty.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
“Artists need to be paid, and fans want to pay them”
Definitively!
But we don’t want to pay parasites such as Vivendi, Sony, EMI or Time Warner.
The corporate parasites will die.
This is the deal.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
I won’t pay unless I like what I hear.
I won’t hear it unless I download it
Catch-22
Unless this UK guy wants to put some tunes up someplace for me to hear (like the Canadian Pirate parties torrent site) they I won’t bother and won’t pay even if he blbas for a month or 3 on the new website.
Simple?
October 21st, 2009 at 12:13 am
Could you post Big Music Beat-to-Bit post to the new site – it has a lot of great ideas
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/27344
For example, artists and fans need a great Internet radio service.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
fine you don’t want to pay the fat cats but really, you’re saying you can’t listen unless you download first? That is why you can also stream tracks online without having to download first. Once you’ve downloaded it who on earth would go back and pay for it retrospectively? Everyone expects to get paid for the work they do in life, and artists are no different.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:32 pm
My Two cents…. If the line between the artist and the fan gets more direct I really dig that. I do a gig someone likes it and they buy my CD. But on the other side of the coin is to have a good team (it takes a team) someone has to be paid. I am not say go with a really big record label (old model) but its a 40 hour a week job and more pushing artist.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Bill Hudson has a good point. The internet model of business is intriguing, but it’s difficult enough for some artists to make music without also having to make sales connections. It effectively takes distribution costs way down, but there will always seem to be a person between the artist and the fans who brought the fans attention to the artist in the first place, whether it happens online or not.
That said, I truly hope this effort works, because it seems like a win-win situation for those fans who are adventurous enough to seek out sounds other than the art sellers want them to buy.