Ten years ago at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, I sat across from Steve Jobs and suggested that asking a generation of music fans raised on Napster and Kazaa to pay 99 cents a song was going to be a tough sell. He argued that for practicality and karma, people would rather pay for music than steal it and that, until the release of the just-launched iTunes Music Store, stealing had been their best option. In retrospect, we were both right: 25 billion downloads later, the iTunes Store thrives, yet the perception that music is free hasn't waned. The notion of stealing music seems quaint now; stealing implies something has value in the first place.
What Jobs and the major players in the record business did a decade ago in putting a 99-cent price on a song was to effectively attach the same value to "Blowin' in the Wind" as a Big Gulp or two loosies from a New York bodega. From 99 cents, there was nowhere to go but down. Jay-Z grabbed headlines by offering a million downloads of his new album via an app — which, as it turns out, might have been a story more about data-mining than music. Jay-Z offered Samsung "content." Content? A song is something that can break your heart or raise your heart rate. A song can change the direction of your day or make you reconsider your marriage. Now you get one — often a new one from a major artist — in exchange for a retweet.
Originally, we were stick-up men stealing from drug dealers. We stole music because paying $17.99 for albums with two good songs felt like we were being robbed. But over time, we let our thirst for revenge turn us into ingrates. We sample instead of consume. We graze instead of listen. We complain about the quality of music and act inconvenienced by the sheer quantity of it when the same things that have made music worthless have made the experience of listening to music exponentially better. Everything is searchable. Everything is sharable. And "If you like" are now the three most powerful words in music — how often have you searched for one song and come away with ten others and a new favorite band? Well, that new favorite band is totally fucked. The new music economy has broken the unwritten code between musician and fan. We take more than we give, which isn't how an artist/patron relationship is supposed to work.
This summer at Bonnaroo, I sat on a panel with Dwight Yoakam and the young Nashville singer-songwriter Jonny Fritz. I asked a question I already knew the answer to: "Dwight, is there any chance today a guy like Jonny could have your kind of career… accomplish the kind of…" They both shook their heads before I completed the sentence. Fritz makes ends meet through leather work — he's got a better chance of selling a guitar strap than an album. And real patronage isn't crowd funding. Kickstarter, which has turned musicians into self-promotional shakedown artists, isn't something anyone should be proud of. Musician-artist Amanda Palmer's famous "The Art of Asking" TED Talk was somehow both naive and condescending. The art of "letting" fans pay instead of "making" them? Please. Radiohead can "let" them pay. Perhaps even Amanda Palmer can "let" them pay. But your new secret discovery on Spotify can't do that.
Music will once again have to be paid for. It will once again need to have a price — not an optional donation but a value you're forced to either accept or reject. Without a price, there's nothing at stake, and if there's nothing at stake with a song, then there isn't any point in listening.