selling out

I got this email jan 10, 2006 from a listener who started out by saying that s/he loves the music and appreciates all the work I've put in, and that they think asking for donations is a good idea, but that the phrase "i have no plans to start charging for my music any time soon" made them wonder if I had plans to charge in the future and that if I did charge I would stop being an anarchist and become "just like snoop dog, but with better lyrics." I was a bit surprised, not only because I thought it was pretty clear that I'm dedicated to making my music available free online, but because I felt like even if I did charge there would still be a pretty big difference between what I'm doing and what someone like Snoop Dog does (no offense to snoop, but i think it's obvious that he and I have pretty different approaches to putting our music out). Anyway since i took almost two hours to write, edit, and then re-write a long and detailed response, and i know there are other folks out there with similar feelings, i figured i should post this up to set the record straight.

Doing so is not meant to criticize the author of the original email, I appreciate feedback - positive and negative - and always reply to letters from listeners. All I'm asking is that ya'll please understand where I'm coming from on this.

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Comment: Hi

First, congratulations for the new album, we as listeners know that you 
have really worked too hard this years for the revolution, you have 
contributed with all your energy for making great music among many other 
activities:

I think it´s great what you have been doing until now, however i just 
noticed some changes in your web site:

1- You said:  " I refuse to make it a commodity by attaching a price to 
it - music is like oxygen - it should be everywhere and it should be 
free"·  It´s great.However you also said:

"I have no intention of charging for anything any time soon". I donot 
know why you said "soon". I got surprised, are you planning to charge 
later, maybe in 3 years?

I understand that we as proletarians have to work, and i think it is a 
good idea the "pay pal" donations. By that way if we can support the 
music we can make donations. But if you start selling your music you 
would quit being an anarchist and you would be just another comercial rap 
singer but with good lyrics, just like Snoop Dog but with differente 
lyrics.

I also donot understand why you have included copyright in your songs, 
is it necesary? I think you should have used copyleft, dont you think?

I hope you dont feel ofended, but i consider you a honest anarchist, 
and i think its my duty as your partner to tell you this. Only consider 
that please. Its my personal opinion.

That all buddy. Take care!

Let´s destroy state and corporations!

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Hey,

Thanks for taking the time to write, and I’m glad you like the new music. I've put in a lot of work and i appriciate the recognition.

Saying I don't plan to start charging any time soon means I have no plans to start charging for downloads, but that if circumstances demand it (for instance if my costs go up and no one donates anything), I might have too reconsider my whole distribution model - which might mean charging enough to at least break even and might mean quitting altogether. So basically I’m not boxing myself in, but I’m saying I’d like to keep giving it away for free as long as it is possible to do so. In any case, I’ve removed the phrase “any time soon” from the donations page to avoid confusion.

Just to play devils advocate, why would it make me not an anarchist to charge? You like to get paid for your work, don't you? What if you spent five years working for someone only to have them tell you that since you're an anarchist they shouldn't have to pay you? It’d probably make you a bit grouchy...

If we were living in an anarchist society then none of us would have to worry about getting paid and we could just do what we love, but we're not. We’re living in a capitalist society and in the here and now it costs money to make music, not to mention the cost of living. I have to pay bills just like everyone else, whether I like it or not. It cost over $200 to renew my domain name and web hosting a few months back and it cost $100 to get the album mastered. Additionally, I’ve spent several thousand dollars on musical equipment, and - since virtually all the shows I do are benefits and I don’t get paid to perform – I usually end up losing money on live shows. That’s before we even address the issue of whether it’s ethical or not to want to make a living doing what I love and not have to be a wage slave any more. I’m so far from making a profit at this point it’s comical. If this was a business I’d have been bankrupt years ago.

Juxtapose that with the fact that my last album had over 100,000 downloads and that if I charged $1 each for downloads the way iTunes does I’d have made more then 10 times my annual income. I could give 2/3 of that money away to local anarchist organizations and still more then triple my standard of living – ya know, get an apartment with enough room to actually have friends over every once in a while, take a friggin vacation for the first time in my life, shit like that – but I know and you know that’s not why I’m making music. I’m doing this because I love making music and because I want to communicate with people. So please, never compare me to snoop dog again, it’s beyond insulting. By the dollar-a-track measure I’ve given away more then $100,000 worth of music in the last year alone, and that’s more cash then I’ve earned in my entire life up to this point combined. If that’s not enough to prove that I’m not in this for the money I don’t know what is.

Being an anarchist means I want to change the world so none of us has to deal with this shit, but like I said on the new album "in the mean time, I’ve got to make rent". That’s reality. Dealing with reality doesn't make me snoop dog; it makes me a working-class wage slave. I’ve heard the whole "it's good you don't charge because if you did you'd be a capitalist" argument before and - no offense - it strikes me as kind of silly. There are literally thousands of anarchist collective businesses all over the world that are collectively owned by their workers and in which there are no bosses or management and profits are shared or reinvested in the community. They use currency because they have too in order to function in the world as it is, but that doesn’t mean they are not anarchist, it just means that there is a difference between the way we’d like things to work and the way things actually work in the world as it is. By your definition there would be no difference between them and privately owned exploitive corporations, and I think that misses something critical. Are you seriously going to tell me there's no difference between a worker-owned democratically run non-hierarchal collective business which pays its members the full value of their labor and supports the community (like rainbow grocery here in San Francisco, for instance) and a giant multinational conglomerate just because they both sell things?

The only difference between rainbow grocery and me (if I decided to sell my music) is that I would be a collective of one – exploiting no one and stealing from no one. Snoop Dog, by contrast, is signed to a huge international corporation that systematically exploits and steals from its workers, its artists, and from the people who buy its products in order to make money for its shareholders and executives. The two are on entirely different planes of existence, to say there is no difference is just plain wrong.

In any case, the short answer is that no, I don't have any plans to charge for my music. Like I said I feel very strongly that music should be free for the taking and as long as I can afford to keep giving it away I will. If you really want to help keep it free, make a donation (ha! the irony!). I’ve had the donation button up for a week and not received a single cent yet, and gift economies only work if people give back. If people don't give back there's going to come a point where I won't be able to afford to keep giving, and that's just how it is. At that point I’ll have to either stop putting music out or start charging for it, and that would be a very hard choice for me to make... it's not one I want to have to make, believe me.

Please don't be offended by my response, I understand where your coming from and I strongly agree with you that it's a lot better to keep the music free. I just felt like I had to respond to the point since I think there's a critical difference between being a capitalist who profits by stealing other people's labor and making an honest living on one's own labor. One is parasitic and exploitive, and the other is not. In any case, I am doing neither, but if at some point in the future I have to go the "charge a fair price for something i created with my own labor" route, I don't want to be called a sellout.

Solidarity,
Lynx