Thomas Mahoney

So you have a band. You’re on MySpace. Or you have a Facebook page. Or you’re on iMeem, Bebo, whatever.

It’s cool that these companies exist that allow you to freely post your music and info, and connect with potentially millions of fans.

There are several problems with this model that are only now apparent.

First, and totally deserving of its own post, is the fact that your band is probably terrible and doesn’t need or deserve an audience outside of whoever you are fucking and whoever is stupid enough to want to load your equipment in and out of your local venue.

More important is this: you are, under 99.9% of circumstances, not sharing revenue from the ads generated when your fans are accessing your content. Until recently (see YouTube and MySpace Music over the last month, if you are a real band with real financial backing), you gained nothing from the banner ads generated around your content. Sure, it might be a miniscule amount, but times 8 million bands, it’s the reason FOX Interactive and their competitors are able to employ hundreds upon hundreds of employees. 

But I’m going to assume since you are at thomasmahoney.net that you are somewhat smart. Your IQ is above 100, you have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience, and you’ve read books slightly above the norm for a nation in which newspapers demand their writers produce for an 8th grade level audience or less. 

So what else could possibly be of value? You’re making 50-70% from your iTunes deal, your t-shirts sell well, and your tour guarantee is at least a grand a night, right? What could possibly be of more value?

Well, let’s say you’re some tattooed kid from the midwest who used to play in shitty metallic hardcore bands. You’re the bass player and your band — we’ll call you Fall Out Boy — has exactly 1,776,554 friends on your MySpace profile. Fuck yeah! You married some babe. You’re hosting MTV shows. You’re in Rolling Stone. Sweet!

Except you share something in common with the band that has 2,500 friends or 117 friends. Hmm?

You have exactly ZERO knowledge of your audience. Zero. None. 

Whoever is hosting your shit online for free knows. They know the IP address. They know the age. They know the DMA and most of the time, the exact geographic location down to a T, displayable in Google Earth. They know what site the kid was on before they came to yours, and what site or link bounced them away from you. These days, they even know how much your visitor makes, their level of education, their marital status, and other information that’d make both the drug-shooting anarchists and gun-toting conservatives shit their pants in disbelief. 

They have your data.

Who gives a fuck about a percentage of ad revenues when you can potentially know a hundred different traits about each and everyone of your friend and non-friend visitors?

The so-called Information Age, or the Age of Google, is built upon data. Do you have your data? Can you access it? Can you control it? Can you analyze it? Can you determine, based on current input, your best course of action in response?

Most likely, no. Why not? 

We could say that these corporations are committing crimes, but I don’t believe that. You are committing a crime against yourself. You are willingly selling off your content for exactly zero dollars and zero cents, with absolutely no equity. Why? Because it’s free, and easy, and trendy, and the norm?

Don’t worry — this isn’t a Bob Lefsetz newsletter that lets you down with all vitriol and no solution.

Save up $50. Buy a domain and a web host. Get your nerdy friend who plays World of Warcraft to tell you about Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress or some other free, open source content management system. Maybe he’ll already have a Google Ad Manager and AdSense account or have done an install of Open X, and maybe he knows how to build a sitemap, install Google Analytics, or Quantify the site. Maybe you do. And maybe you know how to call up someone and tell them that your new site attracts 10,000 uniques a month, and that is worth value for a local business focusing on some niche that your typical fan is interested in. 

I don’t think you are stupid. I think you may be ignorant, and most definitely lazy. To this day, the internet, this giant fucking tool of communication and community and commerce, is mostly free. Definitely way more free than television or radio or print. If you play an instrument and you play it well, it means you are reasonably gifted, and you should simultaneously be picking up any given O’Reilly or “For Dummies” text on web development, design, or metrics.

Steve Albini once wrote about how fucked your friends were for signing to a major. I’m telling you how fucked you are for thinking you’re independent when you’re signing up for “free” services backed my Microsoft, News Corp, Universal, or whoever else.

My friend James, who is twice as big as me, asks the same inane, rhetorical question every time he sees me: “Do you want to live or do you want to die?” Without fail, I always tell him I want to die. And as we have this personal relationship, he knows that translates into, “bring it on, motherfucker.”

So you want to live? Fuck that shit. It’s time to die. 

Come and get some.