Jay Havaldar | There's no such thing as a free lunch

A Numbers Game | The true cost of free music

By Jay Havaldar 07/15/15 10:36pm

I would consider myself a pretty big music fan. To this day, my iTunes library consists of around 5,000 songs, for a total of 12 days of music. At my worst, I would download gigabytes a day — entire discographies — for no reason other than that I could. There was even a complaint filed against me under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act asking for compensation after they noticed I had illegally downloaded “Nevermind” by Nirvana on AirPennNet. I didn’t respond, but I did feel incredibly guilty. Not towards Courtney Love, or Universal Music Group or the DMCA, but towards the music industry in general. The story was different when I was a kid and my parents wouldn’t let me buy music. Now I had my own money, and yet I was still stealing.

The story of the internet is the story of democratization. People aren’t going to be any more likely to pay to listen to a song than they are to buy an encyclopedia, because that information “belongs” to everyone now. It seems that the only successful way to profit off this new paradigm is the “freemium” model, in which you have the option to pay for quality. It’s a natural solution which allows customers to pay what they want. But for this model to be successful and to change what the value of music is, we need to have a discussion about what the value of music should be.

Services like Spotify and Apple Music are making great strides in that artists are finally getting compensated for digital music which is being consumed at unprecedented levels. Unfortunately, the free option has set the tone for how our generation will consume music. If Spotify won’t provide, then YouTube will, and if YouTube won’t, then there’s always piracy. That music is free is an inescapable truth. That it is worthless is not.

It is heartening that people will pay for music even when it’s free. As CD sales have consistently plummeted for the past few years, vinyl has established itself as the fastest growing segment of the music industry. Sure, some are paying for quality, and some for style, but many are making an emotional investment. Paying for a free good is an anarchistic act, a rebellion in which we question the judgment of the free market and instead set our own price. In the age of the internet, we have the unique opportunity to do this, and we ought to take advantage of it now so future generations will be able to live in the kind of vibrant musical landscape we see today.

Despite the entitled, narcissistic stereotype of the millennial, research suggests that we are actually quite philanthropic, with 87 percent of millennials donating to charity in 2014. It’s not impossible to get our generation to move on issues that inspire them. If the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and Kickstarter have taught us anything, it’s that our generation is willing to exchange actual currency for social currency and personalized rewards. Whether you think this is an adequate justification or not, it is certainly a successful strategy, in no small part due to the fact that it gives donors the feeling that they’re getting their money’s worth. Amanda Palmer’s book, “The Art of Asking,” details how she was able to crowdfund her album “Theatre Is Evil” — then the most successful music project ever on Kickstarter — simply by setting up a simple system of tiered rewards. As digital strategist Amy Webb suggests, we could think of charity as investment, not donation. In this way, we can rediscover and rebuild the value of music.

The duty falls upon our generation, and particularly our generation of music fans, to change the way we consume music before it’s too late. We are told that music is free, but platforms like Bandcamp and Kickstarter increasingly offer us the option to reject that assertion. Here’s my investing advice for the day. Buy as many shares as you can in music: in creativity, in art and in culture. Prove to the industry — and to the artists — that music is worth something, and I guarantee in a few decades’ time, you’ll be glad you did. After all, you get what you pay for.

JAY HAVALDAR is a rising Engineering junior from Dix Hills, NY studying math and computer science. His email address is havaldar@seas.upenn.edu.

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