So I'm on a slowish train to London Victoria listening to The Dirtmitts second album.
It's one of those albums that worries me a little bit because I came across the band by accident when I bought a Frank Black album and it came with a free sampler CD which included a Dirtmitts track (Fix & Destroy). What worries me is that, much like with Bobgoblin, the Dirtmitts were a really great band that I'd never have heard of if it weren't for chance. And I hate to think of all the great music out there that I must be missing out on.
I often listen to an Internet radio station called Radio Paradise that helps me find new stuff to buy (another accidental find was The Cloud Cult) and I say 'buy' because if you don't buy then the artists won't continue and, almost as importantly, you won't necessarily value the music and invest your time in listening to it.
Some of the best albums I own are ones that grew on me because the purchase would have been a significant proportion of my income and the 'duff' album had to be listened to several times to glean some benefit from and then the style may well have grown on me.
A good example of that would be The Best of ZZ Top which I bought as it was cheaper than Eliminator (which had Gimmie All Your Lovin on it). I had hoped it would be like Eliminator but it turned out to be Texan boogie rather than the heavy rock I'd hoped for.
This was back when Jim and I would buy a vinyl album each and then retire to his parents' or mine and put them on and evaluate them and read the liner notes having just blown about two weeks income.
But the ZZ Top album grew on me as I listened to it again and again and I have it on my iPhone now having bought the CD (the vinyl is so well played a transfer wouldn't have done it) and I don't think that I even own Eliminator even though I could probably pick it up on iTunes for peanuts.
The point is, in part, that I don't resent paying money for music but I do resent that the money tends to go towards promoting the big artists and the big corporations and not giving bands like The Dirtmitts or Bobgoblin the exposure they deserve.
Not that I think we should pay for music just so that we value it, the people who argue that music should be free seem to forget that even a cheaply produced album is going to cost a lot of time and money spent speculatively and an obscure band isn't necessarily going to be able to tour profitably to make that back.
Currently Lamb are making a new album and have asked fans to buy it upfront in exchange for a credit on the liner notes and maybe that model or a similar one would work for established bands but I do fear for new bands.
I suppose that there is some slight comfort in that people who download lots of music for free probably get overwhelmed and end up cherry-picking out the singles and never really giving the tracks that don't initially stand out the attention they warrant or get to hear the whole album arc as it should be.
