Xerographica

confession... i love music but i can't even remember the last time that i paid for it. for example on youtube i've listened to beach house, yo la tengo, blonde redhead, optiganally yours and even more niche bands countless times, and yes i have adblocker installed, because most ads are too annoying.

this is the free-rider problem. it's based on the premise that the world is a much better place when everyone knows how much you truly love things.

pretend that way back in the day you bought a cocteau twins cd for $10 and you really loved it. the next day you bought a green day cd also for $10 but you really hated it. in neither case did the $10 that you spent accurately convey or communicate your true feelings.

so... why not listen to an album 1st and then pay for it? Pay What You Want (pwyw) is a real thing and it's an option for at least some music. obviously this still has the problem of free-riding.

what's the solution? perks!

let's say that i make a $10 donation to this forum. the perk would be that i'd receive 10 points, which i could use to promote my favorite forum threads.

basically there would be a page on this website with a list of threads sorted by points. if i thought that a thread about possum dixon was too low on the list i could spend my points on it, which would improve its ranking.

we'd essentially have our own billboard chart. being able to directly influence the chart would be a perk of donating to this forum.

to be clear, all of the money would go to this forum. none of it would go to the thread starters or the bands. what the bands get are more ears... more attention... which can lead to bigger venues. assuming of course that our chart is better than the other ones.

logistically it's easy enough to use a google sheet, which can be embedded in a page on this website, as the chart. with moderate participation it shouldn't be too hard to manually update the chart. if participation picks up then some of the money could be spent on automating the system.

one of the main reasons that i joined this forum is that, when i looked on the 1st page of the indie & alternative category, i was kinda surprised to see so many of my fav bands in the thread titles. and there's more than 100 pages of threads! i'm sure there's a ton of buried treasure.

admittedly, trying to decide how to divide 10 points among 100 pages of cool bands would be... arduous...to say the least. but the amount of brainpower that we put into our chart is exactly what would make it way smarter than the other charts.

one possible objection is that this system would be unfair to poor people. but i'm pretty sure that this system would be far more effective than the alternatives at finding and elevating the most talented starving artists.

let me know if you have questions!

DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

While I listen to a lot of music on Youtube (not Spotify, I don't have an account there), I actually go out of my way to actually pay for music as often as I can. Bands and musicians need to make a living too - right? I figure that one reason the music industry has so many problems these days is because so few people actually bother to pay for music anymore. Do you go to movies for free? Do you get paintings for free? Why should you get all your music for free?

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