Indie Artist Profits From “Pay What You Like” Model

Norwegian one man army, Gisle Martens Meyer, recently released the Nebular Spool album Shul as a free download, but if you like, you can also pay for it. Gisle says he is making a reasonable amount of money from “free”.

This is a FreakBits reader guest article

Norweigan musician Gisle Martens Meyer is least unknown as Ugress. On October 31st, as one of his other alter egos, he released the album Shul.

Gisle is an open-minded and experimenting artist, applying the same attitude in respect of his business models. Writing on his blog for the announcement of the album, Gisle notes:

“I realized I have not tried an explicit pay-what-you-want model, so this time everything is available and you can choose if and what you want to pay.”

The truth about this way of releasing your music as a relatively unknown artist comes in many flavors. Some say it is quite possible, while others – especially the large record labels – claim that it’s impossible to earn anything from this business model, unless you’re a superstar with a record label doing all the hard work of building a large fanbase for you.

But how does it really work? Documentation on how this business model works for smaller artists is quite scarce. But Gisle has done his part to shine some light on the subject.

No more than 5 days after the release of the album he wrote another blog post, containing some interesting statistics. He revealed that 40% of downloaders chose to pay, even though they can get the exact same for free. Also, the average payment is 3 US Dollars, and this for a release from a side project of a not very well known Norweigan artist.

Gisle doesn’t want to reveal exactly how much he earned, but he concludes: “Financially and theoretically speaking, if I could release an album like this every month, with those figures, I could actually make a living directly from that.”

Of course, nobody is able to release new albums every month. At least not of a quality to keep the payments at the level Gisle is experiencing with Shul. But it is obviously quite possible to earn a reasonable amount of money by letting people download your music for free, and letting those who are willing to do so pay for it, even if you are not Radiohead.

That said, you probably won’t become a millionaire and be able to quit your job at the factory. But that is not the case either with an ordinary record deal, (at least in Scandinavia) if you aren’t one of the biggest stars. On the other hand, the music most likely got out to a lot more fans than it would have, if it had been released as a CD through the traditional channels of distribution. And that’s not bad, is it?

By the way: Shul is great album if you are into dark electronica. Download and listen for yourself. And remember: It’s not illegal to pay a little if you like the music.

This is a FreakBits guest post by Mikkel Munch Mortensen. If you’d like to appear on FreakBits, simply send your article to tips@torrentfreak.com and we’ll get right back to you.