Should music be free?

I was having a friendly debate with an artist last week who does graphic art pieces for a living. He was telling me that all music should be free, that no one should have to pay for music.

My response to him was if everyone feels that music should be free, then how do people expect musicians to make a living? His response was that people shouldn't have to pay for an entire album when there's only a few good songs on it. That fans make a band, and that all money can be made from advanced tickets sales for shows and tours.

Now in a perfect world that may work. But how can an indie band survive, much less book shows or even aspire to a tour (all self-funded) if all their money is being spent initially on producing an album, so that people could hear them in the first place? An album is after all, like a calling card. So if you don't have one, no one takes you seriously. Music on various websites can only do so much, but having an album to sell yourself is a must. But mind you, you must now sell yourself without making ANY money from your music.

So if no money comes from album sales, and if people have a right to have music for free, how can musicians make a living?

We don't go to doctors, lawyers, accountants and say 'well, there's so many of you guys around, I'll just take your service for free.'

My graphic artist friend, who has 41,000 songs on his hard drive, doesn't know all of the songs on it, because put simply, who has time to listen to all those songs. But we have become such a download-driven culture, that we don't even know what we have on our hard drives anymore, we just download for the sake of downloading. We're addicted to downloading for free.

The one thing I forgot to tell my artist friend, after just attending his art show a few weeks ago, was that maybe if I took a picture of his art and then photocopied it onto color gloss paper, it would be okay because I'm entitled to share his work among my friends and spread the news that he's a great artist, for FREE.

Something to think about.

But for all those folks who download excessively music, and for all those who say you love music, I just have to say that you're killing our livelihood and when there's no more musicians around to make music because we were forced to take a normal job, then I hope you can understand the part you played in contributing to our demise.

And you may I'm whining or bitter, but I don't care. You're not trying to make a living from music.

All I'm saying is, if we musicians are a profession like every other profession, and a vocation, and if we spend our savings on our vocation, and if we are adding value to people's lives and society, then shouldn't we be receiving some sort of value back in return for this?

But the sad fact is that everyone loves music, but nobody sees us musicians as a profession itself. Just like all other professions. So everyone takes for free now, because it has become the norm.

What this amounts to is greed on the part of the listener who somehow feels that they're doing us a favor by spreading our name around for FREE.

How about this? Everyone who downloads excessive amounts music for free should give away something of theirs that they value for free? How about that?

Fair is fair. Isn't it?