The webpage http://ottmarliebert.com/rose is live now. You can download the music for free, but the musicians involved in the making of this recording invite you to make a tax deductible contribution to Direct Aid Iraq. Read more at the webpage: http://ottmarliebert.com/rose
I hope you will help me spread the word about the album! It is very easy to embed the music on your blog or website, using the SoundCloud widget. Just go to our https://www.ottmarliebert.com/rose/ webpage and click on the embed symbol. It looks like this – I encircled it in red in this screenshot:
“…And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”
Counter to some predictions, photography and video are are not bound to ‘Free’. I’m in agreement with Anderson that ‘Free’ is most certainly carving out its space–even reasonably so–in every digitally based industry, but I’m in complete alignment with Gladwell that the two markets ‘Free’ and ‘Not Free’ can and will continue to co-exist reasonably nicely. The trick is/will be in finding the balance.
Read the whole piece here. A lot of very good food for thought.
Somewhat related is this entry at Slashdot:
Slashdot Technology Story | If You Live By Free, You Will Die By Free “Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban writes that the problem with companies who have built their business around free is that the more success you have in delivering free, the more expensive it is to stay at the top. ‘”They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo,” writes Cuban. “Someone out there with a better idea will raise a bunch of money, give it away for free, build scale and charge less to reach the audience.”‘ Cuban says that even Google, who lives and dies by free, knows that ‘at some point your Black Swan competitor will appear and they will kick your ass’ and that is exactly why Google invests in everything and anything they possibly can that they believe can create another business they can depend on in the future searching for the “next big Google thing.”
Anything generic is moving towards free. Anything truly original is moving towards value.
Latin or Blues electric guitar moves towards free. Santana moves towards value. A photograph of the Pantheon can be found for free on the internet, an original and completely different photograph of the Pantheon cannot.
For an artist the lesson might be this: If you want to fit into a certain category of music or want to fit into a specific radio format, you will have to fight free – because similar content WILL be available for free!
If, on the other hand, you are developing something truly original, a different sound, a new expression, then it might take you longer to find recognition, but you will develop value.
If, what you are creating is too far out… maybe you just have to wait a few months (((or sometimes years))) to let the world catch up. Suddenly you might find that your strange new sound fits in quite nicely.
In other words, I get the sense that the current economy and internet-culture should push a young artist towards more original and away from trying to fit in. And that would be a good thing.
Clicking on the above photo will take you to the free track in our ListeningLounge. Only available from today until next Wednesday and only available here.
I want to celebrate my birthday by giving away music. The piece I shall offer in our ListeningLounge – only from January 29th through February 4th – is a piece that came on the wings of… something. We had stopped recording and Jon was doing something in the control room. I started playing guitar and Rahim began to sing , well, here is a link to my Diary entry from the day after it happened.
I think this piece is an appropriate gift, because it was also a gift to us, in a way. Improvisations like this are the reason why I wanted to become a musician in the first place, to hunt for similar moments of spontaneous combustion.
Jon later added the beautiful bass intro.
Visit the LL on Thursday morning and feel free to tell your friends.
You can buy my best album ever (only time will tell…) from our ListeningLounge, you can order the CD from our web store, or you can wait two more weeks until the CD hits the stores and downloads become available elsewhere on June 17th.
Now or later… your choice. If you buy the album now – do leave a comment as to which track you would select to be given away (in 128kbps form) as part of our SSRI Sampler. Tell me which is your favorite piece on the album and which piece you think would appeal to others the most – and that might not be the same track. Thanks.
