Music Commissioning on eBay

There will always be a new way of using the Internet to sell whatever it is you want to sell – it’s just a matter of thinking of it. In the case of Celeste Hutchins, he is using eBay to auction his music commissions. He also defines an interesting economic theory to support his venture – the creation of a music gift economy. His commissions are not targeted at companies, major record labels or media production enterprises, but at the fans. According to Celeste, music is data, and data wants to be free – no amount of DRM is going to stop it, and attempting to do so ultimately reduces your exposure to potential fans, and irritates the ones you already have. So what’s the solution? Set the music free – and if it comes back, it’s yours. On a more practical level, you give your fans a real motivation to invest in you – if your fans actually commission your work, their name is attached to it, they become part of it, and they themselves will then be invested in it (not just their money). This has to be good for you as an artist, and greatly increases the social significance of your work.

I think this is an extremely interesting approach, and I wish him every success – I would certainly agree with the ethos behind it, and I would strongly consider implementing such a factor in my own work. Perhaps I will take the concept to the PodShop – Podcomplex artists could offer songs for sale which haven’t been written yet(!). These then would not be songs, but rather commissions, and once the customer pays for it, then the band can go about composing it, perhaps following some guidelines provided by the ‘client’. Such guidelines could be instructions on what instruments to use, how many instruments, song length, perhaps nothing more than a song title, perhaps nothing at all. The fans could then become part of the work in a way previously only available to rich ‘patrons’.

For those of you paying attention, the exclamation in the previous paragraph is an acknowledgement of the irony of my conclusion – in fact, many of the tracks in the PodShop at the moment have not been written yet. For example, the band ‘Electric Petrol’ do not exist at all, and neither do any of their songs. This entry was created during the testing phase of the shop, but now Celeste has given me an interesting way of presenting it – rather than removing the ‘band’, I could simply rebrand it as a ‘commissionable entity’. Not only could a music fan commission their own songs, they could commission their own artist – becoming a sort of ‘instant music management mogul’ in the process. I wonder what sort of regestive path this is all leading us down…



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