Someone call Eminem – people still listen to “techno” and Moby isn’t too old to pioneer his way to forefront of creative digital musical distribution.
In today’s peer-to-peer age, an almost unimaginable volume of songs, software, games, and even 3-d objects are available on demand, and right at your finger tips… for free. This has vastly expanded the potential for the spread of information, tools, and ideas and leads us one step closer to the post-scarcity era. However, this presents a problem for the owners of creative property, or at least those who seek to maximize their profits using the traditional purchase model.
Moby is leading the growing movement that is succeeding in changing this status-quo. Last year, he released a BitTorrent package containing songs, videos, and stems from his album Innocents available for free download as long as users provided an email. It worked. Moby hit 8.9 million downloads, officially making him the most downloaded artist of 2013. Of course, the rest of the album was available for purchase on iTunes which gave fans the choice to support Moby with cold hard cash.
This model of giving music and media out for free isn’t anything extremely new, but it is revolutionary. Bands like Radiohead were some of the first pioneers to release their work in a non-traditional format with their 2007 release of In Rainbows which gave fans the choice to pay what they wanted for the album – which even meant giving them the choice to not pay at all. In Rainbows achieved massive success, debuting at number 1 in the US Billboard charts, and selling over 3 million albums in a single year.
However, this isn’t where the story stops. Moby just recently pushed his newest single, “Almost Home” through an innovative platform known as Blend.io. For the tech saavy out there, Blend.io allows artists to upload music that is fully compatible with professional software such as Ableton, Logic, etc. Meaning that the song is already separated into stems that makes for an easy import and streamlined creative and collaborative manipulation of existing pieces. Essentially giving artists the tools to release open-source material, much like Open Office but in a musical format.
It’s all about access and creative manipulation to Moby. He’s one of the few that is making a genuine effort to push emphasis towards the creative process and collective work that ultimately makes musical expression so damn cool in the first place. And as Moby told The Verge “If someone took my files and made a version of the song that was more popular than mine, that would be awesome.” You have Moby‘s permission, now get out there and make him proud.
Source – Our friends at The Verge