Strange Angel

In an inherently unfair world it strikes me as unjust that, despite being a unique artist with a 20 years plus career behind her, Kristin Hersh still finds difficulty in making any sort of living from her music from the industry’s predominant business models. This is illustrated by the fact that the tour to promote the wonderful ‘Learn To Sing Like A Star’ LP was nothing less than a money pit despite being musically an exhilarating experience and that just offends my sensibilities.

A few weeks back I copied Kristin’s statement about finding new ways to make her music available without record companies being involved via CASH Music and her first “release” using this model is now available.

The release is one track, ‘Slippershell’ which is available for free download via the site in FLAC and MP3 formats with other downloads related to the release (such as art work.)

Concurrently you can subscribe to Kristin’s music at one of two rates. The first essentially covers a CD of the releases with one or two other goodies thrown in whilst the higher rate includes the likes of guest list privileges at KH, 50 Foot Wave and Throwing Muses shows.

But this isn’t your regular subscription service because there’s no formal link between the music and the subscription. You can take the music and run although I would suggest that only the morally bankrupt will do so on a regular basis.

This new approach raises all sorts of issues surrounding the value of music (and CASH Music helpfully points you in the direction of various related resources). How much are your favourite artists’ songs worth to you?

You probably would value differently an LP bought on spec compared to one you’d been looking forward to for months from a favourite artist. Whilst part of that may be down to the resources at your disposal, it is also because you know that the artist receives only a tiny fraction of the cost to you of the income a company takes from an LP. There is no link between what you pay and what the artist receives. Personally I’m prepared to pay a little extra if I know that the artist will benefit.

So CASH Music is the latest in a line of projects aimed at creating a link between the artist and the rewards for their music. Some artists, such as Julian Cope, have tried to control the means of distribution of the traditional CD by only making their music available through their own websites. But it’s interesting to note that Cope has changed strategy with his latest LP ‘You Got A Problem With Me’ and has made it available through your common or garden retail outlets.

There are of course more radical approaches and a subscription service is one such method. Usually it seems that a subscription will give you added value over and above the actual record such as demos etc. Kristin’s approach though is not just related to copies of the music but also extends to gigs (via the higher rate ‘Strange Angels’ package). However including gigs does raise the issue of where Kristin will play these gigs because what promoter is going to book an act whereby half the potential audience are already on the guest list?

For me the subscription model is one I would be happy to use – but only for certain artists in whom I trust to deliver what I’m looking for. Logically therefore artists setting up a subscription service will not reach their entire audience via this method meaning that some alternative means of distribution will have to be found.

Kristin is definitely in the category of artists I will support in this way. My only debate is to which level of service to subscribe to. But hopefully CASH Music will guarantee many more years of Kristin’s music.

I’m not going to post ‘Slippershell’ here – instead I would urge you to click the link, get the track and find out more about CASH Music.

Kristin Hersh – Slippershell