What price per song would you be willing to pay instead of stealing their music or a price that would motivate you to buy their songs?
A dollar a song is a good rule of thumb – twice that is definitely too much. However, the main reasons for illegally downloading music are:
1. To evaluate the artist before paying money,
2. To get around DRM (I always buy CDs for this reason),
3. To get music that can’t be legally acquired.
If you have high-sound-quality tracks and/or music videos that people can link to for free (cf. Regina Spektor, The Weepies) and you make it easy for your fans to get no-DRM copies of the tracks (e.g. as mp3s, although I prefer AACs at 192 kbps or more for the sound quality), you shouldn’t have too much trouble. Remember: be good to your fans, and they will be good to you. 
February 19th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
A dollar a song is a good rule of thumb – twice that is definitely too much. However, the main reasons for illegally downloading music are:
1. To evaluate the artist before paying money,
2. To get around DRM (I always buy CDs for this reason),
3. To get music that can’t be legally acquired.
If you have high-sound-quality tracks and/or music videos that people can link to for free (cf. Regina Spektor, The Weepies) and you make it easy for your fans to get no-DRM copies of the tracks (e.g. as mp3s, although I prefer AACs at 192 kbps or more for the sound quality), you shouldn’t have too much trouble. Remember: be good to your fans, and they will be good to you.
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