Can advertising sustain artists?

There are a few services out there that let you distribute your works for free. Not just that they seem to imply that they’ll generate enough revenue so that a part of that revenue will be enough to sustain creative efforts of artists.

I want to address two such services, one is Tunesquare and the other is a very popular streaming audio site - last.fm. First,. I’ll explain what these two are services provide to the artist and then will talk about our model of encouraging fans to make a payment straight to the artist.

TuneSquare say they will distribute your music for free. The only thing they do is show ads on the website as fans are waiting for the download of music they’d like to listen to again and again. That is an excellent idea as such. What makes it even better is that they say they will share the ad revenue generated from the pages hosting your music. All well and good and we know creative people will appreciate any income to sustain their creative efforts.

Last.fm has had a recent tie up with CBS, an old school recording and distribution company. The tie up between the two says you can listen to any music from CBS’ collection for free - up to three times. If you like the music, well you should go buy the CD - giving 90% or more of your money to CBS for their excellent service of bringing you the music (sarcasm intended). Again last.fm and CBS say the costs of allowing fans to listen to your music will be covered by - you guessed it - advertising.

I guess both the efforts (TuneSquare and last.fm/CBS) hope advertising will generate enough revenue from ads to sustain the livelihood of artists. So what are fans expected to do - click on Viagra ads hoping 10-40% of the 20 cents generated by each click will reach the artist?

We at Karmafan believe fans should step forward and give something back straight to the artist. A dollar from a thousand fans can help the artist pay for that art work, the costs of producing and distributing their works, even make a living.

Stop clicking on useless ads selling you Viagra, give something back to the artist.