Photo: WENN
| Should more artists be giving away their music for free? | |
| Yes | |
| No | |
John Frusciante has unexpectedly released a metric tonne of free music on his Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Gearing up to take on the music industry, the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist is pulling back the curtains on the dark underbelly of consumerism and music.
Six projects of unreleased songs have been released online by Frusciante himself, with an essay load of quotes explaining why he would release so much free musical goodness of all a sudden. The last we heard of John Frusciante he was working with Duran Duran on their new album - maybe it was a transformative experience?
"Obviously I have a public audience,” Frusciante began. “I am aware of them, and they know who they are, When I said ‘At this point, I have no audience’, I meant ‘audience’ in the figurative sense of people who I have in mind when I am creating, who I intend to send my music to or play it for."
"Reduced to a single sentence, it would have been accurate to say that, at this point, I have no particular audience in mind while I am making music. Thinking this way gives me a certain freedom and stimulates growth and change. It is a state of mind that has been extremely useful to me from time to time throughout these last 27 years of being a professional musician."
"I am grateful that I still have an audience, considering that I do not make music preconcieved to conform to ‘what people want’. I don’t think people know what they want, except that the general public thinks that artists should sound as their audience expects them to. The general public did not ‘want’ Jimi Hendrix’s music before 1967. They did not know that such sounds were possible. How could they have wanted it before they heard it? Did the public ‘want’ Sgt. Pepper before it came out? That would have been impossible, because no album had ever sounded remotely like that. Yet musicians who aim at becoming or remaining popular have gotten into this stupid habit of attempting to give the public ‘what it wants’."
Listen to a few tracks off of the collection of free music below
Frusciante then tackled the age-old debate between art and making a living off of music: "When someone releases music on a label, they are selling it, not giving it. Art is a matter of giving. If I sing my friend a song, it goes from me to her, at no cost. That’s giving. If I sell you an object, we do not say that I gave you that object.
"Recording artists have been ‘giving’ the public music by selling it to them for so long that we now think of sell-outs as dedicated musicians who love their audience so much that they aggressively sell them products, and sell themselves as an image and personality to this audience on a regular basis just as aggressively."
