I agree with you that ppl should pay. But coming from my perspective (young early 20's college kid), I grew up in the DL era. You have to understand the mentality of ppl my age and younger, we don't feel as if we should pay for this because in our minds there's no reason to. We don't even consider it stealing at this point, it's just that commonplace. The thing about providing the limited copies of the album is it makes it so artists don't have to focus on singles to drive sales, the consumer that'll pay $100 for an album (just an example, not necessarily the only solution) isn't going to care about chart-topping singles, they're going to want some REAL music...
Look at MMG for example, why would anybody feel any need to buy that group album, when a week later Meek just gonna come out with a free mixtape (arguably better than the album) and now they say Meek and Wale got a joint tape coming out soon, and they wonder why we just download all their shyt
I'm not far removed from the download era. I understand that people have decided that music is free. My problem is that they do not acknowledge that their behavior has an effect. I wouldn't care if people who downloaded did so and kept it moving. Instead, they bark the loudest about the quality of music and the state of the music business when they are directly contributing to its condition.
The limited edition model is a small scale operation for a reason. The person who would pay $100 would also pay $10. The thing is that artists don't push the value that their work has or should have. That part of the story is being missed by artists. Sell your music. Foster the environment that it's worth being paid for. Encourage fans who buy to encourage others to buy. Word of mouth is underrated and under utilized. Drake having limited edition bundles in addition to normal and deluxe CDs is part of how they make the money back but would never be the be all end all. I remember that Take Care had a version with a t shirt. Nas and Nicki Minaj did the same. However, on tour, they have CDs and vinyl available to get people on the back end.
All artists work on singles because that generates interest in the project. I know that you were probably talking about out of the norm pop offerings to the radio but they help as well. People chase the radio because an overwhelming amount of people listen to the radio a lot. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
With you MMG example, it's their fault for watering down their brand. If they want to put out free tape after tape and foster the cycle of no pay to play, that's on them. They have to be smarter with their art and livelihood. Another part is the mentality of "Why would I give my money to someone who is already rich?". I've heard that from music artists about other artists, so it's a widespread thing. If you value your work, others will value it. If they don't, you have to show it through your actions.
I'm using broke people sense. If you've got a decent following on Twitter and you're RT'ing Joe Budden, your followers may check him out, buy an album, refer him to other people, you know where I'm going.
