From A Weekend Musician, To Making $4.2 Million...
Found on Techdirt on Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Corey Smith was a high school teacher, doing weekend music gigs. Then, apparently, his manager had a revelation and started giving all of his music away for free: and last year Corey brought in $4.2 million. And the music industry is complaining that if the government doesn't step in creative content will cease to exist?
However, as an experiment, they took down the free tracks from Corey's website for a period of time last summer... and sales on iTunes went down.
But, still, the real money maker for Corey is concerts, and even here he's doing something innovative: making concert tickets cheap: $5.
Of course the music industry will continue to complain. And the reason for that is obvious: they are not involved with Corey Smith; he and his manager do the work. That doesn't leave a lot of money in the hands of the greedy industry. So for them, this example cannot work. Supporting this would be suicide for them.