With "supporters" like you, who needs enemies?

Your "tickets and t-shirts" model works fine for pop artists who perform simple music that's easily packaged and merchandised. Well, fine for pop artists who are themselves young, have no family to care for, don't mind being dirt poor for potentially many years while they build up a fan base (if that's even possible for their style of music), and don't mind being road-warrior vagabonds.

But there's a lot of music being created by older musicians who have families, commitments, and, well, lives who *can't* spend the better part of their days traveling. And there are a lot of folks who just don't want to. They still create great music, but in your model we don't get that music because you've declined to pay for it directly (making it impossible to recoup the cost of recording, thus discouraging the recording in the first place), and there are no tickets or t-shirts to be had.

And there's plenty of more complex music that's difficult or impossible to perform live without a large amount of money and people. Still recordable by a small group and a good software package, but not really performable. In your model we don't get that music either.

And of course there's all the niche music that simply will never get the kind of audience necessary to support an artist, but that, if sold directly, could provide enough money to fund the next project.

Summary: Your "tickets and t-shirts" model sucks for a large percentage of the music we could have available to us. But hey, if you're fine with a world where the only music available is that created by people who enjoy the nomadic lifestyle, write simply arranged, easy to perform music, and appeal to an audience that wears a lot of t-shirts, great. I think that world sucks.

I'm a musician. I'd like to be a full time musician, but I'd also like to have food, clothes, and shelter. These are not always present in a full time musician's life (what you read in the gossip rags not withstanding).

At 1 cent per song, I'm hosed. Rather than continue listen to people here pull numbers out of their asses, howswabout we do some math?

Let's assume I'm shooting for the U.S. median income, around $50K/year.

Let's assume I can only produce 1 album per year (think you can do better? Try it some time, smartass.)

So I need to gross $50K/album. But wait, I'm not alone, I have bandmates. And they all want to make the median income as well. So really, we have to make $250K/album. This is your most basic labor cost.

But I probably won't be able to put out the best album possible in my basement. Hyperbolic claims for the abilities of computer software packages aside, a Neumann mic is expensive. More expensive than I can afford. So I go to a studio. Not an expensive one, a fairly cheap one that charges $50/hour and throws in the engineer for free.

Let's assume I don't hire a producer.

I can say from experience of several albums that it takes several weeks minimum to record a decent album (in the more complex musical styles...granted a singer/guitarist/folkie can record an album in a couple days if they're prepped), and in most cases several months. For this argument lets say I take 3 months. That's 40 hours per week at $50/hour, or $24,000.

Now I need to have it mastered. That's at least $500.

Production: Discmakers will do 1000 copies for $1290. Order more and you get a discount. Let's assume I get my unit cost down to $1 by ordering at least 5000 copies.

My hard production costs now look like this (note that the physical CD is an almost trival part of the cost) -

The band - $250K annual/3 months worth = $62.5K Studio time - $24K Mastering - $500 CD production - $5000

Total: $92K

Let's assume I do no marketing, and am able to sell all the CDs at gigs.

To break even, make no profit, and pay for just those 3 months work, I have to charge $18.40 per disc if I make 5000. If I try to make the CD pay for the entire year's salary for the entire band (thus generate $279.5K total) I'd have to charge $55/disc.

That's not gonna work, so I make 10K CDs and sell them all. Now I'm down to $28/disc. Assuming I can get the venues to pay me $1000/night and we gig 150 days per year, I can charge $12.90 per disc (if I make 10000). (Btw, $1000/night is wildly optimistic, as is 150 gigs per year at that rate. Try it sometime if you don't believe me.)

If we make some assumptions about amortizing the cost of the disc over some period of time we can probably get the sale price down to sub $10/disc.

This is with zero marketing. Zero label support. Just driving all over the place gigging and selling CDs. And if we actually sold 10K CDs per year we'd be way ahead of most folks...that's a lot of CDs for any non-national major label support band, and probably won't happen.

Add in marketing costs and the price goes back up. Way up.

"Just sell it online, all your costs go away!" Um, no. $10K of my costs go away. The other $269K are still very much there, thanks. Online sales takes $1 off the price. The physical disc isn't the expensive bit.

This all assumes I'm a "successful" musician who can get lots of gigs and sell lots of CDs. If I'm less successful, I'm basically making poverty wages.

Going the other way, let's take you dipshits that want to pay me $0.01 per song/$0.10 per album. Let's see, to break even I only have to sell, um...2.6 million albums? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I'm all for high standards, but don't you think that's a bit unreasonable? To do that I pretty much have to start a boy band. I'm pretty sure world jazz ain't gonna get me there. And that, my sorry little asshat, is just to make $50K/year gross. No bling, no Ferrari, hell, probably no fucking health care and if I'm lucky maybe a mortgage.

So to you folks that think musicians are making too much money off all this, and that you should stick it to the Man by not paying for music: pull your head out of your ass and do a little math. There's a reason that guy who served you coffee isn't playing music full time. He makes more money at minimum wage serving coffee.