Oregon Music News

“Pay what you want for the music you love. Even $0.”

Did you ever think a record label would tell you that?

Tender Loving Empire founder Jared Mees isn’t sure if his “priceless music” model will work, but he, alongside Brianne Mees (his wife and the store’s co-founder) and Andrew Sloan (TLE’s Minister of Creative Content), still believes the concept is worth exploring.

“It’s definitely not rooted in traditional capitalist commerce ideas,” Mees admits. ”It’s rooted way more in how a relationship works. If I give you something for free, you’re going to do something for me later.” Acknowledging his own potential naivety, Mees maintains, “You have to do something risky if you want to get extraordinary returns.”

Enter The Priceless Music Project, Mees’ innovative, game-changing endeavor that aims to implement a new form of e-commerce where audiophiles can purchase music direct from indie record labels and bands, paying whatever they want while also gaining some insight into the music-making process and even being rewarded for spending above average to support the music they love.

So, is The Priceless Music Project the future of buying and sharing music online?  Mees doesn’t know, but he’s willing to find out. And, if you build it, they will come. But will they buy? Or just download for free?

“A lot of this is just us hoping and praying but ultimately we don’t have anything to lose. We’re already in that situation,” Mees laughs.

“That situation” is the current state of the music industry, and the fact that, according to Mees, it can’t get any worse. Mees has always had a unique, hands-on approach to his work in the music world. In building his multidimensional, hybrid business—Tender Loving Empire is a retail store, custom screen printing shop, and a record label—Mees has always tried to create community first and foremost, establishing relationships and educating along the way.

Because of this, Tender Loving Empire is ”an actual viable business” now. ”If we weren’t doing something that reflected the community, I don’t think we would be doing as well as we are,” Mees says.

And Mees intends for same mentality and principles to guide The Priceless Music Project.

“The goal of The Priceless Music Project is to allow music fans to get the music that they want to listen to for the price that they see is fair,” Mees explains. “Also, to allow musicians and labels a different type of relationship with their customers and fans.”

His outlook involves more than a little bit of faith in humanity, trusting that dedicated music fans truly respect the independent artists who are making music and will pay for it.

Watch Mees give a demonstation of the project here:

TLE first announced the project in early December along with a fundraising campaign, which expires in just under a week. Currently seeking $48,000 on IndieGoGo to fund the idea, The Priceless Music Project is not remotely close to that goal, but ”this fundraising campaign is just one of the many ways to raise money,” Mees says.

“Our next move is going to be to basically bootstrap the development of this project so it works with our own website, let folks test it out, and see what it needs. And then, hopefully, use that momentum to help drum up some more investment to take it wide,” Mees explains.

At the end of the day, this is a huge project that already has, and will have many more, advocates and critics as everyone from musicians to fans to industry people each have their own opinion on the concept of pay-what-you-want music. The current idea is completely in-house but it will need much more than just TLE behind it to get it off the ground, and Mees is definitely seeking input from parties that would like to get involved.

“We know that we have to branch out,” Mees recognizes. “We are not the experts on how this should all work. We just know that something different needs to happen.”

As far as the current progress of the project: “In the scheme of things it’s still early,” Mees says. “Twelve months from now, I expect the platform to be at least a functional part of tenderlovingempire.com, if not something much larger.”

Regardless of the current state of funding, Mees is sticking to his mission and his belief that ”music is priceless,” on more than one level.

With plenty of questions to ask, OMN spoke to Mees in December about the ideas behind The Priceless Music Project.

You obviously have a lot of experience running an indie label that does things both traditionally and non-traditionally, but where did The Priceless Music Project come from?

The idea with The Priceless Music Project is to do our part to forge ahead into a different way that music industry could run potentially. If there’s one thing that’s been constant in the music industry at large is that it’s been changing. I really feel that we’re on the cusp of a huge change in the next five years as physical distribution, actual physical products, gets smaller and smaller—I don’t think it’s ever going to go away but I think it’s going to be a smaller and smaller percentage of the way labels and bands make their money.

We realized that little labels like us are going to be the people changing the music industry as the bigger entities are broken up more and more. It’s going to be up to the people like us to change the way things are done. We’d like to change them in a good way. The Priceless Music Project really gets to the heart of that in that it puts the relationship—the listener and the creator—back where it should be. The idea is that it creates a more personable relationship.

One of the features of The Priceless Music Project would be incentive-based buying. A band would allow a listener, customer, [or] fan the opportunity to get their music for any price they wanted to; however, if they pay over the average that everyone else has paid, they get an exclusive piece of content, whether it’s a song or a live show.

Users and music fans would get incentives for actually contributing. And it’s all about activation—activating the relationship again because it’s kind of gone underground. A lot of music fans feel relegated to the black market, so to speak, where if you want free music, you can’t go to the band; you can’t go to the label; you can’t go to any sort of commerce-based thing. You have to go to these file-sharing sites—it’s just kind of like the prohibition of anything leads to any ugly relationship.

So, if I put all my music on here, is this going to make me more or less money? Am I just going to end up giving away all my music for free?

That is immediately the worry on our part too. We thought, “What if everybody just goes from iTunes and comes over here and gets it all for free?” Then we said, “What if? What if we suddenly had 15,000 people come to our website and download one of our band’s albums for free.” Suddenly you have 15,000 people listening to the band. That is going to come back to you in physical album sales and licensing and all these other ways that actually make the money. The music isn’t the end-all, be-all. The profile raising is what we’re really in the business of. And the relationship.

It does us good for people to listen to the band, and if they have to do that for free to begin with, I think they will come back and they will help out. I think [because] we’re going to give, it opens ourself up, and I believe in the people that are our fans, that they will also give back. It’s really about trusting in people and trusting that people will take care of you if you take care of them.

It’s definitely not rooted in traditional capitalist commerce ideas. It’s rooted way more in how a relationship works. If I give you something for free, you’re going to do something for me later. Or if I give you something for whatever price you want, you’re going to take care of me and not take advantage of me. Maybe that’s a really naive way of looking at it but I think that the music industry could use a little bit of that type of thinking. A lot of the music industry is really ugly and I don’t want to get too touchy-feely with it, but at the same time it is a touchy-feely thing. Music is sensitive and it’s beautiful and it’s art. I feel like the relationship that it fosters should reflect that.

What if bands end up giving everything away for free? Are there any monetary guarantees?

That’s something that we have yet to figure out. If we put it up there and we suddenly see an influx of people taking advantage of the system and it doesn’t work, then [laughs] we probably won’t do it anymore. As far a guarantee, I don’t think there’s a guarantee with anything. What’s the worst-case scenario? Three times as many people have their music and they didn’t get paid for it but suddenly every show they play is sold out and we’re getting licensing. I mean, that’s the worst that could happen. But really the worst thing is what’s happening now where people just aren’t hearing the music and they’re not paying for it. The worst-case scenario that you’d like to avoid is people ignoring your band. That’s what we want to avoid ultimately.

Your system is saying, “We already have the worst-case scenario now so if we legalize it [sound like something else?] then we will create a better environment.”

We hope that it will foster some sort of environment that will ultimately be better for our bands. We’re trying to think of doing it in a different way. Maybe worst-case scenario… I really can’t think of one. If everybody goes from iTunes that bought it today and comes straight over to us for free, suddenly we have increased traffic on our website, suddenly other things are selling—we sell a lot of other things on our website. Or vinyl is selling more because people are saying, “I have this on digital but I’ll buy it on vinyl.” There are definitely bad things that could happen but they all seem like they would involve increases in other areas. A lot of this is just us hoping and praying but ultimately we don’t have anything to lose. We’re already in that situation [laughs].

What if a band only wants to give away a track or two, like you can do on Bandcamp, and then set a minimum amount? Pay at least $5…

I guess what we’re trying to do, at least initially, is try it out in a way where the person always has the option of it being free, and really open it up 100%, just for our bands, and see if that works. If it doesn’t work, then it just doesn’t work. But if it works for our label, then it works. And I think you cut off a lot of the people who could be your potential fans that want to get it for a dollar or not at all if you put a minimum of $5. You have to do something risky if you want to get extraordinary returns. If it works for us then it’s our job to educate people that this system works. You’re maybe selling your things at a way smaller average than you used to sell them, but you’re hopefully selling them to a way higher number of people. If there are ten times more people listening to your music, it’s going to come back to you.

Do you have any research that shows people will actually pay even when offered to option to get it for free from a legal source?

There’s a really cool case study where this video game group put together this thing called the Humble Indie Bundle and it was pay what you want for this bundle of games—you got all six games. If you paid over the average, you got a bonus game, and if you look at the stats, they did unbelievably. There’s also the famous Radiohead thing for In Rainbows.

There’s also a metal label in Canada and they’re already doing it in a totally different way that’s not as intense as ours, but it’s being done to what seems like an amount of success. I think the reason it’s not being done at large though is just because of the fear that everybody’s going to come and not pay you and you’ll be left with nothing. I just don’t see it happening that way. I see there being way more value in giving your music away to a few people than having them find it somewhere and not get it through you. There’s a lot more value to knowing who those people are, where they live, having an email address, having some sort of contact for them so next time your band comes through you can contact them and they can go see the band.

How will artists or labels be able to get involved?  Is it open to anyone to just upload and sell music? 

Ideally we would have an open-source scenario where this can integrate—basically have a downloadable software or application or platform that you would download, apply it to your website and it would work flawlessly with whatever you’re working with. It would just kind of exist inside there but the functionality would be something that would be the same across the board. I think it’s going to be less branded—the idea also is that you have a whole marketplace that you come in and have an iTunes-style or Amazon-style marketplace where people could come and pay what they wanted for music. The problem with that is we want to keep it really personal. I think that’s where the key in pay what you want for music lies: keeping it personal and having the actual education about the band there. The less faceless the [project] is, the better for us.

Your goal is to simply provide musicians with an infrastructure that will enable and empower them to sell music based on your model.

Mees opening for The Presidents of the United States of America at the Roseland with The Grown Children. Photo by Arian Stevens.

And ideally, further down the line, it would actually be a [marketplace] where we hosted all the music, if it worked. But I think for now we’re just going to develop software and develop something where you get all the functionality but you don’t have to go to a central website that’s branded. Because I think once people go there they feel like they’re being sold something, and I want it to feel as seamless as possible—as much like you’re at a show as possible.

We’ve sold stuff on a sliding scale at shows for years. And it’s always worked. We always sell more music. We don’t go down to free at shows because people don’t really expect that so we just do $5-15 and people love it. All the people who were gonna pay $5, you get those people that didn’t want to pay $10. And then all the people who were like, “Man, I just love this band,” they give you $15, sometimes even $20 for just one CD because they want you to have it. Labels limit their upside by putting the national price on things. Because with something like music, people feel really intensely about this—it’s not like they’re buying a box of cornflakes that they have to buy. It’s like, “I love this band! I would pay a $100 for this freakin’ record.” Those type of people will be bringing the average up from people who are just getting it for $1.

Will there still be a curatorial, label-like aspect?

That’s unclear right now; it may depend on how successful it is, but we would like more people to be a part of it. We are definitely looking for feedback from musicians, labels, and really, anybody who uses it. I don’t see us limiting people, anybody who wants to use the software can use it.

You also plan to educate music buyers. How?

Built into the software would be a quotient, some formula figured out where a band puts in how many miles they drive each year, how many shows they play a year, how many band members they have, who has insurance, who doesn’t have insurance, who has a day job, who doesn’t have a day job… they put in all these different things and it gives them some average quotient: “It costs this band this much to be a band.” Just to exist and make music. Or it would actually display those stats if you clicked on something, or a few of those stats. There would definitely be an amount of information that you wouldn’t really get anywhere else because people just don’t put that stuff up. It would kind of humanize the group rather than having their cool bio. Not all musicians are rockstars. In reality, such a small number of musicians actually make their living off their music; it’s just staggering how difficult it actually is to do that.

Your mission has always to build community; support one another by showcasing and selling local works of art. But a digital project like this will expand the “community” far beyond just your local, or even national, sphere.

We want to take our ideals that we have here and extend that to people that we’d never be able to reach otherwise. An ideal is more powerful than one individual band or one label or one town even. Somebody is going to change the way music works and we just want it to a be in a positive way that reflects what we think is important about music and community.

You’ve also mentioned that there’s a charity component to this endeavor, stating that ”the band or Tender Loving Empire can choose a percentage of their total sales to be donated to a specific charity within their own community, further ensuring that the music buying process is not just an empty consumer function, but actually gives back to the community where the artist lives.”

Yes, people like to give to things more when they know that something good is being done with the money beyond just the music. We’re trying to do as much as we can to encourage people to pay for music while also definitely offering the guilt-free option getting it for free. If we can help another group out, and the group could probably help us out as well, we could create a different type of relationship for music. It would be some way to give back to a community and some way that a person could feel like while they’re buying music, they’re also giving back to their own community.

Tell me about the “super-limited edition, laser-engraved, wooden vinyl enclosure with hand silk screened LP jackets.”  These look really amazing.  How and where are these made? [Skip ahead to 1:57 in the video below.]

We’re developing the prototype in Colorado over the Christmas holiday. My dad has a woodshop and is an amazing woodworker. Hopefully he’ll be building all these by hand and then a laser engraver here in PDX will finish them. They’ll basically just be a really sturdy vinyl enclosure that will hold each release. The idea is to do another giant box that holds all 5 that we make this year. We’ll only be doing about 75 of these for each release and they, again are contingent upon our campaign being fully funded. We’re definitely doing one for Y La Bamba though. [Y La Bamba's Court The Storm will be released on February 28th via Tender Loving Empire.]

Finally, you’re really giving up your baby girl’s middle name if someone fully funds the project on IndieGoGo? Just remember that your daughter may read this some day… [See 2:35 above.]

We’re basically telling people that we’re really serious about doing this—this is something that we’re putting our heart and soul into. And, it would be pretty interesting if our daughter knew that she had a middle name as a result of this movement that happened.

Support Tender Loving Empire’s Priceless Music Project by donating to the cause here.

Are you an artist or fan? Do you run a label? If you have questions or concerns about a pay-what-you-want model in the future of the music industry, please leave a comment below.