Notes from the Underground

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One: Lower CD prices

When I first started playing the subways, I experimented with different prices for my albums. I sold slightly more CDs at $2, but far fewer at $8 or $10. The sweet spot seemed to be $5. Later, I gave up pricing my CDs altogether after I got a ticket for selling them. Now I post a sign saying that my CDs are technically free, but they cost something to make, and people should pay what they want. Occasionally someone will take one for free or drop $20 into my guitar case. But the usual is, again, $5.

So why does the average big label CD sell for more than $17? It's not the manufacturing cost. My last album cost me about $1.10 for each CD made, with high-quality work done at every step. And larger runs have vastly lower costs. True, recording solo acoustic guitar is much easier than a full band, but even industry-produced acoustic guitar albums sell for that price. If you're U2 or the Rolling Stones and sell millions of albums, such expenses may be perfectly worthwhile. But for the great majority of artists, the industry should drop CD prices -- maybe not to $5, but certainly closer to that than to $17.

Two: Branch out

The New York City subway has two good places to perform: the platforms where the trains stop, and the hallways leading up to the street. In a hallway, everyone hears you for a few seconds; on a platform, you get far fewer people, but they hear you longer. Hallways, it turns out, work great for playing music that's instantly familiar. I often share my favorite station with a talented hallway musician who plays Beatles songs, the kind of music that in three notes can jar a pleasant memory for huge numbers of people. The instrumental guitar music I play, on the other hand, is fairly complicated, and I don't make a penny when I try to play in the spot where the Beatles troubadour sings. But on a platform where I have roughly three minutes between trains coming, I have time to win some ears and make some sales.

One might think that my only audience would be the Birkenstock nature lovers and 14-year-old kids carrying their first guitars -- and I do well with that crowd. But I also do well with middle-aged black couples, 40-year-old white couples with kids, white blue-collar workers, and the Ecuadorian immigrants who sell jewelry in my favorite station. In fact, I'm more apt to know whether someone will like the music based on the way that they walk than on their age, sex, or apparent income.

The music industry tends to divide both bands and audiences into broad formats: alt music, hip-hop, modern country, and so forth. Though these categories are accurate to a degree, they exist largely so record companies can fine-tune their promotion efforts. Unfortunately, most bands and artists can't get to first base unless their music fits one of these formats, and there are many types of music -- like mine -- that defy set genres. Indeed, it's almost guaranteed that somewhere in the cracks between these formats, the next big thing in music is brewing. But the music industry has not yet figured out how to profitably micro-market innovative bands to scattered audiences.

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