Minneapolis Release Show Videos!

Here's some iphone video I took at the Minneapolis CD release last month.  Like 'em and share 'em if you like 'em!

Nylon Magazine Blurb

I was fortunate enough to get a little writeup in the April, Nylon Guys Magazine!  Check it out!

The Perils of Pay What You Wish (confessions of a former MET ticket seller)

Is it still possible to sell music?  And if so, how the hell do you do it?   As the music industry continues its great upheaval, this is the question that musicians, labels, and music retailers have tortured themselves with for the better part of the last decade.  In 2007, Radiohead famously introduced a pay what you wish pricing scheme for their In Rainbows album.  Nine Inch Nails and others tried similar approaches, and this has all trickled down from those great heights to the lowly indie artist (ahem…me).  Among independent artists, we are in what seems like a race to the bottom—with many eager to give their music away for as close to free as possible.  I’ve even written about the need to give music away for free in the past.  So, let me be clear…I’m not advocating artists pulling their music from streaming sites, like Spotify, Youtube, their own sites, etc.  My latest album, Outside (available here, by the way) is up on all of those sites and will remain so…as the cliche goes, obscurity is indeed a far great threat to the indie artist than piracy.  What I am talking about for the purposes of this post are digital album downloads and physical CD sales.  After trying a pay-what-you-wish policy with my records, I began to think about another experience in my life that sheds some light on the psychological drawbacks of the pay-what-you-wish model, and how it puts customers or fans on a needlessly adversarial footing with the artist from the beginning to the end of the transaction.

From 2008 to early 2011, one of the day jobs that supported my relentless pursuit of rock superstardom was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t doing anything glamorous like curating exhibitions or overseeing celbrety galas.  I was “selling” tickets at the front entrance.  I put “selling” in quotes because the Met has (since the 1960’s, as I understand it) a pay what you wish policy.  They require a minimum payment of 1 cent, and recommend a donation of $20 (as of a year ago, anyway)—but you are free to pay whatever you want.  While on the face of it, this policy is generous.  Art should be able to be enjoyed across class and economic boundaries.  But, in practice, this policy brings out the worst in people…from the visitors to those of us behind the desk taking their donations.

As a "button-pusher" (the admission ticket is a small metal button that visitors attach to their clothing), I was subjected to angry rants from the public about how dishonest this policy is, people swore at me, threw pennies and trash at me…I even had my life threatened by someone who only moments before had seemed to be a normal, friendly individual.  The biggest thing that seemed to set people off was the somewhat ridiculous requirement that everyone contribute something—even if it’s just a penny. 

So the question is why do people behave so badly when faced with what would seem like an altruistic and inclusive admission policy at one of the great art museums of the world?  It is worth mentioning that of the thousands of visitors that I would interact with during every 8 hour shift, the vast majority were perfectly pleasant and gave me no trouble at all.  That being said, I would suspect that my counterparts at other museums with set ticket prices don’t encounter the kind of irrational anger and self-righteous indignation that visitor services employees at the MET have to routinely diffuse and avoid.  Admittedly, part of this is the way the policy is administered.  The MET, like other museums, clearly wants to charge as much as they can for tickets (they are prevented from doing so by a funding arrangement they have with the city that I don’t know the particulars of).  So, they undersell the “pay what you wish” policy by making the price list look at a quick glance like the price is set at $20 (with recommended in small print at the bottom).  Most of us would make an effort to explain the policy, but after many hours of repeating yourself again and again and again, you begin to just take what people give you.  It is also true that the policy is sufficiently confusing that no amount of explanation would suffice to make some people understand.  I often hear from friends that MET employees have a reputation for being bitchy and judgmental about the amount that people pay, but we’re not.  We honestly don’t care what you pay--it doesn’t affect our paychecks.  We’re just tired and have run out of ways to reassure you that you can indeed pay a small amount and not suffer our harsh judgement. 

So how to explain this?  The very act of having a pay-what-you-wish policy puts both customer and the ticket seller in an oddly personal confrontation from the beginning of the transaction.  The visitor feels he is being asked to make a statement, in the form of the amount he/she chooses to pay, about how much he values the museum or art in general.  The employee, as a representative of the museum, is being tasked with motivating people to pay as much as possible.  And, while many of us in visitor services went to great lengths not to give this impression, management nonetheless encourages this guilt-driven approach to the job. In any case, this is the perception the visitor usually comes to the interaction with—regardless of how friendly and welcoming the employee is at the outset.   So what happens?  The visitor is angry and defensive because he doesn’t want to (or can’t afford to) pay the full $20 and feels shamed.  The museum employee, sensing this hostility coming at him or her (and having grown weary of absorbing this hostility from hundreds of people all day) reacts with an equal measure of harshness, and everybody’s day is made worse.  Sometimes this involves a simple eye-roll, and other times it escalates to full-scale verbal abuse at the hands of an angry customer.  The point (and I’m about to bring this back around to music here, people.  Thanks for sticking around this long), is that asking a customer to pay what he or she wants shifts the burden of assessing the value of the product or service that you are offering from the seller to the customer.  Most people are inherently conflict averse and will (ironically) react with a range of negative emotions when asked to quantify with a dollar amount how much they value a product or service, and therefore how much they value the human being offering it.   This might range from embarrassment and an apology for the small amount paid to defensiveness and outright hostility.  And why not?  It is the seller’s job to determine the price or value of a product, not the customer’s.  

But I’m not writing this to criticize the MET, and I'm not suggesting they change their policy to a set admission price.  I’m simply using this as an example of the pay-what-you-wish policy put into practice that can shed light on how music can be sold in a way that doesn’t create an awkward, socially clumsy interaction that can lead to enmity between fan and artist.  Despite the expectations of some music consumers, I don’t think the vast majority of music fans believe music should be free.  They understand that creating music takes money, time, skill, and talent.  If people are listening and enjoying the music, artists should be compensated for putting it into the world.  The expectation that listeners should be able to hear music before they buy it is an understandable reaction against the old bait-and-switch that the industry used to pull—selling an overpriced CD with a bunch of mediocre songs based on one hit single on the radio.  But bear in mind, while music production costs have gone down in recent years, it is by no means cheap to make a quality record, and hey, we all have to eat. 

So for now, I'm setting my price.  My music will remain available to stream on Spotify, Youtube, and all the other major streaming sites--as well as on my website, http://jefflitmanmusic.com/music. If you like it and want to play it on your iPod, computer, car, or CD player, you can buy my new record, Outside for a $7 download or $9 physical CD + download.  And for just a little more, you can get it from trusty, old iTunes,

Thank you and ENJOY!!

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Outside w/ Joe Brent

The awesome violinist and Mandolinist just stopped by to rehearse for our show this Saturday at Rockwood Music Hall in New York. Here's "Outside" Django/Grappelli style...

Rockwood Jingle!

Come on out this Saturday, 3/17 at 5pm for a happy hour set at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC!