A recent report issued by the Jewish Moms For Independent Musicians (JMIM) stated that 9 out of 10 Jewish moms support the “pay what you want” model for selling music online.

“We think it is a good application of the morals we like to teach our children,” says Stacy Schwartz, President of JMIM and mother two young musicians with myspace pages.  “My kids put a lot of time into their music. Right now they are giving it away on myspace.  But they should be compensated for their time and effort like anyone else.  The newspaper delivery boy gets paid for delivering the paper every morning.  My kids should get paid too.”

Added Lauren Gold, Vice President of JMIM:   “If you can’t get someone to do the right thing, guilt is always a great last resort.”

Okay…. enough of my attempt at an Onion style article.  The truth is this model seems to be working.

From Media Futurist: Amazon’s best-selling MP3 album in 2008 was ‘Ghosts’ by Nine Inch Nails, and – even though that very same album was made available by the band under a creative commons license and free downloading - people still made the choice to pay for something they could have had for free.  Started by Radiohead as a marketing ploy in 2007, compelling people to pay from guilt is starting to look like a real alternative to forcing them to pay.

Rising San Francisco based band Ten Mile Tide has used this “pay what you can” approach for their new album, Riverstone.  The reason, says band bassist Jeff Clemetson:  “Before [Radiohead's idea] we would give our mp3s away for free on our website and make them available on file sharing sites like Kaza. By offering our mps up for donations (or free if a person just enters zero for the amount to be donated), we are generating some income from people who might have previously just downloaded the songs for nothing. So the experience has been a positive one for us and our fans because we can still offer free downloads and also collect some money where we didn’t before.”

In my opinion, TMT’s site also represents a nice, folksy way to make this offer without looking cheesy.

As discussed on this site, other bloggers and musicians have even considered applying this concept to CDs sold at shows.

My thoughts are this:

(1) If you want to drive attendance to shows, then getting the music out for free or whatever someone wants to pay is good.  Heck, why not just embrace this concept fully and add something to your website that lists the top 5 or 10 people and amounts paid for your album? Promote them and maybe people will want to get on that list to show that they are “better” fans.

(2) If you are electing to grow over the Internet only, with live shows representing only a small portion of your anticipated growth and revenue, then free music will be a more difficult decision.  After all, the benefit of giving away songs is that peole will get into the music and then come see you play live.  In this instance, offering songs downloadable for free for certain time or the Amie Street model (price goes up as number of purchases goes up) may be better options.