What's your music worth? Well, how about asking?

The Bluebeat Arkestra put up an online Honesty Box for their new EP and plugged it on Facebook. Here's what happened.

Dark Disco, Trip-Hop, Funk,    

Electronic  and Breakbeat heaven    

You can get lots of free music online. Much of it is on dodgy torrent sites who stiff musicians illegally. Streaming sites pay tiny royalties and stiff musicians legally. 

What's to be done? Ubercool web marketing gurus tell you to give it away; it's promotion. That's the online equivalent of expecting a band to play for free. 

The bottom line? The web has devalued music. It's great for spreading and sharing ideas. It works fine for me: I like to write. But it's not great for musos who put up money and rehearsal and collaboration time to make their statement. 

A while back, Dave Breeze of The BlueBeat Arkestra told me of their plans to launch an EP with an online honesty box through Bandcamp: download for free and then pay what you like. We fixed to meet up after the release to find out how it went. 

That difficult first album: why do it at all?

OK, what's the least attractive format?

I went to a terrific show weekend before last at Ort Cafe in Birmingham. The opening act, previously the Young Runaways, now morphed to Drakelow, kicked things off. The front man, in between some rather nice songs, talked, in some detail, about plans for a forthcoming album. And that started me thinking. 

Here's the thing. I get exactly why Drakelow are working on that album. I applaud them. But in a perverse way, albums are now a terribly dated concept, at least from my aged perspective. From an artist's perspective, it's clear: doing an album means you set your stall out, you make a statement, you express yourself. You leave something more substantial in the world than the memory of a few live gigs.

Most of the acts I know want to, or are preparing to, cut an album, or a single, or some vinyl, or an EP. And yet, the concept of an album is now well over a hundred years old. It's out of time.