Okay, so I buy a LOT of tickets. Like, um… well, I see about 500 bands a year. And I blog about it a lot. It’s kind of ridiculous how many tickets I have laying around the house. Like I ought to be able to buy bonds or something against them. It’s like a form of currency. Um. Or something. Here’s a picture:

But that is not the point I am making today. Today, I am thinking a different thought. So, like, as you probably guess, and can see from the picture, I buy a lot of tickets from Ticketmaster.

For the last year or two, Ticketmaster and Apple have been running an iTunes promotion. When you buy a ticket from ticketmaster, you get a free song.

So I buy two tickets at a time, so I get two free iTunes songs. About once a month, I go through all the calendars of all the clubs I like in Boston and New York and buy tickets for any upcoming show I may want to see. There’s a complicated math algorithm here about my travel schedule and buying tickets for shows I don’t end up going to, and resorting to scalpers, but basically it’s cheaper to buy them even if I’m not definitely going to make it, plus I get the added bonus of making my friends happy when I drop free tickets on them.

But that is not the point I am making today either.

This iTunes thing has, basically, made it so I’ve bought almost no new music in the last few years. This isn’t 100% true of course, I still buy things like new Suicide box sets and out of print Epic Soundtracks records, but basically, whenever I hear some song I like, and I want to own it – be it some catchy new single by the Ting Tings or a Goldfrapp choral version, I have more than enough free songs from Ticketmaster to cover me. Like I never run out. I am, basically, purchasing free music.

(And that’s not having bought any tickets in a month or so. I’ll be back to like 20 by Monday)

Everyone’s getting paid here. There is no piracy. This is interesting to me for two reasons: first, it is totally 100% a Branded Utility, as Ben and Johnny coined so many years back. Secondly, it kind of shows me that the music industry maybe isn’t dying at all, just changing.