It's very simple. If you don't want the music you created to be available free of charge, don't release it!
It's absolutely your choice. If you want to keep control of it, keep it private.
But once you (by your own choice) make it available, don't be shocked or surprised if people share it without sending you money for every copy.
The system we have for paying artists is clearly broken. It has been for a very long time. The digital revolution is just putting the final nails in the coffin.
But even before filesharing on the internet, artists were getting screwed left and right, and very very few could make a living creating art.
Now it's clearer than ever that we have to find some other ways to compensate artists for the work they do. Some suggestions that I've heard along these lines are:
- Put a PayPal (or choose your favorite non-evil payment system) icon
prominently on your home page and ask for donations.
- Release your music for free, but ask for money
so that you can work on your next album. Don't release
your next album until you've gotten enough of a payment
to make it worthwhile. If you're good and have developed
a large enough fan base, this should be quite
a reasonable business model.
- Give away the music for free, but charge for
live appearances (make money touring).
- Make it clear to your fans that you are giving away
your music for free, but need them to chip in by buying
tangible merchandise like t-shirts.
Ok. None of these are perfect. And they all work best when the artist is already well known and has a large fan base. But relatively unknown artists have always struggled to get by, and filesharing does not change that equation.
At least with all of the suggested payment methods above, the artist gets to keep a lion's share of the profit, instead of begging for pennies on the dollar when going through the established record company system.