I wonder how general fuzz does? Seems to me a lot of space music people mainly make their livings from a strong internet presence.

What about the world of DJs? I think this works perfectly for this world. Most of my clients are small record labels started by DJs, who usually release their own music on their own label. Sometimes they might get signed to a major for a release or two, but for most of them they exist inside the world of club music and parties. The fan base for some of them is in the hundreds of thousands. So if you want names of artists who exist completely outside the structure of a major label and have thousands of fans paying $20 per year then I submit:

Richie Hawtin Sven Vath Jazzanova

450 isnt bad, but i think your student loans will be 100 times that amount after your 4 year BFA:)

sadly, the only 1000 true fans model i know of doing business in today online world, is that of the webcam girl- prostitute.

and thats mostly out of teenagers bedrooms.. welcome to the singularity….erg.

access=noise the forgotten factor of the new media futurist.

I wonder if Banda Calypso from Brazil fits the bill. They have been very successful (own a private jet!) by distributing their CDs to street vendors for free in advance of performing in a town.

This reference came from Chris Anderson’s Free! article in February’s Wired:

On a busy corner in São Paulo, Brazil, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including one by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all

—

The thing here is that this is possible, even if it hasn’t been so easy that there are many visible examples.

Keep up the search, Kevin, as we’ll find more eventually.

The 1000 True Fans economic paradigm is only made possible because of the existence of the internet. On the other hand, it is the artists who master the skills required by this new communication era that will be the most successful using it. Among other things, artists will need to have blogging, chatting, twittering, facebooking, videoblogging and so on, in their blood. They need the automatism and the desire to communicate with their fans efficiently, painlessly, and to have fun doing it.

If you take a look at the personal pages of the young adult crowd, it is obvious that this generation will be much better equipped for this. They are born with the tools and they are much better with using them compared to older generations.

I think 1KTF economy might or might not be viable right now, but wait, this is not the end of it.

Kevin,

The key is in the marketing. It is perfectly possible for an artist to create a membership-based web site, but the tactics required to grow this site are probably at odds with the artists search for truth.

To grow a membership based site you have to launch a product, seminar or service and attach a recurring credit card subscription. Give them 30 or 60 days free but then start charging $10 to $29 per month unless the buyer opts out.

The internet marketing “gurus” mentioned earlier use high-pressure tactics which trigger emotional responses to fleece people of money by re-badging basic, often outdated, marketing ideas and selling them for $50 to $2000 a pop. They then follow up with the opaque recurring billing for a steady stream of income until they launch their next flim-flam “power product”.

Artists want to truly engage but they often sell themselves short. They need to create value in the eyes of the buyer but the hardcore online marketing guru “pressure sales” model is probably not compatible without heavy modification.

Oh, I’d also like to nominate Andrew Pants of the Songs to Wear Pants to website - I don’t know if he’s making it financially yet or not but he’s definitely new model all the way.

I kind of question a lot of the premises of the challenge. The question of what constitutes a connection to “the old system” seems pretty ambiguous to me. A candidate is out because they had a major label contract? What about someone like Ana Voog, formerly Rachel Olson of The Blue Up? The band got a deal with Columbia but I’d argue it had zero to do with her current career (which is itself ambiguous in context of the challenge as her major outlet isn’t music, but music is still a component of her career)… Who defines whether someone’s career is a “legacy” of the old system? What about indie labels? A band like The Poster Children, which would seem to fit the bill for this challenge as true independents who rely on core fans, have their own label - does that count? What about small collective labels like Rhymesayers? But if indies are allowed, what about “major” minors, like Matador or Sub Pop? Where do you draw the line?

I don’t think it makes sense to exclude a legacy of the “old model” entirely in assessing the workability of the new model. Excluding revenue like movie (and presumably television and commercial?) placement because these are deemed “old, declining” media seems really arbitrary. What about video games, practically a canonical example of a new market for musicians? Copyrights aren’t going anywhere anytime soon: neither are the movies or television, so business concerns for whom having a straightforward legal right to use a work is an obvious legitimate market for an independent.

Anyway, I’ll nominate Ana Voog, the Poster Children, and Issa (formerly known as Jane Siberry) for consideration.

just admit your wrong and the idea is a nice dream, but completely ignores the relationship of the patron to the object and the artist in what we like to call human reality..

jaron at least has realized first hand the failure of his original mythlogy as reality has proved it icey grip on us.

No “artist” can escape the branding mythology driven by the mechanized media for the last 100 years. Not and use that product-art- as the sole financial tool for his survival in the culture.

as with any “object” of desire placed into the humans economy— it will become only the property of those who offer the most in return to its creator.

when “altruism” and “just because” become the main drivers of the creators, AND the rest of the total of humanity as well…. THEN one can entertian such beliefs.

“by the time “chocolate rain” was heard by 100,000 geeks, taye was on G4 and then KIMMEL LIVE, already part of the old media you suggest isnt needed… like every Internet Star before him, he’ll either become a professional balancing the control of his ownership of his work, with anothers(big media included) or work at any other job needed to pay rent.

what i find objectionable is that all this “pro” artist hyperbole, only truly works to defeat the artists offerings in society, and strengthens the role of the current media…which so happesn now to be digital driven, as opposed to the old evil empire that was analog.

same song… different dancers…. same control mechanisms.

Perhaps the Digg girl (Kina Grannis) could fall into this category, although there are reports of her being offered a label deal. However, this is still a good illustration of how an independent musician can leverage the power of Web 2.0 to create buzz and awareness of her existence. Developing a sustainable living out of it is another matter, of course…

Looks like I am not the only JoCo fan who reads this blog! :)

I’m also very intrigued by the notion of nurturing a small base of True Fans, rather than being exposed to a huge faceless mass of regular fans - not that I would mind the latter, I just wouldn’t want to miss out on having the former first.

Hi Kevin,

The guys of Family Force 5 might represent a good case, even though the do not match the definition Jaron is propossing.

But this guys, even though they have a contract with a record label (Forefront Records), they sort of came back to the web to make a living. They actually downloaded (closed) their nice and original web page, and now their myspace account is the official web site.

They put almost daily a podcast, and have recorded a home-reality-show of their lives on backstage.

Might be good to contact them.

Hi Kevin —

Thanks for your ongoing efforts to qualify and fine-tune your thesis. As a stereotypical “struggling artist” myself, I personally want to believe in the viability of the 1000 (or however many) TF model… though I haven’t yet made it work for myself.

But what I’d like to add to the conversation is the question of artist expenses — I haven’t noticed this element of the subject getting addressed (apologies if I have simply missed it).

For instance, any musician who expects to make a living from selling CDs — e.g., your third entry in the table above — has to factor in the cost of producing CDs. If that artist is making $40 from each true fan per year, I assume he/she is selling at least two CDs. It’s a lot cheaper to make a recording nowadays than it used to be, but when your margins are low, it’s still a significant investment. Studio time, engineering costs, band costs, mastering, manufacturing, artwork — it all adds up. Multiply that by two, and the total cited income for that artist ($24,000) is probably knocked down quite a bit.

Of course, there are ways of skimping on CD production costs (go lo-fi!), but certainly there is some initial investment that has to be subtracted from the total income derived from TFs. (Add in touring — with the price of gas being what it is — and you’ve got another significant outlay of cash to be taken into consideration.)

Just a thought…

Anyway, I look forward to seeing how these ideas develop and get put into practice!

Though not one myself, I have a friend, Kristin, who might count as a Jonathan Coulton true fan. When asked about him, she offered the following links. Quote:

This is a long and sort-of-famous blog post he wrote called “How I Did It” that covers a lot of the unorthodox career-building stuff http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2007/05/18/how-i-did-it/

Some good interviews: This NYTimes piece is one of the biggest bits of press he’s gotten. It’s about other people, too, but there’s a lot of Coulton content http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13audience-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=coulton&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Pretty good interview http://thecheappop.com/2007/12/04/interview-with-jonathan-coulton/

Rather heavy on the video-game nerdiness (and this was even before the Portal song) http://www.gamingnexus.com/Default.aspx?Section=FullNews&I=5602

More about “the creative process” http://cecilvortex.com/swath/2007/04/19/aninterviewwithjonathancoulton.html

This one is ok, and recent: http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/61785/how-to-become-a-rock-star

And in Chinese! http://www.chinanewsweek.com.cn/2007-11-20/1/8967.shtml

Podcast people and NPR like him, and so there are quite a few good audio interviews out there, including: http://1000timesno.net/?p=83 http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2006/10/podcast-best-friends-with-john-hodgman.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6603466 http://twit.tv/133

And that, my friend, should get you good and sick of Jonathan Coulton pretty darn fast.

Extra credit: find the passing mention of me in one of these interviews!

Ze Frank’s the show, perhaps. Also I sixth the Coulton nomination.

They are not musicians, but people who have used social media to amplify their likability as people and thus create income in some form are Ze Frank and Gary Vaynerchuk. If these guys picked up a guitar, then I am sure people would listen and buy. I am not totally familiar with Jonathan Coulton but I am sure he has the same marketing talents as Ze and Gary.

Hey Kevin,

Great discussion. I’d have to partially disagree with Jarod. My business model was built online. It started with the Brobdingnagian Bards. We began in 1999, but it was our unprecedented success on MP3.com that pushed us to one of the top 20 most-downloaded bands on that website by the time they were bought out.

Mind you, MP3.com was just the foundation. My entire success evolved from those digital experiences. I give away a couple dozen MP3s on my websites with my different music projects. As a result, I make new fans daily. Some of those have turned into True Fans.

I should point out that the reason I said “partially disagree” is because the income generated is not from one project. My success is not based solely on the Brobdingnagian Bards. Much like many businesses, I diversify. However, all of that success remains online.

I’ve recorded several CDs, one a True Niche—Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers. It doesn’t get narrower than that. Interestingly, that one CD outsells all my other CDs.

In 2005, I jumped on the podcast bandwagon with the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast. This combined with an ezine called the Celtic MP3s Music Magazine, a tool to promote Celtic music and increase my name recognition, I created Song Henge, an membership-based archive of Celtic music downloads. This supplements the other half of my income, totally digital.

That said, I agree it is not easy to make a decent living as a musician using the old formula. I figured out a while ago that every time I release a CD with the Brobdingnagian Bards (who, outside the podcast, have a bigger fan base than any of my solo projects), I earn $25-100 extra per month, more when it is first released. That is obviously not dependent on how many True Fans, but it still points out that the financial plausibility. Our biggest problem as a group at present is that we are not releasing enough CDs to meet the $100 per year minimum.

That is the big trick IMHO. In order to earn a “living wage”, you need to release enough music to equal your $100 per year minimum for 1000 fans. Thus if you are selling CDs for $15, you need to release six CDs or other products per year to meet that need. Personally, I can realistically see releasing four albums per year. Thus again, diversify.

As Alexandria K. Brown, the Ezine Queen, points out, you need a Marketing Funnel, different products which earn different products. I sell CDs. I also offer a mid-level membership-based program (Song Henge). And for the high-end, live performances.

All of these things contribute to my growing monthly income and continue to allow me to make a living with music. Difficult yes. Implausible no, once you do the math AND follow up the math with action. That is the key. I’d wager that the vast majority of musicians are not following math with action. And they have good reason. It is weird!

Your article offers a lot of great hope because it does the math. It’s the artist’s job to turn the math into a financial possibility. Once they do that, you will see a Lot more success stories from your 1000 Fans concept.

Slanite! -Marc Gunn, Celtic musician and podcaster

Joachim, thanks for the suggestion and your larger points about tools. I tend to agree that the right new tools can ease the load, but for some folks, nothing will be it fun no matter what.

Ronald Jenkees comes to mind. Has built a bit of a following by posting improve keyboard sessions on youtube. 1 CD under his belt. 723k views on his latest youtube video (below).

http://ronaldjenkees.com

http://youtube.com/watch?v=smE-uIljiGo

BTW: Love the blog, KK.

Kevin,

Been following this discussion of 1000 true fans.

My mother who is a fine artist, has struggled to monetize her fanbase - but I sincerely believe that is her fault. She has never created mechanisims to track, monitor or engage with her fans, and thus, can not live off her art.

Like its been pointed out, many “artisans” may not have the skills or the desire to take on the more administrative tasks. Perhaps the “key” is to create collaborative teams, one artist with one admin / marketer?

However, as for your thesis, I believe it is entirely plausible - especially to people who possess a marketable skill or talent.

Lets take a bookeeper, or a marketing consultant, or a collector or a pet trainer or even a nutritionist.

Many people in these categories are in fact eeking out a modest living thanks largly to the scale and technologies of the Internet to leverage thier expertise to a micro-niche audience.

So, I do believe the premise of 1000 true fans is still plausible for most - but maybe not for all.

Allan

Kevin,

I read an interview a while back with Derek Sivers, founder and CEO of CDBaby. He makes some interesting points on how musicians can survive and flourish in these changing volatile times for the music biz: “Surprisingly, most of the money goes to places you wouldn’t expect; it’s not going to pop singers. It may be to someone doing a gospel record to benefit the soldiers in Iraq or using hip-hop music to teach multiplication. We have a woman named Eileen Quinn who is a sailor and only writes songs about sailing. Sailors everywhere want her music. She’s got her niche.”

Here’s Eileen Quinn’s website: http://www.eileenquinn.com/ Note that after exploring her site I did not find that she has any ties to old media models.

Something else I’d like to mention. One of the most profitable niches on the Internet is the ‘Business Opportunity’ market which is dominated by products that teach people how to successfully market on the Internet. These product launches by the big-name gurus have achieved a sales run rate in the area of $1M per HOUR for the limited time their products are available. Why not learn and adapt the online promotion and marketing techniques used by these successful entrepreneurs? Musicians, artists, authors, creators of most anything can use just a few of these proven techniques at a minimum of time and financial investment to not only start to build the list of their ‘lesser fans’ and convert them to ‘true fans.’

In your post “The Reality of Depending on True Fans”, Robert Rich states that spending “..half his day doing email is not unusual”, I suspect he may not be most effectively using autoresponder technology. If he receives questions or suggestions from his existing true fans, he could aggregate them into a periodic broadcast sent out by autoresponder, and then incorporate these broadcasts into an email sequence whenever new fans opt-in to his autoresponder.

I’ve signed up for artist newsletters distributed by autoresponder and I’m amazed at how underutilized these artists or their agents or managers make of this fantastic tool to communicate with their fans. There are so many things that any fan, lesser or true, would appreciate hearing from their favorite artists that they simply don’t think of doing. Here are some examples that come immediately to mind: a fan signs up for the newsletter, the fan is then sent to a ‘thank you’ page and offered a free mp3 download of the artists personal favorite song from their catalog, or there’s a FlipVideo produced clip with the artist simply thanking the person for signing up, or there’s a page of ‘behind the scenes’ photos of the artist and an audio stream thanking the artist. All this is fairly simple to do, it can be done once, and then it runs forever.

Another opportunity that artists overlook is by sending out ONLY the touring schedule as their newsletter. This is all I get from some established artists (Aimee Mann, pay attention here!) Kevin, true fans want to have a look at the minor behind the stage details of the artist and their creative process, and we don’t necessarily want to be a part of it. With fast, cheap, and out of control devices to capture these details (FlipVideo, digital voice recorders, photo enabled cell phones, etc) someone in the artists retinue of hangers-on could be tasked with taking these snippets and loading them onto a running diary type web page and then updates announced to the fans via the artists autoresponder service.

Getting back to my point, the marketing and promotion tools used by the successful Internet Marketing gurus are also being used in a wide variety of non-business opportunity related markets, and I think that artistic creators could learn a lot from this particular domain and transfer some of this expertise and these techniques to promoting themselves and their artistic endeavors.

I suggest that getting even a little fraction of a $1M/hour sales run rate is going to make a huge financial difference for the artist. A quick example: someone recently put together a product on dressage (‘horse dancing’ for pete’s sake!) and netted about $60,000 using strictly online marketing and promotion to a very small list of customers.

In direct response marketing the rule of thumb used to be that “the money is in the list.” In our current web 2.0/3.0 world, that’s changed to “the money is in the relationship with the list.” Artists need to learn not only to effectively leverage the communication tools available to them, but also to re-think the way that they communicate with their current and future fans.

Sincerely,

Joachim Klehe fearofbadmusic.com

OK, I got the nomination of Jonathan Coulton. Others?

It’s my understanding that there are artists in ambient music making a living off the true fan model, but not in the way that may be anticipated. Ambient music is big with some very wealthy folks who are willing to pay some of these known artists (I feel mentioning names would be rude) several thousand dollars to perform at what amounts to dinner parties or house shows. I know of annecdotal cases of $10,000 paid for such performances. The question is how to get on these circuits. It is worth noting that this is similar to the old time patron system.

One musician is Jonathan Coulton. (wish I knew of more.) If you’re expanding to other artists, consider Penny Arcade and Red vs. Blue.

I have several examples, but the purest I can think of is Jonathan Coulton. He supports his family in NYC with revenue related to his music.

One name for the list is Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio. He’s not a musician, but rather a philosopher who does a podcast. Otherwise he seems to fit the definition of a True Fan-supported artist.

http://www.freedomainradio.com/

Kevin, thanks for the update to your original post. I’ve been following this discussion closely around the blogosphere, and think I understand why the 1000 true fan supported artist is so rare: Because if the art is appealing enough to deeply engage 1000 “true fans,” what’s to keep the work from appealing to 10,000 or 100,000 “casual fans?”

Also, the amount of time and energy required for an artist to engage any number of fans over 100 or so, limits the ongoing interaction to something less than “personal.” In other words, it’s not much more work for the artist to engage 10,000 people than it is to engage 1,000.

Wealthy patrons might make something like this possible (Michaelangelo, Leonardo, etc). But in that case, they’re paying for the exclusive control of the artist rather than the art itself.

I don’t know this artists personally, but I’ve been to a couple of his shows in Chicago. He seems to be independent and he has a dedicated fan base in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin (it seems) that come to his shows and know every lyric, performance, etc.

He’s been doing it like this for at least 8 years (since I moved to Chicago) and I think he had a definite number of True Fans that support him through consistent concert attendance.

http://www.patmccurdy.com/

hey kevin 1000 i could swallow as attainable, but 5000:) ive been doing this a long time and have the benefits of old media behind me. 5000 true fans in todays cluttered world who will not become distracted in a year or 6 months or… dont fool yourself, 5000 is a lot. its not easy to attain or maintain and few independent artists will have the social media skills to do it. david

How about Jonathan Coulton?

http://jonathancoulton.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13audience-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

You might want to ask Jonathan Coulton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Coulton)?

If you’re interested, there are toy artists who do something like this. You buy a subscription and you get all the toys and products they put out that year. Frank Kozik is one example. Here’s a link:

http://tinyurl.com/4w4lpq

I doubt they actually make their whole living that way though…

Here’s an example. The kids that created the movie Once. http://www.unsprungmedia.com/unsprung_wisdom/2008/3/19/you-can-make-money-in-music.html

Jonathan Coulton.

Jonathan Coulton: http://jonathancoulton.com/

He’s never had a record deal. He bootstrapped his internet fame by blogging and putting out a new song once a week for a year. His songs are not only easily downloaded as MP3s on his site, but are also licensed under Creative Commons so you can use them in your own non-commercial applications.

Now he has a song on Rock Band, plays to sold out crowds (including two sold out shows here in Seattle this weekend), and is supporting himself and a kid.

I don’t know anything about his finances, but I bet he fits your definition.

Hi! I’m a (moneyless) fan of you from Brazil. Have you heard about Jonathan Coulton? http://www.jonathancoulton.com/ As far as I remember, He’s a former programmer that entered the Music career in the new media format. Relying on the fans donations and shopping, but offering free versions of his music. But he also makes live performances, so I don’t know if it fits entirely on your description of only making money from Digital media. But You could try to talk with him ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqTaqVi9J8k

Jonathan Coulton

Jonathan Coulton comes to mind.

I’m a comic artist who’s made about $450 within the past year off of her work, and that’s probably about 5-10 people (if that) who’ve actually donated / bought stuff from me. It’s not great numbers, but for what’s essentially a “while I’m in college” job, it’s not bad either, especially for only being in business a year (which is unheard of in most webcomics).

It’s not proving your 1,000 True Fans theory, sure, but it ain’t bad work either.