I mentioned a few days ago an article written by Kevin Kelly, about the new revenue model for this-generation artists: what’s being nicknamed as “1000 True Fans.” The gist of it is this, in Kevin’s words:
Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.
This goes up against the grain of another popular distribution and business theory that’s been kicking around the ‘net for a few years now (fitting, as the internet is exactly where this sort of model thrives, as keenly noted by my friend Colin): The Long Tail.
The theory is this: if you were to model a demand curve for a certain market, like books or movies, there will be some products that garner a lot of attention (your Godfathers or Kite Runners or *shudder* The Secrets), but also a “long tail” of niche-based demands (your Faster Pussycat Kill Kills and Night on Earths and Complete works of Charles Bukowskis, for example). The Long Tail takes an 80-20 split: looking at the top 20% of titles (the “hits”) versus the rest of the titles (the “long tail,” or “niches”). Used to be that resource restrictions like space and inventory would force most conventional stores to cater primarily to the safer 20% “hits” sector, leaving the other 80% “niches” by the wayside. Now, due to the myriad of technology improvements seen in the past ten years, companies like Amazon and Netflix and Apple’s iTunes can do good business by catering to the niches of the world, and for good reason: research suggests that with a large enough market (such as the world’s online demand for music and books) the 80% actually takes up a substantially larger part of the whole than the top 20%. To translate that to the True Fan theory, this could mean finding the right balance between being a long-tailer and a superstar, right on the cusp of that 80-20 split. For more on this, see Kelly’s article.
The Guardian in the UK recently posted a rebuttal to Kevin Kelly’s theorem: the article, written by economist Will Paige, criticizes Kelly’s simplicity. Paige notes that this theory doesn’t reconcile a lot of the realities of the music business. For example, this $100,000 in raw income (1000 fans x $100 a year) does not incorporate the costs of doing business in the entertainment world: sure, fans may be willing to pay $100 to an artist in a given year (I’m pretty sure I’ve done that with Tom Waits, for example), but how much of that does he see? Let’s break it down.
Once in a while, Northeastern’s humble music cafe afterHours brings in a truly special guest. In my time we’ve had the Dresden Dolls, MC Chris, Duncan Sheik, Hanson, the Sugar Hill Gang, and a whole slew of others - my favorite of all time probably being the brilliant bill of the Demons of Stupidity, Todd Thibaud, The Shoebox Bankers, and Apollo Sunshine - which is how I celebrated my 21st birthday.
Over the next few days we get two greats at afterHours. NU kids, take a break and come see these shows. Non-NU kids, time to make friends with someone who is.
April 5th, 9PM: Jonathan Coulton is a pretty hilarious comedian and general entertainer. I know him as the man who had the constitution to play “Big Rock Candy Mountain” for about 50 minutes while John Hodgeman listed his famous “700 Hobo Names.” Go ahead, try and listen to the whole thing:
He also made a pretty big splash with his “First of May” song. NSFW, but very good. Link to that tune here. He’s going to be with The Konami Kode and Powerglove - whom I don’t know, but I’m sure I can get behind. Brought to you by the NU Association for Computing Machinery, which in and of itself is pretty awesome.
April 6th, 8PM - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Let me say that again. Ted Leo. With his Pharmacists. In a room about half the size of the Middle East. Let me give you some context: the next time you can catch Ted in the states is opening for Pearl Jam. He’s one of the best rockers out there, I say with no hesitation. The whole shebang is being presented by the fantastic radio station WRBB, as well as the NU Council for University Programs. And, from his amazing “Hearts of Oak,” here is “Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?”, Ted’s fantastic tribute to The Specials.
A random thought comes into my head as I prepare to delve into a session with my book on the Music of East Africa.
Why do we have call some countries by a different name than the country calls itself?
As many a historian has said, Nationalism has given person-like identities to countries; they have official songs, birds, trees, clothing, flags, and so forth. And yet, while it would be insulting to call a person by a name other than the name they call themselves, we seem to have no issue with calling Deutschland “Germany” or Nippon “Japan.”
What prompted this thought for me is the struggle my Musics of Africa class has been having with Tanzania. See, we grow up thinking it almost rhymes with “Santeria,” while most Tanzanian people will tell you it sounds more like “Tasmania” (for lack of a mastery of phonetic spelling). Would it be so hard for us to call these counties by their preferred name? Is this arrogant of us? Do they care? I welcome discussion.
Also, I realize I’m not the first to bring this up, if you’d rather read what some Apple-heads think on the subject, may I refer you to this thread from MacRumors.
You know, I really like Crooks and Liars‘ approach to political blogging. Nice balance of video, audio, commentary, and raw reporting. And, best of all, every night they do a late night music series to help take a break from all the news of the day (tonight’s is Brand X). With that in mind, here’s a mix tape for you. In the future this will be embeddable, but this is very new so things are still growing. Hopefully I can have this running on the sidebar in the future. More commentary on these funky flash mixtapes later.
As my time as a Husky dwindles to a mere handful of weeks, I’m spending some time reflecting on my five years of academic pursuit. The Music Industry program gave me wonderful opportunities to explore different trains of thought in regards to industry problems and solutions.
It’s time to bring those trains back to the station. What follows are some of the ideas I had, and what those amount to today.
- Freshman year I spent some time analyzing Jim’s Big Ego’s decision to release of “They’re Everywhere!” with a Creative Commons license. This was the first time I was exposed to this line of rights management, and my interactions with the CC licensing have only grown. I am most excited with what Creative Commons has done to date with CC+ and the new and growing databases of CC material. What was a rouge move by one of Boston’s best local bands is now common practice. Even my own Hobnox uses the licensing as an option in the content library. This, topped with CC-founder Lessig’s recent shift in focus to work on government influence and corruption promises to bring more excitement - I’m very much looking forward to his April 4th appearance at the Berkman Center.
- 2006 brought the Middler Year Paper - for fellow Huskies, this was back when we still did one big paper for the entire semester. My thoughts amounted to a 20-page, single-spaced appraisal of the future necessity of record labels. In short, my argument was that if the record companies of the world were unwilling to embrace modern technologies of the internet and home recording, it would beehove an artist to simply create an album without them.
Truth is, over this time the marketplace has changed, to a degree that simply could not be summarized in a blog post. Suffices to say, based on a meeting I had today with a major label in NYC who unfortunately I cannot name here due to trade secrets, the current guard is wising up to how the internet works to their advantage. I’ve also come to realize that, for all of the modern ease of getting content to market, many artists still rely on a label for distribution - this is probably due to the plethora of additional funding and support projects that tie-in with that. I can simply look to my own band-of-the-week, Le Loup, to see a clear example of how they leveraged their own home recording with SubPop deal to fund a tour across the country and Europe.
As long as the money keeps coming to the labels (which, even if records sales die out, they still will through licensing and publishing, which record companies were wise to snatch up early on) artists will still look to their wallets. The future does see new sources of income from online royalties (if Billy Bragg can help it, anyway), as well as the excitingly brilliant concept of the new “1000 True Fans” model for artist income. In even more abstract terms, the resonance with artists to this off-the-cuff, fast and limber model of doing business makes it attractive so long as the money is good, and I still feel that record companies will have to limber up and further embrace web technology in order to stay the kings of this game. Sooner or later artists will have the power to do this on their own.
- The spring of 2007 was the era of the iLevy, perhaps the only class I ever will take purely pro bono - no grade, no credits, just pure thought exercises. The guiding question was this: if we were to impose a very small tax (talking fractions of a percent here) on content-sharing equipment and services (internet service, yes, but also computers and CD burners and blank media), could the revenue generated subsidize the cost of copyright-protected file traffic in the eyes of the content-holders, so we could do away with all this horrid site blocking, net throttling, and lawsuits?
Well, the concept mas moot before it took off; as I mentioned in my commentary on Christopher Cox, legislation was passed which barred internet taxes for a good long while. A new solution? Singing in the same key as the Berkman Center’s fantastic spinoff Noank, SXSW speaker Jim Griffin spoke this year about about enacting collective licensing - purely voluntary, collected en masse and having a performance rights orgnaization-like body facilitate the distribution. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary here.
More to follow, I think, as long as this is stuff you guys want to hear about. This weekend should have some shorter commentary on Elvis Costello, The Dodos, Dr. Pepper, and the RIAA’s “In Trial.” Stay tuned.
Get two or more people into my apartment these days and the odds are high someone will bust out the Wii, and the unanimously agreed best-game-in-our-arsenal: Super Smash Bros: Brawl. This is the third in the Smash series, which started with the N64 in 1999 and was followed up by the 2001 release for Game Cube, the best-selling game on that system.
For those unfamiliar, let me attempt to describe the game. Take all of your favorite heroes and villains from every Nintendo game you’ve ever played. Mario, Luigi, Kirby, Link, Zelda, StarFox, Samus, Captain Falcon, Bowser, Peach, Pikachu, Ness, Snake, Mr. Game n’ Watch… the only glaring omission is my own favorite, MegaMan. Now, put them in a ring and let them fight to the death. Pretty simple concept.
Since freshman year, when Smash for the Cube was undoubtedly the most popular way of settling disputes in my suite, I’ve been fascinated with this game. What is it about the game that makes it so popular? Sure, the gameplay is excellent - like Reversi, the controls take one round to understand and hours upon hours to master, and as fighters the characters are well-balanced, while unique. But there are dozens of other games that have these characteristics. What is it about Smash that makes it the most popular game of all time for the Game Cube, and one of the highest selling Wii games to date, despite only being released for three weeks?
Consider the hype before SSB:Brawl was released. News leaked that Pit, from legendary NES game Kid Icarus, was going to be a character this time. Digg and MetaFilter flipped when it was discovered that Sonic the Hedgehog, from longtime Nintendo rival Sega, was going to be introduced as a character. Aaron, our apartment’s Wii wrangler and expert on all things Smash, informed me that crowds vocalized their disappointment with the lack of MegaMan on this version. Clearly, the characters carry the game.
Smash Bros. is powerful and fun because we are using figures from our past culture. Playing as Falco, my favorite character in the game, harkens back to playing StarFox 64 as a middle school kid. Playing as Pit allows me to dish out some justice against my 10-year-old-self’s struggle with the Kid Icarus game for GameBoy. My roommate Oscar seems to really enjoy battling on the Green-Zone level from Sonic, as he was always a bit of a Sega kid. Our nostalgia even opened our wallets: he and I both purchased emulations for the Wii of Kid Icarus and Sonic the Hedgehog, respectively - the closest we can get to playing these games from our childhood.
Would the game be fun if we didn’t know the characters? Sure. The 2001 Game Cube release included Roy and Marth from Fire Emblem, a game only found in Japan at the time. “At the time” is fairly significant here, as in 2003, running off the popularity of these characters in Smash Bros., Fire Emblem was released in the US (for a plethora of commentary on this release, read the IGN Message Boards).
So what do we take away from this geeked-out example from my roommates and I? There is value in allowing artifacts from our culture to be reappropriated. I see Smash Bros. in the same way I see TV Carnage or The Kleptones - the power of the game comes from taking a piece of our culture and expressing it in a new and different way. And, for all those worried about the death knell brought by derivatives, it doesn’t kill the desire for the original. Fire Emblem got its US release, Oscar and I bought the old games when reminded of them in the new work.
Our video games got mashed up, and all parties involved - me, Nintendo, the source games - seemed to benefit. The record companies might want to take note.
not only the title of this fantastic fan-art installation which I had a chance to see in its partial glory at the National Portrait Gallery, it is also the title of the first release from lone-pop-visionary-turned-seven-piece-band Le Loup.
Now, full disclosure: one of my very good friends is friends with Sam, said lone-pop-visionary, so I very well may be going into this fully biased, as I am a sucker for a band I know.
But permit me to influence you. Give this track a listen - this is “We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!” from their new album.
This is all Sam here. Now picture this performed with three guitars, banjo, alternating keyboards/french horn, bass, and drums, with everybody singing and clapping and otherwise enjoying the moment. Such was the scene on Friday night at the Black Cat in DC, where I found myself with these guys and a whole slew of good people. It was a homecoming show for this group, after a good stint in Europe, so the energy was extra-high.
The purpose of mentioning all this: they’re playing tonight at TT the Bear’s Place in Central, with Eksi Ekso and fellow Sub-Popes The Ruby Suns. Show starts right after 9, and costs $9. I’ll be there. You should be there too.
We were talking the other day about Ballad of the Broken Seas, a beautiful duet album with Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell. As fates would have it, Pitchfork (found via Brooklyn Vegan) is reporting now that they are back at it with Sunday at Devil Dirt! No touring off the release is planned as of yet, but I’ll keep you abreast.
More updates are coming today, including discussions on Le Loup, Elvis Costello, and Super Smash Brothers.
