The Living Room Tour Trend: Selling Context, Not Content

Last night, veteran musician David Bazan, known for being the man behind the seminal indie/emo group Pedro the Lion, played for a few dozen people in someone’s living room in Lubbock, TX.

Bazan spent almost half the year playing exclusively for people in living rooms. It’s not like he had to — his music career is quite accomplished. Tickets for his November/December tour of real venues are going fast, in part because he’s embracing another recent trend of playing classic albums in their entirety — in this case, honoring the 10th anniversary of Pedro the Lion’s finest concept album, Control.

Bazan clearly is right at home in yours:

Certainly, not every musician has the kind of intimate, almost humble delivery that makes Bazan’s solo performances a perfect fit for living rooms across America. But he is actually part of a long tradition that dates back to the origins of much louder, more aggressive music than his — punk and indie rock in the 70s and 80s.

Last year, NPR ran a blog post about the re-emerging popularity of living room shows, pointing out the convergence of digital event planning tools like Eventful with the new economic realities for musicians in a world of free or near-free access to recorded music.

Most of today’s unsigned, independent bands that have toured the country with no booking agent and no management have played their share of living rooms. I know I have. But these living rooms are not often the kind of urbane, sitting-down affairs you see Bazan playing for 30-somethings. Rather, the hybrid living room/venue is rooted in “punk houses” where a bunch of high school and college-age music fans get together to hang out, party and host local and touring bands. I can honestly say from personal experience these house shows are some of the most fun and inspiring shows I’ve ever played. Our fans have crowdsurfed into ceiling fans more than once (pictured here). But the reason these shows are so memorable has just as much to do with the performance as it does with the camaraderie of being able to meet and entertain people in their homes.

The real convergence spurring the living room tour revival can be explained by a concept I often use describe the music economy in an era of free music. The record business is no longer about selling content, it’s about selling context.

What I mean by that is, we never really paid for music, we paid for access to it. Now that access is relatively free, we’re paying for the experience of listening to it in a particular context. Besides a heartfelt need to compensate the artist (a sentiment that record labels destroyed through exploitation), pretty much the only reason people pay for music anymore is to have the convenience of accessing it in whatever context they’d like. There are few technological hurdles left in making music freely available this way, but corporate interests in the content industry continue to do everything in their power to prevent us from moving forward culturally. These corporations aren’t protecting the welfare of artists, they’re protecting their own bottom line.

As far as context goes, you can’t beat a live performance. Remember, before the phonograph was invented just over 100 years ago, the entire music industry revolved around live performance. Playing a piece live was the only way to summon music for listening, whether it was a world-renowned opera singer in an ornate hall or a family gathered around the piano in — you guessed it — their living room. With the record, suddenly we could experience music in any context we wanted… provided we paid the price.

But music is going back to the living room, and it’s headed there from two different directions. From the bottom up, more listeners are becoming amateur musicians. When they venture out to perform, they enter a network of home venues ranging from punk squats to the kind of well-kept living rooms Bazan has toured so successfully. Bazan doesn’t come from the bottom up, but nor is it at all accurate to say his career took a dive, requiring him to play living rooms. Rather, Bazan and more professional musicians like him are evolving their touring strategy to embrace modern music listening and consumption habits. He’s essentially an early adopter of a new model for professional music tours, where the idea of crowd sourcing meets a post-recording music industry in which context is the new commodity.

The truth is there’s not a whole lot of difference between the crusty punk squats and their tidier counterparts, dwelled in by young professionals — except, that is, for the money involved. At $20 a head, Bazan is charging a fairly comparable amount to a cover charge at a real venue. But consider that there are no other costs to cover besides food, transportation and lodging (some of which the hosts even provide). The venue gets no cut. The fans don’t have to pay for drinks, and have more money to spend on merch. And Bazan is almost guaranteed to make a killing selling merch because his audiences have a much higher concentration of total fanatics. That he sells out the vast majority of his appearances is a testament to this (although admittedly living rooms fill up pretty quick).

Now, the back-of-the-napkin calculation I come up with is that they’re netting in the low four figures at a sold-out show. A show at a “real venue” might be more lucrative for Bazan, but by what degree? And as a musician, I can tell you there is a certain psychological value in playing for a room full of fanatics instead of the somewhat random lottery of attendees at a “real” venue, not to mention all the business baggage that comes with dealing with promoters.

Bazan has clearly made a decision that these living room shows are the shows he wants to play even if it means taking a slight pay cut. Real musicians make music to celebrate its true meaning and power to move us emotionally, physically and spiritually, and unite us socially. We don’t make music to make money. Most of us simply want a lifestyle in which we can make our music, connect with our fans, and have them support us modestly. As direct musician-to-fan connections become the currency of the music industry, don’t be surprised if more well-known musicians start showing up in your living room.

Do you think today’s living room tours are more of the same, or is there something more there?

Top 3 Reasons Musicians are Scared of Crowd Funding and Why They Should Get Over It

Crowd funding is so huge now that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is subjecting the hot fundraising trend to a serious regulatory review (and yes, you should probably be worried — but you already knew that.)

We’re talking about sites like Kickstarter, PledgeMusic and IndieGogo — places where creative entrepreneurs can tap the power of the Internet crowd to pay for their projects and businesses. By collecting small amounts amounts of money from a large group in exchange for perks, these platforms aggregate the finances of the many to serve a specific financial goal set by the creator.

For musicians, there is another crowd funding option available, what I would call “exclusive subscription platforms.” These include Sellaband, Artistshare and Patronism. Here you can charge fans a regular subscription fee, and they get access to exclusive, behind-the-scenes content delivered by you on a regular basis. It’s likely we’ll see the two models continue to converge in the next few years, perhaps until they are indistinguishable.

For musicians, this should be an exciting time. Musician Amanda Palmer just raised $1.2 million dollars on Kickstarter. Maybe you’re not the hyper-talented, super-creative, digital media whiz she is. Maybe you have a fan base of hundreds rather than thousands. The truth is you only need a few dozen fans to raise a few thousand dollars in a matter of months. I’ve seen it happen with some regularity.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard from plenty of musicians that don’t crowd fund for a number of reasons — even a few who did the whole thing, raised their goal money, and still hated the experience. Granted, it’s is not for everyone. But it’s here to stay and will only grow in time. More importantly, crowd funding is not based on exploiting musicians yet raises significant chunks of cash for us, and therefore deserves our support as a business model. In a way, crowd funding is the new patronage. Therefore, I would highly recommend that musicians start getting used to the following three scary things, and overcome for the sake of their ability to make money playing music.

Scary Crowd Funding Thing #1 – We can’t beg our fans for money.

At first I was surprised that this was the top reason musicians were scared to get into crowd funding. Then I remembered that most musicians are allergic to business and understandably would feel conflicted. But as I’ve pointed out before, until a manager comes along, you are your own manager. And you’re just not managing a business if you’re not taking advantage of the hottest revenue stream to happen to musicians in a long time.

There are easy ways to get around you having to physically appear on camera asking your supporters for money. You can simply use text and images to communicate the goal of your fundraising project. Or find someone peripheral or unrelated to the project to ask for you. If you object to the concept on philosophical grounds, I can respect that. But realize that if you have a merch table, you’re already asking your fans for money. Crowd funding is not analogous to begging — they will understand you’re just asking for their support, and they won’t feel obligated if they don’t want to give it. It’s certainly less awkward than asking fans to go to iTunes and pay Apple a fee to access to your music.

Scary Crowd Funding Thing #2 – I don’t know what to provide as incentives.

This is super-easy to solve. Something I encourage all musicians embarking on crowd funding is to do some research on their platform of choice and compare platforms to find the best fit for you. Take a look at similar musicians with similar funding goals in similar genres. Check out their incentives, and see what’s perks are hot and what’s getting ignored. This should give you a really good idea of what incentives will work for you. Setting these up can be the most fun part! Actually creating them and shipping them to all your backers can be a nightmare though, so don’t bite off more than you can chew. The goal here is not to sell merch pre-orders, but to raise money well over the cost to produce the perks. The other thing to remember is that some perks don’t involve an outlay of cash. In fact, the sweat-equity perks like commissioned songs, autographs and original artwork are some of the most premium and well-paid for.

Scary Crowd Funding Thing #3 – What if I set my fundraising goals too high or too low?

Many bands I talk to simply aren’t confident they can raise the amount they’d really like, so they settle on something super-conservative, reasoning that any overage is icing on the cake. Too often, however, they are leaving hundreds or thousands of dollars on the table. Remember there is a flurry of backing action in the closing days of a drive that’s close to reaching its goal. If it’s already met ahead of time, money will continue to trickle in, but not the way it would have if you were a grand or so away from crossing the finish line.

Some bands seize on this and choose to beef up their asking amounts, holding in reserve a grand or so of their own money to artificially increase their asking amount by the same figure they hold in reserve. This way, they can pump cash into their project at the last minute if they fail to generate last-minute support they sought and still make their goal. At the same time, you don’t want to blow the whole thing and ask for more than you can realistically raise, or have to rely on more of your own money than you bargained for to meet your goal.

Again, figuring out how much to ask for isn’t as tough as you might think. You can probably write a short list of the people you feel would give you at least $100 on the spot for a set of cool perks. It’ll include super fans you know by name, as well as friends, family and colleagues you think you can get significant support from. You can also easily estimate how many fans would shell out $20 for a modest perk. Dividing your total Facebook following by ten is a good place to start, but use your intuition and your knowledge of your fan base’s past purchase behavior. Finally, as in step #2, carefully research what comparable bands are asking for in relation to comparable projects and perks.

This should give you a ballpark of what to ask for. You could round this number down to the nearest thousand to be safe. You could add a grand if you feel like you’ll be expanding your fan base during the crowd funding drive. But you won’t get any money without asking, so it’s best to just set a number and see how it goes. Get out there and start crowd funding — and don’t forget that once you start, you’ll have a lot of hard work promoting your funding drive ahead of you. That hard work, however, will pay off nicely if you truly rise to the challenge.