Category: Crowdfunding

Future of Music Summit 2013: A Feisty In-Depth Preview

I am beyond pumped to be headed down to Washington, DC next week for the Future of Music Summit.

The Summit is 2-day conference for music industry professionals and musicians, and is organized by the Future of Music Coalition. The FMC is a non-profit that advocates for musicians’ rights, and helps educate musicians on issues that are important to them, even though they may not realize it. Besides giving musicians a voice in Washington, they may be best known for their Artist Revenue Streams research project that gives incredible insight into the details of how musicians make money in the digital age. The Summit will begin with the latest analysis on that treasure trove of data.

I’m also looking forward to the rest of Monday morning, where conference attendees will be serenaded by government leaders in intellectual property, followed by a counterpoint on copyright from musicians and music businesspeople.

I’d like to ask the copyright panels how they would reform copyright to balance the needs of the individual and the culture versus the need to profit from corporations who have all the legal and lobbying resources to shape the law. Shouldn’t we decriminalize song sharing by adopting some of the ideas successfully employed by Creative Commons? Don’t we have enough studies showing that “piracy” actually increases fan engagement and spending?

I would also question whether virtually infinite copyright terms perpetuated by corporate lobbying have anything to do with the original intent of copyright. I would ask the musicians if copyright exploitation is perhaps a less ethical business model than direct fan patronage, and now that technology has enabled the latter, we should focus on what technology now enables rather than stifling innovation to protect anachronistic models.

Finally, I would posit that free access to music is a net benefit for promoting all of the underlying tenets of copyright: the right of the individual to be compensated for their labor, the right to own and control one’s personal expression, the right of society to benefit from creative works, and the right of a culture to use those works to perpetuate itself. Has anyone noticed how our copyright system works against these ideals by hoarding wealth at the top, appropriating our personas, creating a large deadweight loss in music consumption and denying cultural re-use of creative works, in a culture increasingly based on re-use?

All that will probably have to wait for the cocktail party. Maybe I can get the person who curates the copyright panels drunk and you’ll see me and Larry Lessig up there next year wrestling some lawyers from the Copyright Alliance and the Center for Copyright Information. The gauntlet has been thrown.

The lunch breakout session is the “Band as a Business” workshop, which is funny, because that’s almost the same name as my free “Band as Business” video course on Udemy. I reached out to workshop facilitator Paul Rapp when I realized he was 2 hours north of me in Albany. I asked him why crowdfunding wasn’t covered, considering it’s the next big thing in how musicians can make money. I also dropped the whole copyright spiel on him, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised I didn’t hear back. Looking forward to taking the workshop nonetheless, as there’s always something new to learn, especially for those who teach.

The rest of Monday is dedicated to the “Future” part of the Summit, where we’ll be discussing the cutting edge of music markets and marketing. I expect artist discovery and fan engagement to take center stage here. Over the last few years, we’ve really seen the music industry embrace the kinds of marketing best practices that were developed by natively digital companies. In particular, the idea of a “fan lifecyle” (analogous to a “user lifecycle”) is central to any modern musician’s business strategy. Success comes from identifying target fan markets, coming up with strategies to engage those fans, and then creating a system by which those fans drawn into an integrated marketing funnel, generating more revenue the deeper they go. Digital tools and services can go a long way to facilitate marketing and conversion, and I’ll be curious to see which names from that industry are dropped.

The last panel of the day is the one I’m looking most forward to — a discussion of streaming, crowdfunding, and the future business models of music. Most people are confused when it comes to this topic, and I understand why. But I’ve been a digital native all my life, and I’ve dedicated my life to music, technology and the intersection in between. The “future” of music business is, without a doubt, many different streams. The days of one dominant stream from copyright exploitation are leaving us. When we talk about the “old” business model dying, we’re not just talking about selling CDs or MP3s, we’re talking about paid vs. free access to recorded music, and things are moving inexorably toward free. It’s a net benefit for fans and musicians, and more music is being made and listened to than ever before. It’s awkward and sometimes devastating to professional musicians who are having trouble adapting, or who put their heads in the sand and blame their own fans for their career woes.

At the same time, the “new” business models like crowdfunding are revolutionizing the band as small business… and it’s all just the tip of the iceberg. We have seen but a fraction of the potential for new music markets and models. Perhaps if the market wasn’t mostly controlled by a handful of enormous corporations, it would be agile enough to shift. But no matter, individuals will flip the paradigm and enable new categories of paid musician that defy the dominant “professional” title. Indies will continue to innovate. The majors will hulk along collecting back catalog royalties until music is a utility like electricity or water… and we’ll be there sooner than you think.

We’ll need a drink after that one. Lucky for me, Mailchimp‘s buying.

The second and final day of the conference features a potpourri of unexpected topics.

A history and analysis of the crossfader “as a tool for re-thinking music as a form of social action” seems to jive nicely with my piece on how copyright law undermines the power of music to effect social change. With no de minimis standard for digital sampling, the crossfader seems to be regarded more as a nuclear weapon than a tool for social change by the record industry.

I’m also looking forward to the panel on music and social change. MC5’s Wayne Kramer (who makes an appearance in my Band as Business course) chairs a particularly interesting pursuit involving instrument donation to incarcerated people. I’m a huge fan of music charities, and music’s ability to provide meaning, healing, joy, comfort or entertainment to people who are aimless, suffering, unhappy, uncomfortable or just bored. It’s the reason we have music! Too often we lose sight of music’s true purpose in pursuit of profit. As such, the following panel on “Nonprofit Models for Supporting Independent Music” shares similar potential for being an awesome eye-opener.

Before lunch, the Director of External Affairs from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will run out on stage and scream, “Musicians can afford health care now!” and then disappear in a flurry of pyrotechnics. Or not. But either way, I can’t think of a better place to tout the Affordable Care Act than a conference for musicians, even if I can build a better website myself, for hundreds of millions of dollars less.

The breakout session I’m headed to after lunch is all about how we can provide a better career education to musicians. That’s my mission too! I just launched the Songhack website to do just that — educate musicians on how they can “hack” the music business and make their own careers. My work with John Snyder at Artists House Music (we did the Band as Business course) has given me a unique look into the realm of institutionalized music career education, and the huge challenges it faces. I look forward to gaining more insight from the panelists of this talk… because despite the best efforts of the FMC, most musicians don’t have any idea how musicians make money!

Tuesday wraps up with a more philosophical take on the issues from our distinguished hosts and a group of accomplished musicians. Diving deep on the cultural value of music with the Producer of Blue Oyster Cult sounds like a pretty sweet ending to me.

I’ll be missing the conference-closing NPR All Songs Considered Listening Party. Gotta hightail it back to New York to keep the entrepreneurial machine running. But while I’m there, I’ll be tweeting up a storm and posting daily updates, both here at Mediapocalypse and over at the Songhack blog. Please join me!

Are you headed to the FMC Summit? Do you want to tell me how wrong I am about free access to music and throw a drink in my face? (I know there are some of you out there!) Or have you seen the same bright future for music that I have, and want to join forces to spread the good vibes? Leave me a comment or drop me a line on Twitter and we’ll hang.

See you in DC!

Zac Shaw Interview on the Music Manumit Podcast

Listen to the interview I did with the Music Manumit podcast on all things Dead Unicorn and my quest to empower musicians and spread the good news of the golden digital age of music!

The hour-long podcast is a marathon of interesting topics punctuated with humor — just the way I like it. Hosts Doug and Tom gave me the opportunity to talk about the many projects I’m working on, including Dead Unicorn (and our successful crowdfunding campaign), Mediapocalypse, Right to Music, Songhack, my love for Creative Commons and more… Listen now!

creative commons music manumit zac shaw

Rabbit Rabbit: A New Model of Musician Entrepreneurship

Rabbit_Rabbit_by_Elizabeth_Friar — Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi of Rabbit Rabbit. (Photo by Elizabeth Friar)

Rabbit Rabbit is getting all sorts of attention for its recent write-up in the New York Times discussing the band’s very own subscription-based fan service, Rabbit Rabbit Radio. It’s grassroots crowdfunding at its best and most sustainable. Fans get a bundle of high-quality original content every month, in exchange for a low pay-what-you-want monthly fee.

But Rabbit Rabbit Radio is just the entrance to this rabbit hole. Matthias Bossi and Carla Kihlstedt are partners in music and life, with decades of collective experience playing for some of the most interesting and inventive indie bands on the scene. They are supporting themselves and their growing family through music, which necessitates a wide variety of money-making strategies and an entrepreneurial attitude.

I spoke with them recently about the challenges and opportunities created by the rapidly changing business of music. Independent musicians would be wise to pay attention. Instead of bemoaning the changes brought on by the digital age, Matthias and Carla are pioneering the new music career as real-deal, working-class musicians. Or, as Carla puts it: “At some point, it was just more fun to think like an entrepreneur, instead of just complaining that it was all dying and going to hell.”

By adapting their lifestyle and business model to best serve their dedicated fan base, Rabbit Rabbit is an inspiring example of triumphant musician-entrepreneurship.

Can you tell me a little about your musical background, and how Rabbit Rabbit Radio came about?

Matthias: I played in a lot of bands. Skeleton Key, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, The Book of Knots, made a lot of records with people like John Vanderslice, St. Vincent, Tiger Lillies, Pretty Lights. I played music with my wife Carla — she’s a great violinist — in Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and The Book of Knots. We had a kid, we have a second kid on the way. We decided since we’re not touring as much, why not start this thing that keeps us in touch with our fans. Especially because we’re basically removing ourselves from society and moving to the far reaches of Massachusetts.

Carla: I too have played in a lot of different projects with a lot of different people and had a pretty super-fun and very hydra-headed, multifaceted musical life including Tin Hat, The Book of Knots, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and with our friend and compatriot and hero Fred Frith — various recordings and projects of his. Lots of classical music and contemporary classical music. We’re kind of musical omnivores in that way.

I used to tour ten months out of the year with various projects. That clearly is not the best way to raise a kid, unless you’re a millionaire and can bring your school and your nanny along with you. So that’s in part why we’ve done Rabbit Rabbit Radio. It’s been super-fun and challenging, and we totally made it up as we went along. We kind of pieced together our livelihood via various things. Rabbit Rabbit Radio at this point is a tiny fraction of our actual living. Basically, it makes enough money to pay for itself. Which is great — we wanted to get there in the first year and we did. I also teach at New England Conservatory part-time, and I do a lot of commissions. Matthias writes a lot of music for various things.

M: We do radio documentaries, I do video game music. We definitely make it up. Our goal is that Rabbit Rabbit Radio should be a bigger part of the monthly income stream. It’ll never be passive income given how many man- and woman-hours go into it every month. We have to generate the content freshly every month. We’re just chugging away. There’s a steady but slow climb up. Certainly the Times article, this summer’s tour and the publicity surrounding that really helped get the word out.

You’re clearly doing everything you can to make money from music, and that means doing a lot of different things. Musicians often have this attitude of “if I make great music, I’ll get signed and that will be that”, which is definitely not the case. What advice would you give musicians who want to follow your model?

M: In the Times article, there’s that quote from John Schaefer of WNYC where he said, “If Radiohead did this, it’d be huge. They’re already millionaires, they’d be gajillionaires.” We had the benefit of touring a bunch in a total grassroots style, earning one fan at a time.

C: We had an interview yesterday with someone who had read the Times article, I think she works for YouTube. The reason she wanted to interview us is because they want to do something similar, and kind of steal the idea. (laughs) It’s an idea worth stealing and we’re not protective of it, because it’s an idea a lot of people have been thinking about. We just decided to pool our resources and really make it happen, build it from the ground up. It is complicated and hard.

I think there’s a few things that made it work for us. One is that we signed on two team members, one of whom I’d already been working with: composer and arts administrator George Hurd. He helped us do all the research for the behind-the-scenes stuff that no one ever sees, like the companies that take the payment information. There’s all kinds of things like that which you’re never aware of as a subscriber. His partner is a wonderful graphic designer who we’ve already worked with a lot. She designed the site. So basically, the team is the four of us.

We have a few other things working in our favor. We crafted it to suit our very specific set of interests, and not every musician’s interests would be the same as ours. For example, I’ve always loved the written word, photography and visual art. I totally dove into learning how to do video editing. I really love that part of the site that’s not just the music. Not all musicians want to spend all that time on the stuff that’s not music. I really enjoy that part of it — putting music into a bigger context.

We’ve been touring collectively for some decades already, in very self-made, grassroots operations. [The YouTube interviewer] was asking questions like, “How do you get fans?”

M: There’s no “get fans” button. (laughs)

C: There’s no Facebook button that says, “Get totally devoted fan here.” You get fans by touring 20 years in various high-level, really committed, interesting, engaging projects and devoting your life to that — stepping off stage, talking to people afterwards, interacting with people at the merch booth… years and years and years of a whole life around being committed to creative music. Our fans are not the people who just care about the Billboard charts are saying. They care about deeper content and richer musical experiences.

M: It works for someone who has done this. If you’ve had a band that’s done well, like a reasonably successful indie rock band that has some fans, it can work. If this model came out as a more codified platform, a lot of bands would get lost in the fray. You need to be out there playing and meeting your fans for it to work.

C: The important thing about it has been the whole idea of context. Music has always lived in a context, in a community, with a community of players and a community of fans and listeners. We moved out of a really rich, really varied music community (New York City) to a place fairly far removed. And digital music, for the most part, people find the track they want and download the track. It has no context at all the way that LPs did, for example, where you’d have liner notes, photographs, imagery that went with the songs, lyrics… various things that gave you more of an idea of what the whole project was about. Our intention is to bring context back in a digital format — to bring an analog context to a digital format.

M: Our personalities are suited to a more magazine-style release every month because Carla’s a great photographer, because we like writing, because there are things other than the song. I think you have to have had some exposure out on the road touring. You also need an interest in other things that will buoy up the content of your song every month to make it interesting.

C: I don’t think having all these different facets is a prerequisite for making it work, I just think it suits what our interest is and what we enjoy.

M: But because of that, I think it makes it an interesting thing that could grow to accommodate more people — because there are five subheadings within the monthly issue. It feels like a template for someone else, it could really work as opposed to a single WordPress page with a little embedded play button and a single sentence.

One thing that stands out about your approach is that you’re thinking about your music like entrepreneurs. I think that’s really lacking in musician culture. Many musicians think, “I’ll focus on my songwriting, my performance, my recording” but they can’t make a music career happen because they’re not running their band like a small business.

C: Yeah, the world has really shifted in terms of what skill set you need to be not just a musician, but an actual, viable musician. This is for better and for worse. Nowadays you have to have some sense of what goes into graphic design, you have to understand how fundraising works. You have to understand how PR works and how to gather and keep your fans and your people resources. You have to be a travel agent.

And it means you have less time for music, it really does. I wish I could say it didn’t. I wish I could say that I can actually muster some hours every day to simply work on some music. It’s not true. A huge amount of the time I spend on music is spent on the business of music.

Everyone started complaining twelve years ago, bemoaning that the record industry is dying. The fact is most parts of the record industry didn’t serve the independent musician that well anyway. I have a lot of stories under my belt of little bands like Tin Hat that get picked up by the big label — “Woohoo! Success on the horizon!” And then the guy who brought us onto the label, who’s passionate about our music, who worked for that big label for 25 years gets canned at Christmas because his label got bought by Warner Bros. So when the record comes out, no one’s there to care.

It’s kind of a fallacy that now we’re in the end of times because the record industry’s dying. It’s like now, what are we gonna do about it? At some point, it was just more fun to think like an entrepreneur, instead of just complaining that it was all dying and going to hell.

Do you think you can grow Rabbit Rabbit Radio to the point where you can bring other people in to manage the business aspects, freeing you up to dedicate more time to making music?

C: I hope so. I have to say, I love doing the film every month, even if some months it comes together totally last-minute. We created our own little gerbil wheel, and I’d love to get to the point where we’re a month ahead, which isn’t quite where we’re at now. For sure, we could use another team member.

M: It’s been a rough few months. We’ve made our deadline, but it’s been a scramble. We just had a really busy summer of touring, and writing other music for other things. We’ve done it, but it would be helpful to have another pair of brains.

C: There’s a lot that needs to be done. George Hurd, our co-manager of the site, wears fifteen different hats for what he does in Rabbit Rabbit Radio. We pay him a nominal monthly fee plus a percentage, so he has a vested interest in helping it grow. I have to give credit that we haven’t given yet to our unofficial fifth member, and that is a friend of ours named Jon Evans. He has a studio that we work in a lot here on Cape Cod. He’s got a beautiful studio. He’s a musician, producer and engineer. We do a lot of our recording with him. Every once and a while we also work with our friend Joel Hamilton from The Book of Knots, who runs Studio G in Brooklyn. He’s further afield, so sometimes we send him mixes and he mixes them. But we actually do a lot of very hands-on recording work. That’s why the quality of the recordings is so high. Sometimes we do stuff at home in our living room, but often we get to work with Jon and that’s been a huge help. it’s really helped us keep the baseline quality of the recordings really special, so it doesn’t seem like we’re just throwing something together every month on our little SM-58 in the living room. But I love doing that too.

How do you plan on growing the fan base? How do you plan on marketing Rabbit Rabbit Radio?

C: All sorts of ways. It’s good old-fashioned touring every now and again. It’s reaching out when you have a show in a specific city to the two or twenty people that you know would love to know about it and will tell their friends. It’s keeping occasional photos and posts on Twitter and whatnot. It’s inviting special guests to be a part of the issue on some months and then asking them to spread it to their fans. We are literally trying every possible way.

If we had another team member, we could probably be a whole lot more cohesive on how we approach that. That’s what another team member would be partly responsible for, helping us strategize that. Right now we’re so close to it, and so up close with our own deadlines, it’s hard for us to think further ahead than month-to-month.

Musicians are constantly debating whether the changes in music brought about by digital technology are good or bad. It seems very polarized. On the negative side, people complain that quality is suffering, that freer access to music exploits musicians. On the positive side, folks point out there is more music being made and heard than ever before, and more opportunities for independent musicians to make money without being exploited. What are your thoughts on the digital music debate?

M: I think it’s great that more people are making music. I think it’s great that people are getting a shot. There’s always going to be crappy music. I feel like everyone deserves a shot. We’ve lived on both sides of the issue. I think this is a far more rewarding way to own your output completely.

C: I think in terms of quality there’s always been great music and shitty music. There’s been a lot of high-budget shitty music, and there’s been a lot of really wonderful low-budget living room music. So I don’t really see that the financial continuum always reflects the quality continuum. I think it can. I just finished a recording session in New York for four days with Ben Goldberg from Tin Hat, and he pulled together a budget to record at one of the great studios. It would have been a sacrifice for that project if we had to do it in a living room. It’s a nine-person band. So there are some projects that really do need a support budget behind it.

The project that Rabbit Rabbit Radio is based around is just the two of us, and sometimes our friend Jon — so it’s very malleable. We can do recordings with just the two of us in the living room if we need to. We can also go work with Jon or work with Joel and augment it, make the recording production bigger. Either way, we are in charge of our own production quality control. And either way, we would do everything we can to make it as great a musical experience as possible.

How has the transition to family life affected your music career?

C: That transition forces all kinds of new ways of thinking. (laughs) The funny thing is, I don’t like touring on that incessant level the way I used to. I used to really like it. There’s something hormonal that changes in you where what’s not good for your kid isn’t good for you anymore.

That said, we know people like Nils from Sleepytime and his partner Dawn have a duo together called Faun Fables. They have two kids and a third on the way. They’re touring as much as they ever did. They load into a van with a “manny” and they just hit the road. They’re making it work. And I think the kids are enjoying it and getting a different kind of worldly education. Our daughter had been to Europe five times before she was two. She’s a relatively well-traveled kid, and that has also been a part of her growing up, in a cool way. I think every family has to find where that line is for them, and for us it was a little closer to the less touring side.

M: We’ve started to get selective. There are certain projects that can go out for a third of the time now, and make three times as much money. It used to be Sleepytime had to go out for six weeks. We’d start breaking even at four weeks. The last two weeks were the profit. Because of how many people were in the band, we had to go out for these long periods. That’s exhausting. We’ve gotten a little smarter in that regard. We’ve worked long enough that certain bands can go out for less time and still make the same or more money.

C: I always wrote music at the service of touring — writing it and going to rehearsal because our band’s going on the road. I’d always been in the service of that model. Now, I’m really enjoying a deeper, more involved identity as a composer that needs more home time and needs a little more solitude. It’s also that I’m ready for that now because I’m not just answering to me, I’m answering to the family and our daughter.

I always go on tour with three books and a whole bunch of manuscript paper, and my headphones, and my this and my that, with five projects I’m hoping to get done. I never touch any of it. Especially not now when we’re sensitive to the fact that our daughter really doesn’t like it when we disappear every night to go out on stage for a while. So during the day I try to give her as much as I can, so there’s no day time. When the day is done and you’re off stage, you’re too wiped out. I always go with my total unrealistic optimism and it never pans out, so I’m actually enjoying the kind of productivity we’ve been able to have at home. The whole gerbil wheel has been great because it keeps us in line creatively.

Check out Rabbit Rabbit Radio.

music business music career music entrepreneur musician pay what you want rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit radio

Why Vinyl is Going to Help Save Musicians (and Why Fighting “Piracy” Won’t)

Vinyl sales grew 39% in 2011 and projections for the future are even higher. This is huge for musicians.

Here’s the dirty little secret you probably haven’t read much about: Look more closely and you’ll quickly realize that the music industry is 75% controlled by four labels. Musicians are not the majority rights holders of music — four labels are.

Does that make any sense in an age when the cost to produce, market and grant access to music is a fraction of what it was 15 years ago?

For the other 25% of rights holders, vinyl is huge. For indies, vinyl is a shining beacon of hope. For independent musicians, vinyl is becoming super-important to their bottom line. For these musicians, charging for access to one’s music no longer makes sense (it quite literally makes cents), particularly when attention is a form of payment in the Digital Age. A chance to be heard is a chance to be paid. A chance to be heard is too valuable to paywall for the 25% who don’t have huge stables of lawyers and lobbyists, or enormous marketing budgets and payola arrangements to manufacture popularity.

Music innovators Feedbands have recently come under friendly fire for this op-ed on Digital Music News in which they slay all sorts of bogus stats that washed-up pro-musician bloggers like to tout when they complain that fans sharing their music are killing their careers.

For those who don’t know of Feedbands, what they do is allow users to vote on a vinyl release for the month. They then pick a winner, press up their EP, and send it out to all their subscribers for the reasonable price of $14.95. For the bands that make the cut, it can be a huge windfall of new fans, not to mention Feedbands cuts them a nice check and does the pressing free.

What I love about Feedbands, and what will save the music industry (at least the 25% that matters), is not the vinyl records themselves, but the ethos:

We at Feedbands believe that music is essential and should be shared.

This simple sentiment has been completely lost on piracy-obsessed blogger-musicians at The Trichordist and I Am A Scientist, who believe sharing music is akin to stealing — a concept that came and went over a decade ago. And anyone who thinks RIAA and IFPI have musicians’ best interests in minds is dangerously out of touch.

There are two simple reasons why “killing piracy” will never save the 25%, or the 75% for that matter.

“Piracy” can’t be killed, period, and it’s naive to think otherwise.
“Piracy” helps musicians (at least the 25%) because a chance to be heard is a chance to be paid.

There is still a healthy demographic of musicians who blame their career woes on their own fans’ sharing of their music and on ad-supported, unauthorized music distribution platforms. They want to eliminate free access to music and force fans to pay. It’s a great way to never be discovered and to piss off the people who love your music.

Instead of incentivizing fans to pay by offering something they can’t get free off the Internet (vinyl is just one example), they would rather kill the free access discovery process in order to get a tiny minority of those fans to pay 30% to the digital distributor and then let the money trickle through an exploitative label contract. They want to increase the deadweight loss and alienate the people in a position to support their careers by dictating the terms on which their art is appreciated. It’s not a winning strategy. Vinyl is.

I don’t need statistics and studies to tell me vinyl will help save musicians. My band raised over $4,300 on Kickstarter to fund vinyl production. Every musician I talk to now is excited by vinyl. It has reintroduced scarcity (vinyl is often released in limited collectible editions feature awesome art and crazy coloring), but more importantly, it’s a way for fans to express their love for a band financially and get something tangible in return.

Some people will tell you that modern digital files sound great and the sound quality of vinyl does not make the difference. I’m not sure what to say to those people. I’m no vinyl snob, not even a collector, but even I can’t argue that for many types of music, vinyl just sounds better. I was so blown away when I heard our band’s vinyl after we got it back from the plant, I went out and bought a record player. Say what you want about sample rate, but analog audio is natural and digital sampling ain’t. You can’t argue with a brain that evolved over millions of years to interpret a continuous sound signal vs. a purportedly indistinguishable succession of digital samples. Whether it’s the “warmth” of the intrinsic distortion of vinyl or any other trick of physics, the sound speaks for itself.

There’s something else the haters are missing, and that’s the ritual of vinyl. Even with cassettes and CDs, there was a ritual. We’d have to select the physical media from our collection, and place it in the physical player, and then we had to listen. Straight up, true fans want to listen to music.

People are having religious music experiences upon hearing vinyl. I first heard our vinyl album on cheap computer speakers via a USB turntable, and it still sounded better than my hi fi car stereo. The ritual helps establish the attention to listening, so I’m not sure how much of it is psychological, but our brains are all we’ve got so I’m going to listen to mine.

So spread the truth. If you want sound quality, vinyl offers an experience wholly different than digital and preferred by many.

The cost of production, marketing and giving the public access to music has never been lower. There are more independent vinyl pressing plants today that before most of us were born, and you can get 250 records pressed up for about $1500, then turn around and sell those for $15 apiece minimum. Higher quantities yield higher profit margins. It just doesn’t even compare to the margins on streaming and downloads, which are only going to shrink as access to music is bundled with telecom service and mobile contracts. With enough litigation and legislation, the major labels might be able to get a bigger cut of streaming revenues, but good luck seeing that income trickle down into all but the most previously successful musicians’ pockets. Isn’t the purpose of copyright to create a healthy music culture, not enrich creators who are no longer relevant creatively?

There’s one more log I’d like to throw on the fire, and it’s last but not least. Fans know that when they buy vinyl, the money is generally going to the artist. Fans know that when they buy digital, a good chunk goes to a large corporation simply for serving up the file. They’re just about as happy with price-fixed digital files as they were with price-fixed CDs.

In this business of music, who are we trying to save exactly? The multi-billion dollar media conglomerates who write off their recorded music losses against military-industrial complex cash cows? Or are we trying to save the actual musicians responsible for creating the music we love?

Nobody wants to save the music industry, the 75% owned by the big four. Well, the pro musicians who profited from it do. The lawyers and lobbyists do. The executives who successfully manufactured the popularity of 1 out of 10 musicians they singed do. But I’m not sure how much clearer of a message fans could send to the music industry than a $3B loss.

To be clear, vinyl alone will not save musicians, inasmuch as they need saving. Last time I checked, there was more music being made and listened to than ever before in history, and so-called “piracy” was still rampant. There are other important revenue streams that copyright-obsessed musician-bloggers like to ignore. Crowdfunding and tipping are growing exponentially. Licensing has never been more in demand and accessible. It’s never been easier for a musician to cut out the middleman on all kinds of merch and physical product and make huge markups. Live music generates more significant revenue now than it has in years. Fans are still paying musicians, they’re just over paying for access. Musicians make music to be heard first, paid second, so where’s the conflict in digital technology finally making that dream a reality?

If you want to save musicians, buy a record, burn it to MP3, and share it with your friends.

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Crowdfunding is Not an Experiment: Why Pledge Music Matters

“We are Ben Folds Five… When we started in Chapel Hill, NC in 1994 it was the heyday of grunge music. It was all guitars and no harmonies. Many said we didn’t know what we were doing. They were right. And in 2012, we still don’t. But we’re not alone now. Because in 2012, nobody knows what they’re doing. Except for Steve Jobs and Amanda Palmer.”

This is how Ben Folds Five opened their crowdfunding campaign video on Pledge Music.

Besides being incredibly funny to anyone who follows musician crowdfunding, it’s also illuminating. Crowdfunding for musicians — particularly those who have had success releasing albums in the “traditional” way — is often thought of as an “experiment”.

But what’s really more experimental: taking a loan from a record label where 9 out of 10 artists fail to turn a profit, or asking 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 of your biggest fans to finance the record with hardly any risk?

Even though Kickstarter raises more money for artists than the National Endowment for the Arts, crowdfunding is still an experiment?

Crowdfunding is no longer an experiment. It’s a proven formula. We’re still figuring out some of the details, but the theory is correct: fans want to support artists directly in exchange for exclusive access to the band and their creative output. If anything, it’s this musician perception of crowdfunding as “experiment” that’s slowing adoption — the fans are screaming at the top of their lungs asking for it like a back catalog request at a live show.

Musicians: the future is bright and under your control. Put on your shades and deal with it.

Of course, musicians themselves aren’t solely responsible for failing to adapt. The market itself has been slow to respond to the specific needs that surround crowdfunding an album.

There are relatively few companies that understand crowdfunding is going to be the dominant way albums will be made in the future. Certainly, you have the meteoric rise of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but they have broader missions to change the dynamic of funding creativity in general.

There are only two companies right now that are seriously and directly competing for album-specific crowdfunding. They are Sellaband and Pledge Music. It’s unfortunate that their potential is to some degree being drowned out by the juggernauts of crowdfunding (Kickstarter and Indiegogo) because what musicians truly need is a crowdfunding platform created just for them.

There certainly aren’t only two companies competing for a share of the direct-to-fan artist revenue stream. Topspin, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Reverbnation, Bandzoogle… the list goes on. The definition of “crowdfunding” could be made broad enough to include them. Here, I’m talking specifically about platforms that actually have people on staff to work with artists and their managers to produce album-specific financing campaigns.

I’m going to focus on Pledge Music because they share many basic features with Sellaband, but also have several major differentiators that I consider genius. Sellaband is the more established of the two platforms and I’m not trying to diss them, I’m just really excited about the potential behind Pledge Music’s particular approach.

Pledge Music is a managed music crowdfunding and retail marketing platform. The “managed” part? Pledge Music staff will actually set up and run your crowdfunding campaign, so it’s “white glove” service for musicians and their managers. They’re experts that will consult with your management and coordinate all efforts to minimize risk and ensure your fans are engaged and get exactly what they pay for. They’ve run the “experiment” of album crowdfunding enough to have established solid best practices for success, and have built the tools to facilitate that success.

You’ll pay a standard and reasonable 15% cut that includes all payment processing fees. With respect to its crowdfunding component, it’s analogous to what you know and love about Kickstarter or Indiegogo except for a few truly genius moves:

Crowdfunding campaigns don’t end until the album is funded.
The dollar (or euro) amount being raised is hidden from public. They only see what percentage of the album is funded so far.
99% of musicians on the platform opt to give a small portion of the funds raised to the charity of their choice.
Musicians are encouraged to market to their fans through the platform with exclusive content as part of the value offering.
When the crowdfunding campaign ends, a pre-sale window begins.

That last move is critical. When you think about it, there’s a blurry line between crowdfunding and a pre-sale. Most of the difference seems to be whether or not you have financing on the outset. So it makes perfect sense to start a pre-sale immediately after receiving financing. It’s one of those “why didin’t I think of that” strokes of genius that I see as the beating heart of Pledge Music’s common sense approach.

It’s the kind of sense that makes dollars. According to Pledge Music CEO Benji Rogers, my band left $1,661 on the table with when we recently raised $4,356 on Kickstarter.

That’s because Rogers has research showing 37% of the money raised by Pledge Music album campaigns comes in after the crowdfunding period ended. Ouch. That could have gone a long way.

See, on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, you build tons of buzz in the closing moments of your campaign to push toward and beyond your goal. Our goal was $3,666, which we hit about ten days before our campaign ended. We were able to push another $700 past that by pulling out all the promotional stops.

A few weeks later, we put the album up for pre-sale. We figured we wouldn’t get much interest because most of the fans that wanted it already got it through Kickstarter. But every day our inbox would pop up with new Bandcamp messages saying someone had pre-ordered the album. We saw the names and realized these weren’t old fans, these were new fans we’d attracted while doing all the crowdfunding promotion.

The secret to Kickstarter and Indiegogo is that they capitalize on one simple fact: true fans want more. They want the full brunt of your creative force. That’s why they’re patronizing your work. They want your creativity maximized, they want to have a hand in exposing others to what they love about your work. They don’t just want your music, they want your original lyric sheets, the shirt you wore on tour, and the bucket you puked in when you got off stage. Exclusivity is the new scarcity now that access to music is ubiquitous.

The average fan on Kickstarter contributed $39 to our campaign, as opposed to $5 for our pay-what-you-want pre-order on Bandcamp. If we turn out to have at least 42 people pre-order our album, as we’re on track to do, that actually works out to $1,661 we theoretically left on the table, because those people would have potentially purchased a reward package at a higher dollar amount had they taken part in the crowdfunding campaign.

There’s another, less obvious but very important reason to go with Pledge Music, and this applies to both small acts like mine, and the more widely known acts that seem to be Pledge’s bread and butter. It has to do with a very smart decision they made: The amount of money you’re trying to raise is never displayed in dollar amount. Users see what percentage of the goal was reached so far.

There’s this sort of inherent fear in setting your Kickstarter goal because the penalty of not reaching it is total failure. Since you also have to be 100% transparent on the amount, you’re compelled to set as low a number as you can get away with so your fan’s don’t think you’re overreaching. For example, we set our goal lower than we wanted to be safe and ended up unable to afford to hire a PR agent as we had originally planned. And there were still cost overruns in many of the rewards, some of which we’d planned for, some of which we hadn’t. On a larger scale this could have been disaster and is a fairly common complaint with Kickstarter. (Indiegogo is even more prone to this, because it rewards projects that fail to reach their goal, but takes a higher cut.)

Not only does Pledge Music have the expertise to help you avoid these problems, but their attitude is much more conducive to success: “Set the budget you need to do what you need to do, and you will get there eventually, just keep at it”. On Pledge, our band would have set our original budgeted goal of $6,000. We cut it down to $3,666 because that was our educated guess on how much we could realistically raise in 60 days, and we weren’t too far off. But it felt like the final round in the Price is Right.

Would it have taken longer than 60 days? Yes. Was there something about the deadline and the consequences that drove us and our fans to reach our goal? Yes. Obviously, it’s a big reason Kickstarter chooses to take its approach.

But here’s what it really boils down to: Behind every successful album on any platform — be it digital crowdfunding or just selling CDs out of the back of a car — is a successful manager. Kickstarter works because its platform that has features that enable the average artist to self-manage, whereas Pledge Music is built more as a tool that their campaign managers, along with the artist’s management, can use to engage the fans of the artist they represent.

You can read the case study on how our crowdfunding campaign succeeded, but basically, it was proper management and passionate promotion. I’m sure Pledge Music’s campaign managers can corroborate the amount of time and effort it takes to keep fans engaged is not to be underestimated. If I were scaling the crowdfunding campaign into five or six figures like most artists on Pledge Music, outsourcing management would quickly become mandatory.

The big lesson we’ve learned from watching projects fail on Kickstarter is that over-promising and under-delivering is a major risk. I’m reminded of many stories of indie bands that unexpectedly sold out of records or CDs and didn’t have the liquidity or production resources to keep the supply of recordings moving to fans. This is just a 21st century version of that problem.

So how to we convince musicians to embrace crowdfunding as the status quo for making albums? Education is a big part of it. With this blog and my online course, I’ve been doing everything I can to spread the word.

Ultimately, musicians will have to run the “experiment” themselves to see that it’s the most equitable financing solution for both musician and fan, potentially more lucrative than any record real if managed correctly, and much more rewarding from a basic human and artistic standpoint.

It will take companies like Pledge Music to convince musicians and their managers that crowdfunding is where music is headed. They’re going to need to better differentiate themselves from the Kickstarters and Indiegogos that dominate the market, while offering a user experience that is engaging for both fans and musicians. These are the areas that Pledge Music is weakest in. It’s not really standing out from the crowd in a marketing sense, and much of that has to do with a user experience that fails to be as innovating as the ideas behind it. Competing with Kickstarter is no small task, but I think Pledge Music has the potential to carve its own lucrative niche in the direct-to-fan artist revenue stream with the right leadership.

crowd funding crowdfunding crowdfunding for musicians IndieGoGo Kickstarter Pledge Music sellaband

Kickstarter for Bands: How We Raised $4,300+ from 112 People

My band just raised $4,356 from 112 people in 60 days on Kickstarter to release our new album Pandemic.

I’ve been espousing the virtues of crowd funding for a while now, so I’m really glad we didn’t blow our goal of $3,666. Instead, we went $690 over our goal.

There were a few strategy/marketing moves that really worked, and a few unexpected but important issues that arose during the process. I’d like to share them here with my fellow musicians.

This isn’t about how to make a great video or a great campaign — I’m assuming your campaign is already totally awesome and your album rules. I’m here to give you the war stories so you don’t repeat the same mistakes and make real money with these Kickstarter best practices for crowd funding an album.

Why We Picked Kickstarter

The first big choice is Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo vs. Pledge Music vs. Sellaband vs. Patronism. The last three were either overkill or still in beta. For most bands, the choice is going to be between Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Kickstarter is the most established, fully-featured and polished of all the platforms. The only reason to consider Indiegogo is because unlike Kickstarter, you keep whatever money you raise even if you don’t reach your goal. You will pay a 9% fee instead of a 5% fee for this honor. When we weren’t 100% confident in our goal, we lowered it until we were. Indiegogo is perfectly fine (and charges the same 5% fee if you reach your goal), but we went with the established player. Remember, many of your backers will be funding their first project and will have to sign up with Kickstarter, so it pays to go with a trusted name.

Why We Set 60 Days to Achieve our Goal Instead of 30 as Kickstarter Recommends

I’m not going to dispute Kickstarter’s assertion that 30 days is the optimum length of a campaign — I’m sure their statistics clearly show it. But for us, 60 days was the right length. I think that for bands just getting their footing with marketing and sales, it’s better to have a longer window to utilize — think of it as a challenge to keep your audience’s engagement for a continuous two months. It’s hard to do, you will make mistakes, there will be lulls… but it’s a fantastic learning experience. If you’re not in any particular rush, more time will allow you to draw in more people from outside your fan base.

Delays to Watch Out for at the Beginning

Don’t expect to have your campaign up and running the day you decide to launch it… or, for that matter, anytime that week. Unless you’ve done a campaign before, you’re going to wait 2-ish weeks for Amazon Payments and your bank to work things out to where you can accept payments. You’ll need to provide tax info — oh yeah, you’re getting taxed on this income. You really ought to have an LLC and a business checking account, but you can squeak through DBA yourself with your personal account.

You may also be delayed if any of your campaign rewards (or any other piece of data) triggers Kickstarter’s moderators to flag your submission for violating the terms of service. That’s not limited to penises in the promo video and human blood as a $100 incentive. Our campaign was stalled because our top backer package offered free admission for life to any of our band’s gigs. Apparently, lifetime rewards are not allowed. There are dozens of “small print” rules like this. For us, it was an easy fix, but it’s important to be aware your launch can be delayed a couple days if it’s not up to spec.

Remember Shipping, Taxes, Fees and Declines when Budgeting

Setting your goal is all about figuring out how much money you are 100% confident you can raise, and then creating a budget to produce the album that matches that amount. When you do this, don’t neglect to factor in additional expenses that will have a significant impact on the money that’s left over to produce the record.

Shipping – Shipping gets expensive quickly and is highly variable based on where the recipients live. You’ve really got to budget for shipping, and for that you have to guess how many of each package you’re likely to ship. Take your guesstimated total and round it up to be safe.
Taxes – If your band has an LLC or a partnership, your company will be liable for the taxes. Otherwise, the person who handles the money will be on the hook. Like shipping, taxes are difficult for the average citizen to estimate, but you should be building in some room for cost overruns in your budget, and setting aside some money for taxes alongside.
Fees – Kickstarter will take 5% of total funds raised, and Amazon will take ~3% for processing the payments (less or more depending on how much you raised). This quickly adds up to hundreds and even thousands of dollars in fees — you will wish you worked at Kickstarter when you see what they take out. Factor the fees into the budget!
Declines – Backers’ cards are charged when the campaign ends. Depending on how broke your fans are, you may get a number of declined credit cards. Kickstarter tries to get the cash by sending alerts to the backer every day for seven days after the campaign. Then they give up, and the money is gone. Everyone’s going to have one or two declines, but some may have more. You’ve got a real problem when someone backs you to the tune of hundreds or thousands, and then their card declines, but there’s nothing you can do about that except try to build a relationship with that backer outside Kickstarter before the campaign ends (which is a good idea anyway).

In our case, all of the above added up to roughly 1/4 of our total production budget, so pay very close attention to fees and charges that may not be apparent at the outset.

By the way, we were worried about how long it would take to get paid after the campaign ended because we saw some people saying it took them up to two weeks. It took two business days for the cash to hit the Amazon account, and another day to transfer to our bank account.

The Hustle

A great video, a bunch of great packages, a great album… these are all… great. But they are nothing without the hustle.

Put briefly, we made a list of around 300 people we thought would back us at some level. We also had our 600+ Facebook fans and 300+ Twitter fans as a captive audience, and we hit them up every day. But as the deadline grew closer, we ran our 300-person list like we were doing a fundraising run against terminal illnesses.

Preaching to the choir is not everything — you absolutely have to be drawing in people from outside your fan base. Around 30% of our backers were total strangers to us before the campaign. We constantly were meeting new people on Twitter and pitching the album, and that was good for a few hundred bucks. Ditto on reaching out to the Creative Commons folks, who gave us a spot on their curated Kickstarter page because we license all our music CC-BY-NC-SA.

So get out there, meet new people, and get them to back your dream.

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Musician as Entrepreneur, Band as Business – Take My Class!

Today I’m excited to announce the culmination of over two months of round-the-clock production work to answer the common musician question: “How do I make money from my music?

I proudly present Musician as Entrepreneur, Band as Business, an online course offered by Artists House Music on the Udemy eLearning platform. Watch the promo video below:

Earlier this year I teamed up with John Snyder of the awesome Artists House non-profit to plan a curriculum that would engage and educate a new generation of musicians. Artists House has a massive video library — John brought to the table hundreds of hours of video footage featuring interviews with the top names in the music business.

I edited that massive mountain of content into 5.5 carefully curated hours, and with John’s wisdom (and 85 pages of written advice) to guide the production, we emerged with a course like no other.

Please head over to Udemy to preview the course — we’ve made one section available for free so you can get a glimpse of the top-shelf, real-world education we are offering here. There are no boring lectures that drone on, just solid tips from folks who have already proved they know how to make money from music.

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Crowd Funding for Musicians 101 (Video)

The second installment of my video blog is a crash course in crowd funding for uninitiated musicians.

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The Steady Decline of the Professional Musician

The professional music career is in decline.

We could start with the RIAA’s debunked statistics painting a worst-case scenario, but that only tells one side of the story.

I’d rather look at Google, the “do no evil” company and thorn in the side of the few corporations that control the majority of the US music industry.

Search terms can’t be gamed and framed the way U.S. Bureau of Labor data can… Google Trends searches are like Shakira’s hips, they don’t lie. Let’s take a look at some common terms associated with aspiring music professionals:

The search volume for music career, learn music, music business, songwriting and music sales are all noticeably down since about a decade ago. Seeing these and other terms on a downward trend paints a clear picture of a future with less professional musicians.

Who’s to blame? Depends on who pays your bills. If you’re an old school music business person, you probably blame the content-devaluing “information wants to be free” tech sector. If you’re a new school musician, you probably have a chip on your shoulder dug deep by the exploitative, self-destructing record business which is ineptly responsible for the scorched earth you have to Mad Max a music career on these days.

Before we seek blame or solutions, let’s pause for a moment to consider what this means. Back to Google Trends. What about search terms concerned with more modern, everyday music practices?

Search volume for how to remix, mashup, garageband, how to record and how to make music are on their way up. There are more “musicians”, but less of them qualify for the “professional” distinction. You might call it the “amateurization” of music. More musicians, less music careers.

This is fun, let’s take another look at the “old way” of doing things:

Yup, interest is flagging in music publishing, music job, artist management, music copyright and music law.

So there must be a huge explosion of amateur musicianship, huh?

Hmmm… less people seem to want to go the traditional route of learning guitar and song composition through formal experience in training. This would seem to jive with less musicians going pro. Also jives with all the time those damn kids play video games on their mobile phones. They probably have a much more direct relationship to music creators, right?

Wow, crowd funding is exploding in popularity — there are clearly less careers these days built on exploitation and more facilitated through patronage. And lots of people seem to be picking up the habits of aspiring music professionals (Facebook pages, merch, albums). Perhaps we’re just in a slump, and there’s a digital music baby boom waiting to happen?

Of ourse, the situation is not as simple as I paint it here with the Google Trends graphs. For one, Google search terms are very broad in both scope and depth. If Kickstarter had an IPO, that might spike traffic, despite no correlating spike in user activity. Second, statistics can tell almost any story you want them to if you know how to frame them.

I’m not here to spew propaganda. I’m here to form solutions. Can this trend be turned around? Should we even care?

On the one hand, I believe we need more of a culture of entrepreneurship among musicians. The art/business divide is increasingly one of unsustainable, apathetic detachment from reality. It’s a cultural anachronism from a time when creative work found its utility in exploitation. Put simply, we musicians could use a little entrepreneurship with our sex, drugs and rock and roll. Everyone is creative nowadays — in a sense, creativity is getting more competitive. Those with the entrepreneurial skills have more and more opportunities for exposure than those skilled only in composition, performance or recording.

On the other hand, the music industry is growing, and while huge challenges remain (largely around copyright issues), it doesn’t seem as if the music market is in a downward trend. In fact, more people are listening to more music than ever before.

I think what’s happening is clear — we’re witnessing the dawn of a new creative class and a new type of creator-consumer.

We should continue to strive to figure out ways the old guard won’t lose all the value they invested in the music world these past few decades. But royalties — so-called “mailbox money” — are like a musician Social Security system, and just as unsustainable. Old rights owners (or their heirs) who no longer create anything are bogeying the music economy pie, leaving only tiny slices left for emerging, independent artists. This is why Spotify royalties are so low. I bet they love artists and would love to pay them, after all, they’re Swedish.

The purpose of copyright is to promote the production of creative works — how is that accomplished by giving the George Gershwin Estate millions of dollars? It may be a radical concept, but I think we need to divert some of this money into funding programs for the next generation of musicians. And we clearly need shorter copyright terms.

In any case, let’s push toward patronage and leverage the creative value in all of us to protect the independent class of musicians that represent our future. We may very well live in a world with more musicians and less professionals for a long time. But that doesn’t mean music is any better or worse off. Music is always awesome no matter how much we screw up the business side.

What is happening now is a redefinition of what a musician is (which is good because none of us can agree on a definition at the moment). We’re figuring out new ways (or rediscovering pre-phonograph ways) of doing business.

But as most fans and musicians would tell you, “Who cares about definitions and business models — turn up the music!”

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Sweden Blows U.S. Away with its National Music Scene

I was reading about a new IFPI report on digital music and how 1 in 5 U.S. music consumers now subscribes to a music streaming service. Man, we are really slow to get this whole future of music thing.

The article says “Of course the number is off the charts in Sweden,” and sure enough, a whopping 48% of Swedes are using some sort of music subscription service. But I couldn’t understand why the article said “of course”, as if it was supposed to be self-evident to me that Sweden would lead the world in streaming music.

As your typical xenophobic US citizen, I revered Sweden as a clean, pacifist, rich and equal society full of well-cultured, well-educated citizens. But I wondered, why are their music fans so evolved?

My first stop was the Swedish popular music Wikipedia page. With a population of around 9.5 million (just a million over New York City), its hits-per-capita has been through the roof since the 70s. ABBA, Europe, Roxette, Neneh Cherry, Rednex (OK, could have done without that one), Robyn, Basshunter, Nina Persson, The Cardigans, Ace of Base, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Avicii, Meshuggah, In Flames, Opeth… the quantity is matched by diversity. This isn’t even to mention Swedish producers like Denniz Pop and Max Martin who have written some of the biggest hits for U.S. artists in the past couple decades.

Is it something in the cool, crisp, refreshing Swedish mountain spring water?

Well, it was time to hit the offical Sweden Wikipedia page. I quickly found some more clues:

About 85% of the population live in urban areas.
Sweden has the world’s eighth highest per capita income.
The country is ranked as the second most competitive in the world by the World Economic Forum.
Sweden is one of the world’s most equal countries in terms of income.

Money and urban living certainly add up to heavy music consumption, but let’s dig deeper into the Music subhead:

Sweden has a prominent choral music tradition, deriving in part from the cultural importance of Swedish folk songs. In fact, out of a population of 9.5 million, it is estimated that five to size hundred thousand people sing in choirs.

Wow, so 15% of Sweden’s population sings in a choir. What do 15% of American citizens do?

OK, well, that’s depressing. Looks like the so-called “cultural leaders” of the world’s IP economy could learn a thing or two about music culture from the Swedes.

I Googled a little deeper and came across a 2010 Pitchfork.com article asking “What’s the Matter with Sweden? Wait, there’s something wrong? It starts:

“The first time the Knife got money from the Swedish Arts Council was in 2001… The electro-pop duo received 45,000 Swedish kronor (SEK), or about $6,327 — ‘pretty standard for albums back then'”

Wait, what? The Swedish government gave an eletro-pop band $6K to record an album? Can you imagine what Southern Republicans would say if the Bush administration gave Gwar $6K?

Reading down the article, one quickly realizes Pitchfork was just pulling a hipster fake out on you, and there really isn’t anything wrong with Sweden. Everything looks right.

Sure, it takes a tax rate around 50% of GDP (it’s closer to 28% in the US), but it adds up to tens of millions of dollars in arts and music funding. We’ve got the National Endowment for the Arts, but try getting a grant out of them for your electro-pop band.

Could it be that simple? Could Sweden’s secret be public funding of the arts?

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Living Rooms as Music Venues: Interview with Concerts in Your Home Founder Fran Snyder

Your living room was made for music. Fran Snyder’s Concerts in Your Home website was made to do “nothing less than rebuild the touring infrastructure for small touring acts.”

The idea behind Snyder’s website is simple: Hosts sign up to welcome touring artists into their living room. Beneath that simple idea is a complex operation to cultivate a community of musicians and music lovers in a win-win value exchange.

I recently wrote about the living room show trend, and that’s how we got to talking about the triumphs and tribulations he experienced in his years setting up one of the most incredible independent networks of support and camaraderie for musicians and fans alike. I’m thankful to have Snyder’s input for the “living room show” section of my book, but the whole interview was so great I transcribed the best parts here so you could appreciate Snyder’s dedication to supporting music and musicians. Let’s look under the hood of this ambitious and successful operation:

How did Concerts in Your Home start out?

I started as a performer in the early ’90s doing every kind of gig there was: the bars, the beaches, the restaurants, all that kind of stuff. I was continually frustrated by the fact that I was putting myself in situations playing music for people that weren’t really interested, and not liking the idea of having to fight for their attention or to be a human jukebox. Anyway, “woe is me”… that’s what every musician faces when they first start out.

After graduation, I played concert hall opening slots and did the college circuit for many years, traveling around the country. I finally tried a house show with one of my fans and instantly fell in love with it. I realized, “this is why I do music, it’s about connecting.” Obviously I need to make a living, but the idea of fame and fortune were never driving factors. For me, making money is not something you have to reject out of hand, but it’s important to know why you do what you do. House concerts really woke me up to the idea of being intimate with the crowd, talking to people, sharing stores, getting to elaborate a little bit about who I am, the history behind the songs, and the things that make me tick.

It was transformational for me, and at the time in 2006 there really wasn’t a good website to promote the idea of house concerts, so I set about fixing that. I asked myself “How can we inspire people to host shows? How can we help artists connect with these people?”

When I realized how much work it was going to be, I had to figure out a way for it to pay for itself, and that’s how we came up with our business model of helping the hosts for free — they help the artists, and the artists keep us going with a membership fee.

So it all started out with the living rooms you were playing and it spread virally from there?

Yes, there are a couple of cultural hotspots when it comes to house concerts: Texas, California, and places in the southeast and northeast where you have folk festivals. A lot of these folk artists really give access to their fans, and at some point word gets around at the festivals about the house concerts, and people start inviting people.

Part of the growth of our site was finding these people and showing them, “Here’s this resource…. we don’t want you to sign up just so you’re on our list, we want to help you, we want to provide tools and give you a community of like-minded people where you can share ideas and get to know each other. That’s how it has grown.

What motivates a host to put on one of these shows?

We’ve noticed that a lot of our hosts are empty-nesters, so they’ve got a house with space that feels a little empty. They love to entertain, and it’s easy for them to accommodate guests overnight, so they have this perfect space and they have all this new free time that they need to fill with a hobby.

The romantic notion is that a lot of these hosts play an instrument, and have at one time or another dreamed about being an artist. Maybe they got locked into a career too early, had kids too early, and made the decision to go for security instead of art. Now, 20 years later, they’re finding they can bring music back into their lives by supporting the artists that are out there doing it… and not just as a pass through guest. Many times, hosts develop friendships with the artists.

What are the unique challenges that a host faces to host a living room show?

It should come as no surprise the biggest challenge is getting people to show up, getting people to commit in a reasonable amount of time — that is, giving the host an RSVP instead of waiting until the night before to decide to come. People say they’re going to come and then cancel, or don’t show up and don’t even tell you. Those are the two pariahs of this business, and in that sense it is not unlike the clubs. Butts in seats is the most challenging thing.

What we try to do is set each host on an easy path to success, and the way we do that is to start small. We have what we call a “Dinner and Song” or “Dessert and Song” during the week, and just get seven or ten people to show up. Artists are dying for meaningful things to do during the week, and when you throw in the value of a free place to stay, a free meal, and a captive audience, that means they didn’t have to spend ten hours promoting the show. The musician just gets to show up and do what they do best, be friendly and make friends.

So if the host sets a limit and says, “We’re going to have a Dinner and Song and we’re only allowing in ten people, they can sell it out.” They can invite 150 people, and then 40 will respond, and 30 of them will be disappointed they didn’t RSVP soon enough. That’s how you train people that what you’re doing is valuable an in demand. That’s how you create a buzz, right? You can’t create a buzz if you’re not turning people away. That’s how you make someone feel they can be a part of something special before they even show up at the door.

What motivates musicians to join the Concerts in Your Home community?

I think a lot of them are like me, I think they’re fed up with playing places where they’re not paid attention to, and they’ve got to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

One of the key things for me — even though it’s not explicitly stated — when you play in a bar, the value of what you do is measured by how much alcohol is sold. And I think that’s a shitty way to measure music. I don’t have a problem with people drinking, that doesn’t bother me at all. But if the value of what I deliver to people is measured in alcohol sales, I think it’s a pretty shitty way to measure what I do.

What does the music fan get out of it?

The big attraction both for hosts and fans of house concerts is the pin-drop atmosphere. You don’t have the drunk guy behind you talking while you’re trying to listen to music, so it’s movie theater etiquette. And when artists have everyone’s attention, magical things start to happen. It becomes spiritual, it becomes communal, it takes the show to another level. There’s a sort of unity, a “Kumbaya” thing where we’re all one — that starts to be tangible. I think that’s a big part of the appeal to fans, the house concert high: “We were all there, we were a part of something.”

I think a lot of shows inspire a looser atmosphere too, but anything that’s going on has to do with the show. So, even if you have the performer joking around with the people in the second row, or getting their shoe tied by someone in the front row because they’re so close — it all serves the show as opposed to being a distraction.

What is it about the music climate or the music industry right now that has encouraged this living room trend to gain so much traction and popularity?

There’s a couple ways to look at this. Demographically, kids don’t buy CDs. When I was first starting out, the hot market was the CDs you sold to kids. Everyone was trying to be half their age in terms of material and presentation so they could appeal to 16 year-olds and 19 year-olds because those were the people who bought the music.

Well, these people are now in their 40s and 50s — well, I’m not that old — but these empty-nesters are the ones who grew up with the culture of buying a souvenir after the show. So if you’re going to sell CDs, house concerts are one of the last markets left where there are people that still value taking the music home on an artistic medium rather than a hard drive or thumb drive.

When I play colleges, people come up and say, “You’re awesome!” and I say, “Thanks, do you want to buy a CD?” And they say, “No, we’ll just check you out online.” You hear that enough times, and you say, “Well, shit, why am I making all these CDs? Why am I playing for 22 year-olds who don’t want what I need to sell to live?” That is the demographic answer.

But I think with technology, community starts developing over the Internet — the idea of sharing spaces and sharing experiences is another thing that causes the upswing [in house concerts].

Even more important that that is the idea of embracing small — that’s probably the most important part of why house concerts are surging. Twenty years ago, you pretty much went out to a bar, drank, and listened to bands — that’s what you did on weekends. Now you have video games, groups for every interest under the sun. There are more sports on TV and on the field than ever before. There are so many distractions. So we can’t have 400-500 people at the club every weekend listing to original music. You have to figure out ways where if the shows are going to be smaller, how do you make that work? And house concerts are the best example I’ve seen of making it work.

When dealing with professional musicians who are used to professional venues, is there an attitude adjustment that needs to happen before they feel comfortable performing in a living room?

I think it depends. Ellis Paul, because of what he’s accomplished — because he can still sell out small- to medium-sized venues in 30 or 40 markets — he has a different standard. He’s not going to do a house concert for 30 people — you have to have big house. You have to seat 80-100 people at your house to have Ellis Paul play, and even then, it’s tough to get him. So part of that is just the economics of success. You’re going to go where you’re going to be the most productive.

There are artists that feel they should be at the level of Ellis Paul — or maybe once were and are no longer — that are facing the wake up call of, “Okay, I have to learn to make do with less, I have to learn to enjoy to play for smaller crowds.” Some take to it like a duck to water because of the atmosphere, and for some of them, the economics really still bugs them.

To put a finer point on it: Because we encourage so many hosts to start small, the idea of playing for 12 people in a cozy living room, even on a Wendesday night… there are a lot of artists that say, “I can’t do that, I won’t do that.” And that’s fine. They can go play a club and have 12 people there. And then they have to go find a place to stay. (laughs)

The prima donna stuff does not cut it in our market. Fortunately, there are a lot of really talented artists out there who are nice people with decent expectations, and even when they have odd experiences they can handle it gracefully and move on to the next opportunity and the next day.

This is not a perfect world. We have people who try to host concerts and fail. There are some who will schedule a show and cancel it a few weeks out. We have 20-30 new hosts each month that we train and coach to try and get them on the right foot, and not all of them succeed.

It sounds like you’re very hands-on with the hosts…

Oh yeah, we’re hands on with everybody. Everyone who joins the site has a conversation with us. We don’t have the money for background checks. We try to get a sense of why they’re doing it and make sure they know what they’re getting into and their responsibilities. That slows things down, but we think it’s a really important thing, especially when we have 22-year old women touring by themselves, we don’t want this site to be anonymous.

Where do you want to take living room concerts next?

We started a new website called BenefitArtists.com which basically allows us to tie artists together with charities. The charities help us build an audience and we help them raise money. We connect charities with artists who have an affinity for that cause, so it’s a win-win situation. An artist gets to support a cause they love, and they help the host build an audience.

Listening Room Network is becoming our fan portal. Within the next few months that’s going to really develop in terms of creating a house concert club. If you’re into this experience you’re going to be able to meet people with similar interests and connect with all the house concerts in your area.

Our goal here is to get our community to the point where we have all these hubs that develop organically, where artists can book a tour off of one conversation. They get connected with the right host, who’s connected with the other hosts, and the artist will book five or ten shows with one contact. To me, that’s where this needs to go, because booking is impossible. It’s ridiculously draining, and we have all these artists spending more time booking and doing social media than they are on their music. To me, that is a huge loss. We [musicians] are terrible at booking, we hate it. What I’m trying to do is create a system where the fans are enabled and empowered to make it happen and to do it through community. Everyone else out there is trying to do it through technology, we’re trying to do it through community.

Visit Concerts in Your Home.

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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?

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