interesting
Soooo, there's a book out there called "the Long Tail", by a guy named Chris Anderson (Editor of WIRED Magazine). Coles Notes: The book is about a marketing phenomenon he calls the long tail. Sounds boring, but it's actually pretty interesting - he uses the music industry as an example in the book - basically, imagine a simple XY graph. The X axis (vertical) is the frequency/number of albums sold in a week, the Y axis (horizontal) is the rank, by name of the album. The left side is dominated by the the Top 40, new releases that are currently recieving radio air-time.
Nothing new there, but here's the interesting bit - that huge amount on the left hand side of the graph decreases dramatically as you move to the right (apparently it's the 1/n rule, not that I know what that means), eventually dwindling to zero. Even really random, small interest albums generate a few sales, and the thing that's amazing is that this area under the "long tail" is much greater than the dramatic spike at the beginning. According to Anderson, in traditional retail models, new albums account for 63% of total sales - but online, because of ease of access, unlimited supply and huge selection, those numbers are reversed, and new albums account for only 36% of total sales!
MY POINT - I found a very interesting website today called "Sell A Band".
From the site:
Fans, dubbed 'Believers', find an artist they like on SellaBand.com. For USD 10, they can buy a share, or 'Part'. Once the band has sold 5,000 parts, SellaBand arranges a professional recording, including top studios, A&R managers and producers. Believers receive a limited edition CD of the recording. The interesting twist is that the songs are then made available as free downloads. Income comes from advertising revenue, which is split three ways: artist, believer and SellaBand. Since both believers and artists benefit from getting 5,000 parts sold, both are likely to actively promote the band (and SellaBand) everywhere musicians and music fans are active: on their blogs, on their MySpace pages, in online communities, to their friends, etc. Once the recording has taken place, the same goes for SellaBand's download portal: artists and believers profit from ad revenues created by driving traffic to their download page.
The site has been up since August 2006, and so far they have 4 bands that have reached the 50,000 fan mark. Their terms are pretty reasonable - sounds like it might be an amazing way for indie groups to pick up a bigger piece of that "long tail". Not to mention record an album for free.
I wonder how successful they will be - I can see some people being pretty disappointed if they've invested $10 in a few different bands, and none of them hit 50,000 (the magic number where they get something back, physically). That's what I think is most interesting, people supporting a group with almost philanthropic (or maybe entrepreneurial is a better word!) intent - there's no instant return on your $10, no guarantee of any personal return at all. Are they supporting the industry, or the website itself? They're really only giving the band a "chance", as the band doesn't get any money until the album is in the free download stage and ad revenue starts coming in.
Is it worth it for the bands? I don't imagine much money will come in during that first year where they don't own their master and they are only getting ad revenue. Then again, I don't have any practical idea how big those ad revenue numbers might be. And a year isn't a very long time, so this might be the best opportunity some bands ever get. Either way - neat!