25 July 2009 — 1000 True Fans
THE STORY OF THE 1000 FANS
A couple of years ago I attended a lecture by Jamie Oehlers which dealt with the commercial side of being a musician. Jamie talked about the depressingly small number of albums a jazz artist could expect to sell, but then looked at pragmatic approaches to making a living out of playing music.
One of the things he brought up was a story about a friend of his who was a blues musician, who decided early on that he was going to take a more direct approach to dealing with fans. He worked out that he only needed to find 1000 fans worldwide to buy one album of his each year, in order to make a successful career. This was obviously in addition to live performance and possibly teaching also.
This was an interesting thought, and one that seemed fairly revolutionary in its own way at the time. It implied that there was an avenue that had gone previously unexplored, by musicians who were too obsessed with making it big to think about a more small-scale approach to music production and distribution.
I was reminded of this story by reading this post, by Kevin Kelly (via DaringFireball). In it, Kelly states that
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
You can see why I remembered Jamie's lecture.
Kelly's piece excites me and worries me at the same time, in a way that Jamie's talk did once I gave it some more thought. I remember talking to Rob from Plastic Palace Alice about it once, and his reply was basically "yeah, but who's going to find 1000 people prepared to buy an album each year?".
WHY 1000?
Rob's response hints at the the significance of the number 1000. It is both large and small at the same time. For naive musicians who read stories about Michael Jackson selling 50 million copies of Thriller, it's an absurdly reasonable target. For bands who are used to 50 people turning up for a gig at the local pub, it is a reasonably ambitious one. Going on Kelly's article, this seems to be precisely the reason for picking such an arbitrary number – as he says: "One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000."
But is it? In what situation do you have to be in to think that 1000 true fans are a reasonable expectation, especially when taking into account the unstated fact that these people have to maintain their interest for longer than the general public - any band may have thousands or millions of people like them for a week, but a true fan would have to be loyal for several years at least.
GOOD FOR ONE
Kelly goes on to point out that "if you added one fan a day, it would take only three years." Huh? The tone suggests that this is almost embarrassingly easy task, but this struck me as wishful thinking for many people. One fan a day? Over three years? To put this in perspective, Plastic Palace Alice have been around for around 5 years (I think. I joined about 2 and a half years ago). Excluding family and very close friends (and perhaps even including them) we would have probably less that 10 true fans, as they are described in Kelly's post. Potential Falcon may have none at all.
Now, I'm not saying that we're the best bands in the world, or that we are prime examples of the kind of artist that Kelly is talking about, but it does raise the question: "what kind of artist easily fits this category?" Not only would we need to be more successful by a multiple of 100 to get to this elusive number of true fans, when you look at Kelly's breakdown you see that this really only works if you're a solo artist, because the income you derive from 1000 people is only decent if it goes to one person. Kelly acknowledges this, but makes some odd hypotheses:
A few caveats. This formula - one thousand direct True Fans -- is crafted for one person, the solo artist. What happens in a duet, or quartet, or movie crew? Obviously, you'll need more fans. But the additional fans you'll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group. In other words, if you increase your group size by 33%, you need add only 33% more fans. This linear growth is in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate. I would not be surprise to find that the value of your True Fans network follows the standard network effects rule, and increases as the square of the number of Fans. As your True Fans connect with each other, they will more readily increase their average spending on your works. So while increasing the numbers of artists involved in creation increases the number of True Fans needed, the increase does not explode, but rises gently and in proportion.
Did anyone else notice the bit where he got a bit crazy? If not, I'll re-quote it:
" But the additional fans you'll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group... This linear growth is in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate."
What? How on earth is this a working model for a band? Since when did the number of band members have any relation to the size of their audience? Granted, when you are just starting out, having a big band means that you have a bigger group of family and friends to play to, but this is a model that depends on a much bigger crowd than that. It's really heartening to know that such expectation of growth is not as bad as other "things in the digital domain" though. Phew!
A WORKING MODEL?
Having said all this, I still think that there are a lot of valuable ideas to draw from Kelly's essay. Being more pragmatic about the number of people you want to reach is a good idea. Not only that, but attempting to build a more intimate relationship with your fans is a noble goal, and one that more bands should try. I sometimes feel like bands are expected to remain somewhat aloof from their audience, but this isn't really possible for most bands these days, and that's a good thing. I think.
I wonder how big a band has to be to have 1000 true fans. What Australian bands have that many? Do some bands who are less well-known have a greater share of true fans, compared to others (yes, I'm thinking about The Waifs here)? Given that there are six of us in Plastic Palace Alice, does this breakdown simply prove that we will never make a profit? Can I start making money from this blog if I get 1000 people to read it every week?