29 July 2009 — Band Loyalty
After writing the post below, I started thinking a bit more about what it is to be a fan these days. If a true fan is someone who is prepared to spend $100 a year on an artist, I'm not sure that the label would ever apply to me. If I had the opportunity to see Wayne Shorter perform every year, I might well pay $100 for that. Possibly. The fact that I have to create hypotheticals, however, suggests that it's unlikely.
So who does spend that much on any one artist, for more than two years in a row – if we exclude one-off spending that would average out to be much more, such as an individual painting worth thousands of dollars? Hard data would be nice to find, but I have yet to see anything that shows whether such a sum is something that music listeners ever spend on a single artist.
Lacking actual evidence though, let's take an example of an Australian teenager who listens to pop music – most of which is American. The cheapest ticket to see Beyoncé in Melbourne is about $100, ranging up to $170. She toured in 2007 also, and we can assume that the tickets were a similar price. So that's $50-$85 a year averaged out, if she were to tour every two years. This fan also decides to buy every studio album of hers and of Destiny's Child, including the "8 Days of Christmas"(!) album, and the compilation "#1s". Beyoncé has released three solo studio albums (plus a live album which, hell, I'll include too), and Destiny's Child released 7, making it 11 albums over an 11-year span from 1998 to 2009. Assuming the charitable rate of $30 an album, that's up to $80-$115 a year. If you include $50 worth of merchandise spent at each concert, that makes $130 a year. Yay! A true fan!
This model also assumes that an artist can gain new fans at the rate that she loses them: we know that it's not the same fan that goes to a concert once every two years for 10 years, but rather that for every fan that stops attending concerts she attains a new one with the same habits.
But we know that this is stretching it to the extremes. I can't find how many times Beyoncé actually toured Australia since Destiny's Child's first album, but I can't imagine it was once every two years. And it's hard to imagine that the average price of those albums was anywhere near $30. So it's highly unlikely that it's really even practically possible to spend that amount of money on a single artist over an extended period of time.
Plus, this is fucking Beyoncé! If she can't get someone to spend $100 a year on her, who can?
This suggests to me that there is a pretty good reason for attempting to reach a broader audience: true fans are a myth.