Many bloggers and others have been discussing the success of Jonathan Coulton, “code monkey” turned full time musician. A recent NY Times article highlights what has driving Jonathan’s success – his personal interaction with fans. Many bands may already realize this is the best marketing tool, but this article makes clear what a full time job it can be.
Says Coulton: “People always think that when you’re a musician you’re sitting around strumming your guitar, and that’s your job,” he said. “But this” — he clicked his keyboard theatrically — “this is my job.”
Coulton has opportunistically leveraged his fan interest to help him be more efficient in many of his other management duties. For example, rather than pick a location to play and promote for people to show up, he polled his fans to find out where they wanted him to play, which allowed him to play and sell out a 140 seat venue in a small Pennsylvania town.
His fans have also helped create youtube videos for him, edited his music, provided guitar riffs for his songs and given him general management guidance.
Whereas, pre-internet, perhaps a band may have a street team of loyal fans, the internet has increased the potential helping power of friendship with the fans. It does take significant time and maintenance, as Jonathan states, but these viral benefits can be huge for any emerging musician, whether they have management or not.
A strong viral & real connection with fans can also help musicians adapt to the changing interests and trends in the music listening world. Many fans may be more adept and knowledgeable about the new options of the internet to market and promote music. Only when well connected to fans can musicians hope to inspire them to put their own time and expertise into helping your music and art grow to new levels. An example for this for Jonathan is the anime style video that one inspired fan made, and a website created by a British fan solely to organize fan created videos using Jonathan’s music.
A further point to note is how Coulton makes his money: 41% of his income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29% of his income is from CD sales; 18% is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11% comes from T-shirts, often bought online.
I have summarized this piece as best I could as it applies to Jonathan, but there is more information in the article about stories from other musicians. Anyone interested in learning more should definitely read the entire article.
9 Responses So Far
1
Aaron
Mar 3, 2008 at 2:01 pm
This article also discusses pricing songs. It mentions how Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.
2
matt
Mar 3, 2008 at 4:38 pm
The pricing question is certainly an ongoing debate.
Here is another statement from Jonathan in the article that I found interesting: “When you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can feel as if you’re on stage 24 hours a day.”
3
matt
Mar 4, 2008 at 11:09 pm
The woman who sang “I kissed a girl” is raising money from fans to make her next album, thus avoiding the need for a label, etc. Kind of cheesy how she is willing to name people in her song if they contribute enough money, but I guess she has got to do what she has got to do…
4
Dan
Mar 8, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Blogger Kevin Kelly believes that 1,000 True Fans are all a musician (as opposed to an entire band) needs. He discusses how artists are now receiving money from fans to complete projects before the projects get distributed to fans and others.
One example is to raise a certain amount of money first before releasing an album or book. He cites on example of an author who, once he raised $100K, then released his book online for “free” to everyone. This way he could get paid for his work by the True Fans who are willing to pay for the artistic time and effort put into the creation, and those who get the free copies of the work could then perhaps be turned into future True Fans.
Is this new model of mirco-patronage (Kevin’s words) a Win/Win scenario?
5
matt
Mar 10, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I have a feeling that this string of comments may continue for a while.. another blogger named Netvalar documented the success of Making April, a band that used Myspace to go from a small audience to selling 1,000 songs a week on iTunes.
Young pop band Making April was apparently rather disciplined in their approach – they had a defined and written goal of adding a certain number of daily Myspace friends and plays they wanted and made sure they stick to their goal. To me, the importance and advantage of a band working together as a team here speaks volumes.
They only began charging for songs (and no longer giving music away for free) after one year of heavy myspace marketing (only myspace marketing, no other places).
It is also important to note that, like J. Coulton, Making April spent time to respond to every new friend personally and on IM. And, similar to the “I kissed a girl” girl, they have used their fans to design t-shirts by offering to write a song about the winner. That particular promo got them 100,000 page hits.
Eventually they were offered a record deal.
http://blog.timelineonline.org/2008/01/12-success-tips-for-myspace.html
6
Netvalar
Mar 21, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I actually learned of Making April’s success from Ariel Publicities newsletter (http://www.arielpublicity.com/) since that post I have learned she operates her own blog.
As New Music Strategies states artists in todays world need to customize according to what they can do and every other factor they can use (including hardcore fans, David Jennings calls these Music Savants). I am currently working on putting together 2 recent online conversations the 1000 true fans mentioned above already and the get blogged about and increase music sales just as if you were part of a label.
As Matt states these comments could go on forever so let me leave this with the thought that if you had 1000 true fans who were willing to blog about you and ask other bloggers (hype machine) to do so too. And if 40 blog posts about your music just before your album released supposedly increased your sales 30% where would you be.
7
matt
May 27, 2008 at 5:13 pm
The SF Chronicle article we have in News and Notes is a nice continuation of this discussion.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/21/BUNF107OQ6.DTL
The article also contains some tidbits about companies highlighted on the V11 site:
“Independent music by definition is local music,” said Jeff Yasuda, CEO of Fuzz. “When you think about the music scene, the neo-soul movement in Philadelphia, the funk scene in Oakland, the grunge scene in Seattle, it’s all based around geography. So how do you recreate that music scene in a virtual world? That’s where Fuzz comes in.”
Indie911 offers both a social network and a management service that helps artists promote themselves on the Web. Last year, its music-selling widget ran afoul of MySpace and was banned because it broke the site’s terms.
8
Matt
Jun 1, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Here is a link to a string of comments on thegearpage.com about the music industry, the value of labels, and other insightful comments related to the discussion on this site. The discussion started from a NY Times article about the problems with giving away music for free.
http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=396577
9
Adam
Jul 1, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Here is an email from Gaby, a Bay Area musician. It is nice to see an extension of the Jonathan Coulton model being played out in the SF bay area (minus the pay part of it). Good luck GabyV and friends!
First off, please excuse the email. I am sending this to let friends know of the new site I created a couple of months ago. It’s called GabyVmusic.com. I began the site to give a new spark to the music creating process and to enable phriends to hear the other styles of music that I hold dear to my heart. So, the Gaby V Music Weekly page was created. The idea is to create one new, original song every week and upload it to the page for one year straight, which means that at the end of a year I will have 52 songs, all archived and accessible on the site for anyone to listen to. I am now on week 7, which means that 6 songs have been created and uploaded to the page for anyone and everyone to listen to and download.
The GabyVmusic.com site has really given me a nice burst of energy already. I almost forgot how much I love playing acoustic guitar at home and creating songs in a non-formal setting. There is a sense of freedom that I have regained by doing so and I am genuinely giving lots of time each week to the creation of each song. Some songs might be silly, others a bit more serious, some funky, and some folky. Regardless, the song will be new to each week and will be performed and recorded from my home.
I would love to have all of you go on the site (GabyVmusic.com) and give a listen to the songs.
In a few weeks, I am going to be inviting other musicians to perform specific weeks’ songs with me (some of these musicians many of you probably already know), which will give a nice twist to the project as well. One week I’ll bring a musician that prefers to lay down the funk, so the weeks’ song will be a funk number, another week will be aimed at an electronica piece, etc. People who subscribe to the site can give their recommendations for themes of future weeks’ as well as give feedback to past weeks. I would love to have all of your input and look forward to the songs that will be created.
I hope this email finds you well.
Much love, peace, and music.
Gaby V
http://www.GabyVmusic.com
http://myspace.com/gabyvmusic