Well, I thought it’s time to introduce myself on the RMM blog, so I just want to give everyone a big American hug (we do that there) and say thanks for having me on such a fantastic team. I’m a sophomore at NYU studying “Media, Culture, and Communication” and French and I’m studying here in London until May. I work on my own tiny company doing web design, social media, and marketing. I’m launching the music-specific part of it in a month or so since that’s where my passion lies, but in the mean time I’ve been doing some web sites for independent musicians, widgets for Bad Boy and some side projects just for fun like this Mariah Carey widget.
A new Wired.com article comments on the new crop of sites like SellABand.com that allow fans to invest in unknown musicians they like in order to fund a top-notch $50,000 studio session with a big name producer for the band. Revenue from the musical ventures are split between the web site, the investors, and the artists. Pretty cool. I wonder, though, if this type of venture is truly the future of music. Really, all the site is doing is cutting out the “discovery” job a label performs. I think what it does say about the music business is that the industry is shifting towards a more democratized and social one, putting choice into the hands of the consumer, while still relying on record labels to promote and distrubute music.
More thoughts on this after the jump.
SellABand and similar sites, like MySpace, I think are pointing to the idea that social media is revolutionizing the way consumers engage with music, but for musicians, a record deal is still the ultimate goal. Look at American Idol (errr….I mean Pop Idol) – the big prize is an expensive record deal with a huge label, not a featured MySpace Music page or a deal with iTunes. Even singer Colbie Caillat, who gained popularity via her MySpace page, eventually signed with a big label (Universal); MySpace was a powerful tool to getting discovered, but once it fulfilled that purpose, it went back to being a marketing tool. On a similar site to SellaBand called slicethepie, they boast of a the success story of one of their bands getting signed to a big-name label after gaining exposure on their site – and how the band gave profits back to their initial investors.
I’m thinking these new Web 2.0 deals and innovations are great ways for artists to gain exposure and are changing the industry by allowing music fans to have the more direct role in the process that they desire. The SellaBand and MySpaces could be considered the demo tapes of today – and the social network users are the new democratized A&R department. Similarly to what we value in KUDOS, these social media tools are beneficial to both the consumers (music fans who get better music) and the brand (record labels who are looking for ways to improve their product, in this case bands, by finding artists that are more in tune to what people are listening to). I wonder what other tools may pop up that take elements of the old-school music business and put a social media spin on it?
Unless artists are going to pick up millions of fans and get signed for their first five albums just for being so damn cool they can’t help it, it is perhaps important that they manage their fan bases to optimise their success.
Kevin Kelly suggests that success can be found from nurturing 1,000 true fans. Well, it’s 1,000 per band member really, and it’s just an approximation. But I think this is still a good example of an overriding principle of how to exploit large social media populations – picking out the few great voices from the surrounding noise out there. It’s about creating order from chaos.
Of course, this requires “creatives” to become business-like, something they’re not well known for. But that’s almost a little relieving. If artists could manage themselves better they’d take over the world. Then what would the rest of us chumps have to do?