Slashdot Mirror
Online Business Model for a Band?
Backes asks: "I've seen a lot of submissions about P2P, iTMS, DRM, piracy, and the RIAA, lately. Apparently everyone has an opinion on this and most seem think that the recording industry are a bunch of greedy people that stick it to the consumer as well as their own artists. After hearing some of the stories, I'm not even sure that getting signed to a label would be the best course of action for an aspiring musician or band. So what is a better option? What would you, the Slashdot community, do to make it big on your own using the Internet?"
"What kinds of features would a site need? Would you pay for downloads of MP3s from a band's site or not? At what price? Would donations work, or would everyone just freeload? How often would you need updates or new songs to keep you coming back? If downloads were free, would you then buy a full length album from the site just to get the CD? What special features should the CD include? How would you get your name out? What do you think is the best course of action for a band that wants to completely circumvent the whole music industry process and do it themselves?"
How to protect your music/lyrics from being stolen. If I have a band and we publish music on the web (for free, or a price, whatever) how can I protect them from being stolen and used by another band?
It seems to have worked for some 'indie' bands recently, using viral marketing - offering demos or live versions of their songs via p2p, or even the full song to get publicity
After they get a name for themselves with fans who download music to check out new stuff, they make an effort to get signed, the problem here being the production of new material if they used their best to get a name for themselves online
I don't think the internet would ever top the playing in bars to get your name out, but if mixed with services such as download.com - while sharing live or demo versions on p2p, you could build yourselves a name quickly. A lot of things would also depend on the type of record label who would sign you, the 'indie' kind who give out songs online for promotion, or the big labels who try to stop download and have huge budgets for promotion
Business Voyeur
Don't be stupid. If a label offers you a contract take it. If your career goes anywhere, you can renegotiate a better contract after the terms of the first have been completed.
I agree, don't be stupid. But that's all I agree with.
90% of signed bands never release a second album, because their label dumps them first. Meanwhile, just about all bands make negative money from their first contract. This is important, if you sign with a label, you will end up in debt, you will also end up not owning your own work made while on contract. Standard label contracts are really that abusive. They get away with it, because prior to the internet, they were the only game in town.
You know why Prince changed his name for a few years to that weird multisexual symbol? Because his label owned his name. We got to hear all those jokes about it, when it was really a creative way to escape a hideously abusive recording contract.
Don't be stupid, don't sign with a major label. You never win the lottery, you ain't going to win the label lottery either.
If you are good, you don't need the labels anymore (and chances are they don't want you because "good" does not usually equal "easily packaged up as sex symbols for young teenagers").
Make your own way.
Release your current work to the net with a Creative Commons license. Promote your live performances, sell doodads.
If you are good, you'll gain a following after a while (years probably - so don't quit those day jobs just yet). With a substantial fanbase you can start working on commission. Here's how in a nutshell:
1) Set up an escrow account that people can deposit money in via paypal, credit cards and electronic checks.
2) Name your asking price for the release of a new recording - a whole album or just a track or somewhere in between.
3) Make sure your fanbase knows about your offer, publicisize it every which way you can.
4) When enough people have pre-ordered your new music (via the escrow account) to reach your asking price, release the new performance with a Creative Commons license, and take your money.
If you continue to make good music, each time you release a new track to the public, it becomes advertising for your next commission. If you get popular enough, say just 1 million fans (out of the possible 1 billion or so people on the net), you can really start raking in the bucks on the commissions - ask for a cool $1M to release your next album and all it takes is just 10% of your fans to pay $10 and you are now a very well paid artist. Your fans are happy because unlike with RIAA music, they really will own the music they buy from you, no guilt, shame or jail time for sharing copies with all of their friends and strangers too.
Everybody wins, except the RIAA and their old guard distributors, and nobody will shed a tear for them.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Check out They Might Be Downloads. Their prices compete with iTMS, but you get high-quality, LAME-encoded MP3s without any DRM. You can also pay a little extra to get FLAC rips of selected albums.
Give away some songs for free (maybe enter Songfight! once in a while and link to it), but just let people know that the songs are for sale and that they're DRM-free for the customer's convenience, and that you trust them. Charge a reasonable price and make the site easy to use and you'll get customers.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
There are quite a few successful online-only artists these days. First off, sell your CD's through CDbaby.com. They take a very small cut of your profits and will put your stuff on iTunes for you (you also get a larger cut than the standard artist there as well via cdbaby). Next, put free downloads on your site. The only way people will know if they like your music or not is if they can hear it, right? Now...I would suggest putting them in a slightly over-compressed format. Meaning, it's a high enough quality to hear your music properly, but not quite high enough for them to be satisfied with just that file. I'd suggest either a 96kbit MP3 or Q0(~64k) Ogg Vorbis file... Now they can proceed to buy your CD or download a high quality file from something like Mindawn.com. The next step, and it's the hardest one...is to get advertising of some sort. You can have the best music and the best site, but if no one knows about it, no one will ever see/hear it. This is the music industry's trump card currently, but it is possible. My current favorite band, Celldweller, does all their stuff themselves, sells primarily online, and are doing pretty well (they had a song featured in the Spiderman 2 trailers last year). They even have a small distribution deal to get their stuff in mainstream stores like Best Buy and whatnot. Good luck!
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
The recording industry ARE a bunch of greedy bastards that are just in it for the money, so any place they can squeeze out a few more bucks, they'll do it. And they know the power of Intellectual Property © ® and all the fists full of money that can generate, so they do everything they can to extend and expand copyright, so they can retain monopoly rights on something they paid someone to create but somehow they own.
But the real question is how can you make it. Well, to make it on-line as a musician, this is what I would do:
Make it easy for interested fans to find you, refer you to their friends, buy stuff from you. Make your website easy to find and accessible. If you're not so good with visual media or website design, you probably know of a geek or a family member who is good at that, you could have them make a site for you (Payment would be between you and them). Once you're big enough, see if you can setup some tour dates. Sell CDs there, give out business cards with your website URL on them. Give away CDs with a few singles on them. You can even have an introduction on the CDs and DVDs and direct them back to your website, especially on any CDs you give away. Put a data track on audio CDs and DVDs that has some promo material or music files for your band and a link to your website. Remember everything can be used to promote yourself/your band, so make sure you've got it there where you can. But don't be obnoxious about it. People understand self-promo
... And so it comes to this.
Courtney Love's article on the subject
Producer Steve Albini's take
Long story short: Stay the fuck away from major labels. Even if 'nobody has heard of you' as an independent artist, you're still more likely to make money than by being shackled to the RIAA.