Entries from August 2008 ↓

There’s an article on Ars about how independent artists are not only surviving but doing quite well without labels. The article is by Jacqui Cheng, whose brother is a member of an Independent band called Panda Riot.

The key points coming out of Panda Riot’s experiences were

1.  ”The struggle is no longer getting it there, but trying to market and promote once it is there.” Distributing online is easy, the article mentions TuneCore as an easy way to sell your music online through a number of websites, including iTunes. The problem is being heard enough so that fans eventually buy your music.
2. MySpace is a great way to not only let your music be heard, but also measure reaction from listeners. From the article -
   

   MySpace is particularly useful on the band’s end because it provides a play counter on their embedded music that lets them measure reaction to certain things (new reviews going up, a feature on Internet radio, etc.)

3. Using P2P, bittorrent or other file sharing stuff is actually good. Panda Riot’s experience -
   

   The folks from Panda Riot recounted a story about their album showing up on BitTorrent and a number of other P2P networks—somehow, they found a site that listed how many times the album had been downloaded and they saw that it was relatively high. “At first, we were going to send a takedown notice, but then we decided to keep it up and see what happens,” Cook said. So… what happened?

   “Well, our sales doubled.”

So what are you doing as a musician to be heard more and more?

Of course if you think that it is problem that if people already have your music of filesharing programs why will they buy your music off TuneCore? Well, you know our answer - let them support you monetarily without needing to buy your music. Let them support you with Karmafan!

Read the article from Ars for the details of the Panda Riot story. Thanks Jacqui for sharing Panda’s experiences.

Seems like Pandora, the Internet radio trying to stay alive from advertising revenue is feeling a lot of pressure from the people who want to control distribution of music so that they control the flow of money back to the artists.

Why? Here -

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

Hypebot is encouraging people to email their congressman now. If you are in the USA, that is

What we need is fans and artists to realise that music, literature and other art forms need to break free from the controls of distributors that are suffocating both artists and us fans. We believe the way out is patronage and so do a lot of artists. We’ll get there, surely.

The BBC World Service’s program Culture Shock talks about a German fashion label, Pamoyo, who have started releasing their designs online. The designs are available under the Creative Commons (CC) License.

Pamoyo’s use CC license implies that anyone can use the Pamoyo designs as long as they say that they got their designs from Pamoyo. Also, if they make any changes/improvements to the the design they have to release the changes to the world as well - free of cost.

Listen to the BBC interviewing Pamoyo. It’s worth a listen, as the BBC guy tries to understand why it makes business and artistic sense to release designs of clothes online. Read more about Pamoyo’s license on CC’s pages.

It is heartening to see artists understand and appreciate the usefulness of releasing their works under CC like licenses.

A new survey (PDF) sponsored by the British Music Rights (which represents songwriters and music publishers) has thrown a “surprise” result which seems to say that “fans of artists do want to pay.” As a consequence a lot bloggers and informed people are talking about it - Ars Technica, Kevin Kelly, and many more.

The main point of that is being talked about is the conclusion that around 80% of respondents to the survey were willing to pay for a legitimate music sharing service. However there are other results that caught our eye -

• Around 95% of respondents had copied music in some form or the other,
• 61% of tracks in a 14-17 year old’s collection were not paid for,
• Of those who supported the idea of a music license, 90% wanted the songwriter, musician, composer and performer to benefit from it.

So people do share music and want to give something back to the artists, especially the creative people behind the record.

I must admit that the results didn’t really surprise us.  After all, we built Karmafan under the assumption that fans who enjoy the works of an artist want to give something back. However, the Ars article points out a fact from the survey that even if fans want to pay -

the majority of 14 to 24-year-olds have not actually paid for most of the music in their personal collections. The research found that 14 to 17-year-olds had paid for only 39 percent of the songs that they owned (whether these came from legit download services or CDs), while 50 percent of songs were paid for among 18 to 24-year-olds.

Now this is what we have to say to the above quote - A lot more of the young audience would pay if there was an easy way for them to pay, and they knew about it.

Karmafan provides artists a means to open numerous gateways for fans to make voluntary payments to the artist - no matter how the fans got hold of the music.

Karmafan also provides  a payment gateway that is easy for the young to use - the young that don’t have credit cards. Karmafan’s SMS (text message) feature enables young fans to support an artist by sending a simple text message (SMS). How easy is that?

For example, all someone in the US has to do to support Karmafan with $5 is to send the message “go go karmafan pay karmafan” to the number 23333. Simple, isn’t it?

So what are artists doing to tap into their fan base and encourage them to support the work - no matter how the fans got their work?