Fans want to pay - they just don’t know how

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?