Karmafan.com - Patronage for the Internet era

Rhodri Marsden writes on Music Think Tank about the futility of trying to sell your music. The post is written with a lot of self-deprecating humour including links to YouTube videos from the days when he was a member of a band trying to sell records after a gig.

The conclusion of the longish (though I repeat a really fun post to read) is again captured best by a couple of quotes from the post itself. The first one is when he captures why distributors can no longer be blamed. Rhodri believes, it is a band’s own fault if record sales are reaching that ‘zero number’. A bit harsh, but he seems to think it is true.

Now that we’re put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who a) don’t need warehousing space for your MP3s, b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, c) don’t care whether you’re brilliant or whether you’re bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn’t mean we can sell them – in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn’t mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can’t blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.

The second is the final conclusive paragraph -

In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they’re there. And if, against the odds, you’ve been given some cash, you’ve managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god’s sake don’t get angry. Don’t see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you’re freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you’re almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn’t make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it’s worth nothing.

The post is full of humorous analogies, really worth reading. It does make one wake up to the reality of this distribution on the Internet era - If we can’t take a record, a website, a short story, a novel, a painting to market - it is no body’s fault but our own. But more importantly trying to control the market, limiting the number of people who can hear your music to only those who will ‘pay’ for it is certainly a lost cause.

Hope you enjoy Rhodri’s post.

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?

David Rose who writes for KnowTheMusicBiz builds another case for allowing music fans to download MP3s for free. He says -

In a very unscientific test, I selected 10 of my favourite albums that have been released in the last year or so. I then checked the websites of those 10 bands* to see if they had a MP3 download store. Surprisingly only three (Big Head Todd, Kings of Leon and Matthew Ryan) had any MP3’s available for download at all. A quick check of the websites from several popular independent artists in my area found none of them had MP3 downloads available. Unfortunately several of the local artists didn’t even have their own website.

He goes on to point services like Musicane, Indie911 and easybe that allow musicians to ’sell’ their music from within other sites like MySpace.

What we find even more strange that not many musicians on MySpace use the free download facility available on MySpace. Why not let your fans get your music? They will only appreciate it more and spread the word about you to your friends, maybe even share it with their friends thanks to the numerous ways to share it straight from their music players (via a PC of course).

Interesting this week David’s post is the second one to talk about giving away music, digital audio insider called for a debate on how it is best for musicians to give away their music. Amongst the comments on the digital audio insider blog two stand out,

Someone from universal indie records says -

I’d rather give the music away to create that fanbase in the hope that down the line they’d be willing to purchase something.

The way we see things is of course how Colie Brice captures it so well by saying

“Inspiring patronage is the only hope.. Whether giving away free files or playing live..”.

Jordan Grodecki writing for Digital Music Future tells us about the success Coldplay are having with releasing their music online.

Coldplay, who released their album for free streaming on a variety of website, including their myspace, are having some serious success with sales. HMV and other retailers are stating shock at the sheer number of pre-orders, and downloads for the single on iTunes have topped 800,000, a phenominal amount I’m sure you’ll agree!

Jordan go on to say -

What does this tell us? The internet is an effective promotion tool, even when used to stream the entire album! I wish more record companies would get that into their skulls!

I guess that says it all. Jordan, thanks for putting it so nicely.

macleans.ca has a report about honour system for payments working out wonders for a bakery. Here’s a snippet from the story.

John Bergen, a former potter, has two bakeries, both of them built inside old gas stations, both of them running on the honour system. Customers serve themselves then decide how much they owe with nothing but their own conscience to enforce payment. Last year, the bakeries — one in Preston, Ont., the other in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont. — grossed $1.2 million in combined sales.

“You want a coffee?” says Bergen, explaining how the set-up works. “You serve yourself. You want a bagel? You grab a bagel. You want the bagel toasted? You go over to the little bagel cutter. You put the bagel in the toaster. You put your own cream cheese on.” A blackboard lists the prices. A coffee is $1.50. A bagel is 75 cents. Customers take what they want, then do the math in their head. To simplify arithmetic, all prices are rounded to the nearest quarter and the tax is included. “Right in front is a fare box that we got from a streetcar. You throw your money in the cash box and walk out.”There are no cash registers. There’s no tip jar. They don’t have Interac and they don’t take credit cards. “It really attracts A types,” says Bergen. Customers can be in and out in one minute without ever interacting with staff, he says.

So if such an honour system can work for bakery, what stops us from making it work for musicians, writers and artists?

Last.fm announced their revenue sharing program that allows unsigned artists to get a share of last.fm’s ad revenue. There has been a lot of discussion on blogosphere about it, here are two of the differing schools of thought.

The first says, its a ground breaking program that will help a lot of unsigned artists to get some cash to continue their work.

Since providing unsigned artists with the option to join the Artist Royalty Program in January, over 450,000 tracks have been uploaded to Last.fm and offered for free-on-demand streaming.

The second opinion was voiced on the register where it was reported that artists and some of the indie labels are complaining about the lack of transparency about the revenue shares.

Last.fm doesn’t pay most independents, and where it does, you’d need a microscope to see the royalties.

We think that indie musicians should use an excellent service like Last.fm independent of whether Last.fm’s revenue share gives them a decent amount of money or not. After all, the exposure that Last.fm can bring to an independent artists is almost as big as that on MySpace, if not more.

The biggest pro in favour of using Last.fm is that an artist’s music can be ‘accidentally’ discovered by listeners. And that is a big boon for artists working on increasing their exposure. This discovery mechanism though can be found on a lot of other services like Pandora (US only), and Imeem.

The revenue from Last.fm, if good, is then just an icing on the cake. And with last.fm taking the lead, I am sure other services will have to provide some means of revenue sharing too.

What we’d love to see though is these services providing a way for fans to ‘give something back’ to the artists. We are sure the day is not far though.

Norine Braun raised $4,280 from fans to continue her work on her album. Now that is so cool. We just hope such fan fund raisers could be more organised. Of course, Karmafan is an attempt to help artists organise these fund raisers as well.

Norine used the idea of pre sale signed CDs and selling pre-releases. I’d like to talk about another idea for such a fund raiser.

Imagine a gig where musicians play some new music and ask for support to help take the record into studio. The patron could be implicitly promised a freely available download when the recording is complete.

To make such a scenario a reality we at Karmafan built the idea of sending money to artists via SMS text messages. So you are at a gig, you like the music and send an SMS sending money to the artist. You know that when the recording is complete you can download it for free anyway.

We think such a solution is not far from being adopted, and we are providing a very useful tool for musicians to make this a reality. We are patiently waiting for musicians to come forward and try our suggested solution. If you are a musician and want to talk more about these ideas, do contact us, or leave a comment here.

Thanks to Victor from Four Stones for pointing out the story about Norine. It surely inspired this blog entry.