Duke’s note:  Remember House of Pain?  Naughty by Nature?  How about Tom Silverman (i.e. the guy who brought those two to your attention)?  Okay, well…

On a brighter note, Tom is interested in reforming the recording industry, just like everybody else who’s involved in it and has a minimum of half a brain.  To this end, Tom put on a big ole seminar in Chicago so people could hash out ideas on how to go about it (or more to the point, how it’s already happening).  I just like the fact that this headline borrows a title from one of Weird Al Yankovic’s originals.

by refe

The music industry has gone through significant changes in the past decade, and many of the major players have been slow to understand or embrace the changes. Fortunately there have been many encouraging signs recently suggesting that’s slowly beginning to change.

I attended the New Music Seminar in Chicago yesterday and had the opportunity to hear some good discussions about the past, present and possible future of the industry. The seminar, which was put on by Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy Records, seeks to be an incubator for new ideas and strategies to help artists and music professionals navigate the changing business. Panel members included Lou Plaia of ReverbNation, Ariel Hyatt of CyberPR, Bryan Calhoun of SoundExchange, Amy Phillips of Pitchfork and Martin Atkins, author of Tour:Smart.

I have tried to distill the main messages of the seminar into four bite-sized chunks. Much of this won’t be new to you if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, but these concepts are worth repeating. I’ve also put together a collection of the most interesting and entertaining quotes of the day.

Continual streams of creative output

Just about all the panelists seemed to agree that artists need to shift their focus from the traditional one-album-every-two-years mentality and embrace a more consistent schedule of individual track releases. I’ve written about this a few times, most recently here. It was good to see a few industry leaders recognizing the role that an artist’s music can play in fan engagement.

One analogy that was made compared the traditional album model to hardcover book releases, and new release strategies to subscriptions and periodicals. One you read once (though you may enjoy it immensely) and the other you develop a long-term relationship with.

The seminar’s co-founder Tom Silverman also had some good data which projects that single track downloads will be 5x higher than full album sales by 2012.

1,000 True Fans

One buzz phrase that popped up in just about every panel was the ‘1,000 True Fans’ concept popularized by Kevin Kelly. For those who are unfamiliar, the idea is that a True Fan – the kind of fan who buys everything the artist puts out – will spend about $100/year on their favorite artist. Once an artist amasses a base of about 1,000 of these they’ve built a sustainable career.

Silverman countered objections that $100,000 isn’t enough to support a four or five piece band by pointing out that the total should be closer to $255,000 once the ‘non-true’ fans spending is counted. This makes a lot of sense, because the True Fan category is likely just a small percentage of an artists overall fan base. So even though less committed fans spend less, it adds up due to their higher numbers.

Get the whole story from Creative Deconstruction

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Music Business, Music Culture, Music Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.