Ways of Making Money

Ok Go Explains There Are Lots Of Ways To Make Money If You Can Get Fans

from the everything's-possible dept

Over the last few years, we've covered many of the moves by the band Ok Go -- to build up a fanbase often with the help of amazingly viral videos, ditch their major record label (EMI), and explore new business model opportunities. In the last few days, two different members of Ok Go explained a bit more of the band's thinking in two separate places, and both are worth reading. First up, we have Tim Nordwind, who did an interview with Hypebot, where he explained the band's general view on file sharing:

Obviously we'd love for anyone who has our music to buy a copy. But again, we're realistic enough to know that most music can be found online for free. And trying to block people's access to it isn't good for bands or music. If music is going to be free, then musicians will simply have to find alternative methods to make a living in the music business. People are spending money on music, but it's on the technology to play it. They spend hundreds of dollars on Ipods, but then fill it with 80 gigs of free music. That's ok, but it's just a different world now, and bands must learn to adjust.

Elsewhere in the interview, he talks about the importance of making fans happy and how the band realizes that there are lots of different ways to make money, rather than just selling music directly:

Our videos have opened up many more opportunities for us to make the things we want to make, and to chase our best and wildest ideas. Yes, we need to figure out how to make a living in a world where people don't buy music anymore. But really, we've been doing that for the last ten years. Things like licensing, touring, merch, and also now making videos through corporate sponsorship have all allowed us to keep the lights on and continue making music.

Separately, last Friday, Damian Kulash wrote a nice writeup in the Wall Street Journal all about how bands can, should and will make money going forward. In many ways the piece reminds me a bit of my future of music business models post from earlier this year -- and Kulash even uses many of the same examples in his article (Corey Smith, Amanda Palmer, Josh Freese, etc.). It's a really worthwhile read as well. He starts by pointing out that for a little over half a century, the record labels had the world convinced that the "music" industry really was just the "recorded music" industry:

For a decade, analysts have been hyperventilating about the demise of the music industry. But music isn't going away. We're just moving out of the brief period--a flash in history's pan--when an artist could expect to make a living selling records alone. Music is as old as humanity itself, and just as difficult to define. It's an ephemeral, temporal and subjective experience.



For several decades, though, from about World War II until sometime in the last 10 years, the recording industry managed to successfully and profitably pin it down to a stable, if circular, definition: Music was recordings of music. Records not only made it possible for musicians to connect with listeners anywhere, at any time, but offered a discrete package for commoditization. It was the perfect bottling of lightning: A powerful experience could be packaged in plastic and then bought and sold like any other commercial product.

But, he notes, that time is now gone, thanks in large part to the internet. But that doesn't mean the music business is in trouble. Just the business of selling recorded music. But there's lots of things musicians can sell. He highlights Corey Smith and Smith's ability to make millions by giving away his music for free, and then touring. But he also points out that touring isn't for everyone. He covers how corporate licensing has become a bigger and bigger opportunity for bands that are getting popular. While he doesn't highlight the specific economics of it, what he's really talking about is that if your band is big, you can sell your fan's attention -- which is something Ok Go has done successfully by getting corporate sponsorship of their videos. As he notes, the sponsors provide more money than the record labels with many fewer strings:

These days, money coming from a record label often comes with more embedded creative restrictions than the marketing dollars of other industries. A record label typically measures success in number of records sold. Outside sponsors, by contrast, tend to take a broader view of success. The measuring stick could be mentions in the press, traffic to a website, email addresses collected or views of online videos. Artists have meaningful, direct, and emotional access to our fans, and at a time when capturing the public's attention is increasingly difficult for the army of competing marketers, that access is a big asset.



...



Now when we need funding for a large project, we look for a sponsor. A couple weeks ago, my band held an eight-mile musical street parade through Los Angeles, courtesy of Range Rover. They brought no cars, signage or branding; they just asked that we credit them in the documentation of it. A few weeks earlier, we released a music video made in partnership with Samsung, and in February, one was underwritten by State Farm.



We had complete creative control in the productions. At the end of each clip we thanked the company involved, and genuinely, because we truly are thankful. We got the money we needed to make what we want, our fans enjoyed our videos for free, and our corporate Medicis got what their marketing departments were after: millions of eyes and goodwill from our fans. While most bands struggle to wrestle modest video budgets from labels that see videos as loss leaders, ours wind up making us a profit.

Of course, that only works if you have a big enough fanbase, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that less well known bands can use to make money as well. He talks about an up-and-coming band in LA that doesn't even have a manager that was able make money:

The unsigned and unmanaged Los Angeles band Killola toured last summer and offered deluxe USB packages that included full albums, live recordings and access to two future private online concerts for $40 per piece. Killola grossed $18,000 and wound up in the black for their tour. Mr. Donnelly says, "I can't imagine they'll be ordering their yacht anytime soon, but traditionally bands at that point in their careers aren't even breaking even on tour."

The point, Kulash, notes, is that there's a lot of things a band can sell, focusing on "selling themselves." And, the thing he doesn't mention is that, when you're focusing on selling the overall experience that is "you" as a musician or a band, it's something that can't be freely copied. People can copy the music all they want, but they can't copy you. "You" are a scarce good that can't be "pirated." That's exactly what more and more musicians are figuring out these days, and it's helping to make many more artists profitable. And, no, it doesn't mean that any artist can make money. But it certainly looks like any artist that understands this can do a hell of a lot better than they would have otherwise, if they just relied on the old way of making money in the music business.

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Case Study: How Dave Matthews Band Has Embraced The Modern Music Industry In Extraordinarily Profitable Ways

from the but-that's-impossible... dept

Over the last few weeks, we've noticed a few of our usual critics attacking the basic claims concerning successful music business models, because some of the bigger concert tours this past year ran into trouble, and because some of those tours seemed to realize they were charging too much. Of course, it's unfortunate when people misunderstand basic statistics and what data shows. First of all, we've never claimed that concerts were the only way to make money in the music business. There are lots of ways to offer scarce goods that have nothing to do with touring. Second, the fact that some big tours had trouble -- and misjudged the market is hardly a condemnation of touring as a money maker. It just means that some tours misjudged the market. This is hardly a surprise. For years, many tours had underpriced tickets, leading to a valuable aftermarket for scalpers. But over the past few years, major acts and venues have tried to capture more of that for themselves, leading them to push the market ever higher. There was obviously a limit as to how high those prices could go, and people have started to figure that out. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.



But the key point to recognize is that just because some acts misjudged the market, that's not a condemnation of these other ways to make money. This claim reminds me of similar claims back in the early 1990s about the productivity of computers in the workplace. A few companies did massive implementations that were done poorly, and turned out to be way too costly. And with poor implementation and poor planning, the end result was that these new computer systems didn't increase productivity. Suddenly, there were claims and press coverage about how computers didn't lead to any productivity gain. The mistake was conflating a bad implementation with what would happen if you implemented stuff properly. No one here has said that "just touring" automatically is a successful strategy. That's because it's not true. Instead, a properly implemented multi-prong strategy, that fits with both what the musicians want and their fans want, can work quite well.



A perfect example of that may be the Dave Matthews Band. Slate recently did an article on the massive success of the band. A big part of that, not surprisingly, is a relentless touring schedule. However, as the article notes, DMB is making a lot more money touring than most people realize. It's consistently one of the top earning touring acts in North America, despite not being as "big" a name as the others on the list. In 2010, for example, DMB was the 3rd largest grossing tour in North America, after Bon Jovi and Roger Waters, and ahead of such names as Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga and The Black Eyed Peas. And they did this with significantly lower prices than most of the other acts in the top 10. While tickets to Lady Gaga concerts averaged $98 and Sir Paul's concerts went for a staggering $138.49, DMB's average ticket price was $57.38. And, as the article notes, they did this in a massively profitable way, unlike some concert tours which cost so much as to have them losing money. On top of that, the band uses the famed Grateful Dead model for keeping fans coming back for more: changing up their songs each time, and having fun going off on different jams, that make each concert unique.



But, of course, it's not just about touring. The band has done its own version of CwF+RtB, with over 80,000 fans paying $35 per year for its fan-club (and the 80,000 number is three years old, so I'd imagine the real numbers are now much higher). That's $2.8 million from the fan club alone. Similarly, the band appears to sell a ton of merchandise. The article notes that, back in 1998, the band would sell $200,000 in merchandise per day, while on tour. Obviously, that data is way out of date, but the band seems to have little trouble coming with good "reasons to buy" for its fans.



I have no doubt that the usual critics will mock this, claim it's an exception, or somehow complain that this is somehow "bad." But it seems clear that it's working great for the band itself, and they're quite happy with it. And, really, in the end, that's what these business models are about. Finding the right mix for bands to connect with fans in a meaningful way, while setting up the structure that allows those fans to support the band. DMB seems like a perfect example of a band doing this on a massively large scale.

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