Tag Archives: music industry

Bundle Update

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I’ve been lost in opera/thesis land for a while, hiding out in my parents’ jungle-like garden home. I haven’t been keeping up with the outside world all that well (the vegetation is thick!), but I bring you a few updates on older stuff and a peek at a new initiative to promote experimental music.

A couple of weeks ago, in The Power of Bundles, I talked about a nifty site selling indie music as a pay-what-you-want bundle. With only 10 hours left to go, I went to check out its progress. It seems the sales slowed down a little after the initial spurt and the total now sits around $400,000. It’s a healthy $66,000 per album minus charity and the website’s share. More importantly, this music reached an audience of almost 50,000 people. Definitely an idea worth exploring for contemporary art music.

I’d like to point out a new experimental music company braving the web frontier. Soundcarrier Music Network* is a new site founded by Halifax musicians Norman Adams and Alex Kall active in the Atlantic improv scene. The site distributes “improvised, experimental, new and free music” selling both studio albums and high quality live recordings. The approach recognizes the value of distributing rougher concert recordings, which is especially appropriate for the more improv-based scene they cater to. The site also charges more for individual tracks longer than 10 minutes. Soundcarrier’s catalogue is still quite small and I’m not sure how they are promoting themselves, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them if you are into that sort of thing.

In Explores of New Frontiers I talked about a somewhat misguided use of crowdfunding platforms. I hoped to be wrong because they seem like a lovely organization, but a month in, that particular campaign is sitting at only $380. But they still have 27 days to go. Maybe their fans will come through in the end.

In other news, I finally bought my plane tickets to Kyiv (Kiev) and will have the pleasure of spending the night on a bench at the Frederic Chopin airport in Warsaw. I am expecting a piano at every gate featuring skillful renditions of mazurkas and nocturnes by the flight attendants. It should set me up nicely for my work in Ukraine (see Village Crawl in Ukraine).

* University-trained musicians love long names and ‘networks.’ Perhaps they felt the need to expand it out because there are already quite a few things named ‘soundcarrier’ floating around on the web, including a maker of amplifiers and a band.

Why should I ‘like’ you?

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I was recently asked by an arts organization if I visited/became a fan of their Facebook page. The question painfully reminded me of all the sad looking signs I see outside bars and gas stations demanding that I ‘like’ them on Facebook. My first and only question is always, “Why?”

What does ‘liking’ you get me? Why should I expose myself and give you more clout? Why should I engage?

In this particular case, I had in fact visited and ‘liked’ that page and I had to evaluate my motives. I also asked myself if I engaged with that page since ‘liking’ it. The answer was selfishly simple. I ‘liked’ it because I knew there would be content about ME posted on this page. After this happened, I had no other reason to go there. All the other info, which appears on this page, can be found elsewhere much more quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, the page is simply a bulletin board for reposting content which already appears on the organization’s website. It was yet another channel for their marketing department to deliver their story in a one-way direction, which did not invite interaction. My personal engagement with the page ended right there.

This got me thinking about the idea of fan pages in general. There is a huge difference between a fan page created by the fans and one originating from the object of affection itself. The first might loosely revolve around the idea of this object or person, but it’s ultimately about the fans themselves and their relationship to this entity. It’s about the community created through this common fixation, a platform designed to connect and validate its users. The object of affection might occasionally engage in this community to give it further encouragement for existing, but as an individual person or idea, they are quite secondary to its purpose.

The second type of fan page is ultimately a megaphone designed to tell a particular story to what it hopes is a captive audience. The problem is that it’s never captive.

Facebook is an online community designed to engage users in each other’s stories. When a single individual’s stream of status updates becomes a megaphone for every detail in his over-glorified life, people simply ‘unsubscribe’ and this person ceases to exist in their world. The same can be said about a business or organization page. If it’s only about them, it’s of no interest to most of us because we have no room to weave ourselves into their narrative. And the scariest thing is that once someone took the trouble to mute you out, you are very unlikely to engage with her again. She no longer acknowledges your existence.

So it seems that to design a successful fan page or organization profile page, you need to step back and allow your users to tell their own story. The page needs to be a comfortable platform that encourages sharing and inspires user-generated content. The organization’s agenda is promoted through this gently directed conversation.

How does one go about building that? I’m going to cop out at this point and say that there’s probably not a single correct model for this. The right approach probably depends on the nature of the community one desires to engage. I would love to hear thoughts on this and see successful examples if anyone has them.

Crowdfunding as a leveraging tool

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Crowdfunding is a platform that allows many people to contribute varying amounts of money towards a project. It is the idea of patronage broken up into small pieces allowing a multitude of dedicated and curious people to participate in the creation process. The idea has been very successfully implemented digitally through websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where the creator can offer various rewards for different levels of support. I am seeing many successful examples of this fundraising tactic in the art music world for things like commissioning, concert production, tours and recording projects. I recently came across a project initiated by the Kronos Quartet to raise money for their next Under 30 commissioning project. It’s something that I’m itching to try myself.

Seth Godin, a marketer and non-fiction author who fearlessly navigates the turbulent terrain of the modern world, just launched a project that uses crowdfunding as something more than a purely fundraising tool. Through The Icarus Deception project, he is harnessing the power of Kickstarter to blend new and old media for the dissemination of ideas: the internet with its ebook and blog, and traditional paper publishing.

The project was set up to essentially presell his new book in various forms to dedicated fans, giving them rewards for jumping on the bandwagon early. If the project reached its goal of $40,000 by a set date, the new book would be published in paper form and distributed through traditional channels. The genius of the idea is that he is not really using Kickstarter to fund the publishing process, but rather to simultaneously gage and create interest in his new book before he writes a single word. It becomes a kind of leveraging tool in the risky and costly world of paper publishing.

What if you were to apply this idea to the risky and very expensive process of producing a new orchestral work? An opera? These require huge investments in time and money with extremely uncertain payoffs (and I don’t even mean “payoffs” in terms of profit, but rather audience interest).

What if, as a composers, you took matters into your own hands rather than waiting for a giant behemoth of an orchestra or opera company to warm up to such a risk? You fundraise your own commission fee while simultaneously measuring and generating excitement about the work before it’s even on paper, before you’ve invested so much of yourself into it. Now you are coming to the producer with something more tangible, you have leverage. You are bringing a ‘tribe’ of dedicated followers who have already invested money and curiosity into your idea. No, you haven’t taken away all the risk, but maybe you’ve made that leap a little more appealing.

Crowdfunding can seem magical. Godin’s project reached its goal within the first two hours and 24 hours later it was sitting at almost $190,000, nearly five times its goal. But he has a huge tribe of dedicated readers already.

The success of such a venture really depends on how hard you’ve worked building up your following. You can’t pop out of nothing and expect explosive results. First, you need to take the time to build up a trusting network of supporters. Second, you need to offer valuable* rewards for their faith. This kind of initiative, if done right, can help you reach out beyond that close circle. It’s about using the fast, low-cost digital platforms to encourage the slow and expensive institutions to bring your art to life. You also get to really connect with your fans in the process, which is priceless.

* Your followers should really be getting something unique for their bravery and dedication, be it an unforgettable experience, a limited-edition object or an exclusive peek inside the creation process. It’s not worth thinking about this as a pity donation with a token trinket attached.

Trained to look for a job

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“Culture changes to match the economy, not the other way around. The economy needed an institution that would churn out compliant workers, so we built it. Factories didn’t happen because there were schools; schools happened because there were factories.

The reason so many people grow up to look for a job is that the economy has needed people who would grow up to look for a job.” (Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams ,section 13)

In this free ebook available here, Seth Godin dissects the public school system arguing that it was designed to produce the ideal factory worker and that this goal is no longer meeting society’s needs.

Most of us don’t associate art music composition with factory work and mass culture. We like to think that we are above all that garbage and compliance, that we are doing something different with our lives, that we are changing the world and leaving a mark.

But how many composition students do you know going through school with the aim to find a university teaching position? How many of them complain that there aren’t enough such positions? How many think that their career is hopeless because of that?

How many music departments train their students to be composers? How many train their students to be university professors? Those concepts are not at all the same.

For many aspiring, talented young composers, composition becomes a factory job and university is designed to get you to that job, if you can find it. You spend years of your life perfecting your craft so that you can teach rudimentary theory, counterpoint and ear training to the next generation of musical factory workers.

Is this what you wanted when you decided to study music at university? Or have you just fallen into the rut that mass education created for you?

If you did actually want to be a teacher, then think about what you really wanted to teach and how you wanted to teach it. Are you doing that? Or are you a cog churning out more cogs?

If chosen well and approached critically, university can be a wonderful place of learning and passion, a time for you to hone your skills in relative safety and financial stability. But it’s worth reminding yourself of your goals from time to time and to check if your path is still leading you there, else you become an automaton being pushed along the assembly line.

Economies of Paper Sizes

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Recently, I had to produce a set of parts for my new ensemble piece, The Unanswered. The whole experience got me thinking about paper size and its effect on cost.

I had to format said parts according to the MOLA Guidelines for Music Preparation, which suggests parts with a staff size of no less than 8.5 mm printed on 10×13 inch paper. Also, “to avoid show-through of music from the reverse side, to ensure durability, and to stand up to on-stage wind patterns caused by ventilation systems” the paper needs to be 60-70lb.

What got me here was the 10×13 inch paper. What kind of a size is that? It’s a weird size that you can’t buy in a store and that’s not carried by everyday print shops like Staples or Kinko’s. According to this fairly extensive Wikipedia article, it’s not a standard size anywhere in the world. Some CMC offices carry it, but we are not all fortunate enough to live close to one (and I don’t think the stuff they carry is quite so heavy).

So, to get something like this printed in a smaller city like Halifax, you have to go to a professional print shop where paper can be cut to any size. For me to print my 52 pages worth of parts at such a shop would cost approximately $45 + tax (Etc Press).

What if you use the FAR more prevalent 8.5×11 inch paper? Simply reducing the whole part creates a staff size that is too small (only 7.0 mm), so you need to reformat somewhat. That adds about an extra page to each part. So, let’s make it 65 pages to be on the safe size. Because these parts can now be printed virtually anywhere, what does that do to the cost? Printed at Staples, which tends to be the cheapest, it would only be $11.05 + tax. Yes, that’s a quarter of the cost. The more specialized the product, the more expensive it is to produce.

My piece only requires 11 parts and it is only 8 minutes long. Now imagine scaling that up to an orchestra of roughly 100 people performing something longer. The price difference gets into the hundreds.

This is probably not a big concern for music publishers who print huge volumes. But what about an orchestra having to produce parts for a brand new piece they commissioned? A lonely composer forced to prepare parts without any support from the performing organization? It seems silly to spend so much more for the sake of convention, especially when the piece will likely get only one performance.

In an industry always complaining about lack of funding, why not break with some traditions and switch to the standardized and cheaper option? It’s one way to cut cost where the music won’t suffer at all, but the musician’s wallet might suffer a little less.

What did I end up doing? I printed the parts on 11×17 inch paper and trimmed them myself, one page at a time. I hope I never have to do that for orchestral parts.