1000 Die Hard fans

If you haven't read the FingerTipsMusic article called Farewell to the Casual Music Fan, you should, before you read this blog entry. It is a written in response to another blog entitled 1000 True Fans by one Kevin Kelly. Both were posted at the end of last year.

Put simply Kelly puts forward a theory that any musician who can establish a fan base of 1000 die hard or true fans that will spend at least $100 dollars a year on his or her music and merchandise, can make enough to live on. (For bands, multiply these figures by the number of members).

Kelly advocates targeting true fans and side-lining the casual or lesser fans. The latter will of course also spend something from time to time, but can hopefully be drawn into true fandom with time and/or enough good product.

If, like me, you have a record collection that comprises a large percentage of records by bands that you would consider yourself to be a casual fan of, this makes for quite depressing reading.

Just by chance after reading this article I received a email from Lloyd Cole of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions fame, not a personal one but a mailing list one. In it he outlines his plan to raise $60,000 in pre-orders for his new CD in order to fund its recording. His record company, he says can't afford to do so. They would rather plough the little they do have into promotion and publicity. God! I think. How the mighty pop star hath fallen.

But when you think about it, does Cole have a choice apart from following this business model? Without this model, he, like us, would have to get a 'proper' job. Imagine being sold a mobile phone by Lloyd Cole. Or Lloyd Cole working the checkout at Sainsbury's. Or Lloyd as your postman. Your therapist. I could go on; but this is (sort of) serious.

Does this all affect us? Us hobbyists trying to knock out 500 CDs we just pressed? We make CDs, and we hope to distribute them as widely as possible, don't we? So a few thousand die hard fans buying our CDs, pre-ordering them too, and buying our T-shirts, would be unbelievable. Right?

But getting 1000 true fans each? That is a lot of work. And as you know, in most bands there's one, maybe two, people who do all that kind of work. It's a bitch.

No, most of us won't have to worry about a business model for our band. We just have to worry about getting another gig after the last one that no bugger turned up to. But as music fans, this sort of polarisation will impact on us. I don't know about you, but I'm still keen to hear new music. There's only so much classic rock that can be repackaged and regurgitated. So where am I gonna find new music now?

Genre-ised commercial radio. Maybe? Genre-ised internet radio? Maybe? But where's the variety?

First Top of the Pops got the chop, and took the Charts with it. Don't ask me what's number one, I don't know anymore. And these days it appears that musical genres only really collide at big festivals. If you can get and afford tickets, or you enjoy mud and camping and sniffer-dogs at your ankles, festivals are the place for you, once a year, to hear something you wouldn't normally.

There's always watching it on TV, too, I suppose.

The point is, the music business will only become more polarized by this 1000 true fan model, and the collective experience of enjoying the same song for the same few weeks so that it becomes a smash hit that we all remember so well, is over.

It's a bit like TV. It used to be that we all watched the same TV because there was only three or four channels, and one good programme. Enter satellite and cable and very few of us watch the same TV, save the odd TV phenomenon, such as Xfactor or I'm a Celebrity. And when you say to someone, "did you see that programme the other night on BBC4?", they invariably say "No, I missed it, I was watching Ugly Betty. Or was it CSI: Miami?".

There's always the iPlayer, I suppose.