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Seshmeister
11-13-2009, 01:21 AM
You don’t need to sell a million to make a mint - Times Online (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6902843.ece)

UK article £1 = $1.7 and €1 = $1.5


On October 14, the Danish singer-songwriter Tina Dico celebrated her 32nd birthday by announcing her latest project on Pledge Music. For €10 (£9), pledgers got a download of The Road to Gavle (inspired by her soundtrack to Oldboys, a Danish independent film) ahead of time, as well as exclusive video blogs, unreleased songs and live recordings. But there was more on offer. The €300 premium package gave pledgers her seven albums and a Christmas card (all signed), along with a personalised video message and song. Other variations offered signed albums and cards, handwritten lyric sheets or tickets to private gigs. Within 24 hours, she had pledges of €35,000 from only 600 fans. All the premium packages were gone.

That evening, Dico, who has been living in London for the past eight years, sold out the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. At least half of the audience had flown over from Denmark to help her celebrate. An established star in her home country, with a growing following abroad, Dico sells on average 80,000 albums. Apart from a brief, unhappy sojourn with Sony, she has always been independent. Her intimate songs are enhanced, not harmed, by relatively low recording budgets, she tours with only two musicians and she has embraced the opportunities technology has given to keep close to her fans on her website (tinadico.com). She controls her own destiny and she makes a good living.

“If an artist has 5,000 fans willing to spend £40 on them every year, they can have a long career,” says Dico’s manager, Jonathan Morley. “They may not be living in a mansion, but they will be stable financially.”

The hard part is getting 5,000 fans to buy the album and T-shirt, go to a couple of gigs and still crave more. Best suited are solo artists in a well-defined niche, with a post-credit-crunch financial consciousness and a determination to put in the work, to interact and communicate with their fans. In the Facebook world, staying in touch is not difficult, although websites need to be regularly updated and to reek of reality, not hype.

The key is financial independence. Selling 100,000 albums on a major label, even on its top-whack 20% royalty, won’t put much of a dent in the £500,000 it has spent to get that many sales. If it’s your own label, you can be in profit selling a tenth of that number.

Stephen Dale Petit, a California-born guitarist and blues evangelist, financed his first album, Guitarama, by busking on the Tube. Now Petit (guitararama.co.uk) can sell out the 100 Club, in London, regularly, while his summer tour featured the former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor.

Merchandising is a crucial part of his profit margin. “You can make a good-quality T-shirt for less than £2,” says Mike Andrews, of Enable Music, who advises independent artists. “Selling it for £10 can be seen as a bargain.” Providing quality connects with fans and does not have to be prohibitively expensive. It costs about 80p to produce a CD in an attractive fold-out sleeve rather than a tatty jewel case. Selling that at a gig for £10 nets a £9 profit. If the act were signed to a major, they would have to pay dealer price for their own album, netting about £2.50 a sale.

That is why Kate Walsh can afford to support Paolo Nutini on his European tour. If she can sell 25-50 copies a night of her three albums and her EPs, that will make enough to pay her expenses. While she’s not a huge shifter of T-shirts, the EP on which she covers three of her favourite 1980s songs is particularly popular at gigs. Two years ago, the singer-songwriter (katewalsh.co.uk) recorded an album in her producer’s bedroom for £500. Tim’s House became an iTunes sensation, outselling Take That. With a minimal marketing and PR spend, the album sold close to 10,000 copies and was picked up by Universal, which promptly spent a lot of money failing to turn Walsh into the next Norah Jones. After she recorded the excellent Light & Dark, the label, preferring to put its marketing efforts into Pixie Lott, dropped her.

“The advantage of signing a big deal is that it puts wedge in the bank and keeps the manager solvent,” smiles Morley, who met Walsh at a Tina Dico gig. “Universal needed to sell at least 100,000 albums, but those are traditional big-record-company expectations, and it quickly became obvious that Kate didn’t fit. So we went back to doing it ourselves. At the moment, Kate is not going to sell a million albums, but there are plenty more people who could love what she does. It costs her £10,000 to make an album, and in four years’ time she will have four albums out and she’ll be playing 50 to 100 shows a year to 500 people a time, selling close to 100 CDs a night. Creatively, this is a better plan.”

Publishing royalties — whether from advances, album sales or radio plays — are an essential part of Walsh’s income. She has also attracted enough attention to get a “sync”, or backing track, on the hit American television series Grey’s Anatomy, which likes to showcase unknown artists. “The slam-dunk income stream for independent artists is the sync,” says Mike Andrews. “Of course everybody wants to be in Grand Theft Auto, the Cadbury’s Flake ad or a blockbuster movie, which can all be worth £500,000, but there is money to be made on websites, from radio and TV ads and in television programmes.”

The right sync can kick-start a career. The American singer Ingrid Michaelson’s breakthrough hit, The Way I Am, first attracted attention on Grey’s Anatomy. A song played in the background will earn about $15,000 for the owner of the recording copyright and $15,000 for the writer. (However brilliantly your gothic swamp-rock numbers go down in a Brighton pub, you are unlikely to get a sync on True Blood without either a publisher or a specialist sync agent, both of whom will take at least 20% for their services.)

How do you pay for recording, marketing and touring costs without a record company? Pledge Music is one of several business models that helps artists to raise capital from their fans. Benji Rogers, an independent musician, set up Pledge (pledgemusic.com) last year because he was “tired of playing great shows, selling a good number of CDs, and still having no money”.

“I saw incredible talent that would sign to a label only to get dropped, and people selling out shows, yet still broke,” Rogers says.

“I noticed sales for larger acts dropping off sharply, fans losing interest and everybody blaming everybody else for why the music business was doing so badly. There had to be another way. Fans don’t want round plastic discs, they want personal contact. Pledge doesn’t sell CDs and DVDs. We offer fans the chance to go on a journey with the artist, in return for which they are rewarded with exclusive material. Originally, I estimated that the average pledger would spend $50. Our experience is that it is almost double that.”

Colin Smith (colinsmithmusic.com), of the New York-based Irish rockers Mr North, needed funds to master, publicise and tour his solo album, The Wilderness. Looking at his fan database, Rogers reckoned he would be lucky to raise $900. By offering everything from private gigs and answerphone messages to guitar lessons — “The three things I said I would never do” — he raised more than $23,000. Right now, Smith is out on the road, and doubtless relieved that none of his fans offered good money to go shark-diving with him.

ELVIS
11-13-2009, 08:08 AM
A mint sells for 5 cents...

standin
11-13-2009, 11:59 AM
great article!:baaa:

Nitro Express
11-13-2009, 01:05 PM
A mint sells for 5 cents...

Best used in a tumbler of bourbon.

Seshmeister
11-13-2009, 09:43 PM
It seems that there are some artists making $400k + a year without record deals using the method above.

When I was young one of my best pals was a middle distance runner and I was trying to do the music thing. I used to turn to him and say 'You have it easy, all you have to do is be really good.'

There were better bands than mine signed up as a tax dodge or fucked over in elaborate management deals.

His thing was completely empirical and objective. It was based on how fast he could run a mile whereas I had to deal with all these fucking dodgy people and luck and opinion and fashion and a dozen other factors.

Recording was really expensive and then to sell it you had to have a cover which I would have to electroset the text on.

For our younger readers this was pre-PC so that would involve getting sheets of transfers and putting them onto a master copy a letter at a time before taking it to a printers.

Now with Al Gores interweb and new technology people today have no excuse. I would have loved to be promoting a band in this environment.

If I wasn't so old I would give it another go.

Cheers!

:gulp:

GAR
11-13-2009, 11:52 PM
If I wasn't so old I would give it another go.

Won't even think about giving it a closeted-go? A myspace-go or an interweb go?

I think you're thinking about it! And why not.

Nitro Express
11-14-2009, 12:26 AM
With software and computers, people can make their own albums without having to use expensive studios. It used to be you needed a lot of financial backing to make a decent album. Not anymore. All the big boys can offer is a big marketing campaign but signing with them means they will own you, your music, and usually keep you in debt to them if you take their advance money. If you market yourself, you keep it all after the taxes and overhead are paid. You control it. I've heard so many horror stories; especially, regarding Capitol Records.

GAR
11-14-2009, 12:30 AM
I've heard so many horror stories; especially, regarding Capitol Records.

Capitol has to be the worst example. I hope that record-stack building on Vine comes down someday with the wreckers' ball.