Bill Clinton delivered an electoral beat-down Pappy Bush after realizing that in a recession, the economy was the most important thing on voters minds. In this recession merchandise sales are the path to “jobdom” for today’s musical artist (“stardom” is ever-elusive). But there’s a lot of competition for fan’s dollars. Touring headliners have to sell alongside opening acts with less-expensive goods, and inside clubs selling their own swag across the bar.
The All Night Party takes this problem seriously, and studied the situation. Starting with our “SceneStore” at the Midpoint Music Festival, and continuing to shows by our affiliated artists, including mallory’s slammin’ release party, we put our market research and conclusions to the test. Here’s what we learned:
When it comes to merch, more is more. All other things being equal, the band with merch covering the most different price points earns more than the band with less. In other words: you need items to sell for $1-9, not just $10 and $15.
A strong merch table can generate more revenue for artists than cover charges or guarantees. This shocked us, but after loading merch tables with a wider range of choices at different prices, it was not unusual for touring bands to earn more at the merch table than the door!
Fans prefer tangible things to intangible items. A download delivered on a throw-away card (like Starbucks Tune of the Week) is less desireable (thus worth less) than something unique, cool and/or collectable.
Downloadable music is easily attached to anything – it’s easy to print codes directly on the merch, as well as disposable tags.
The real strengths of downloads are tied to the low cost of music delivery. They’re lighter (read: cheaper) to haul than CDs, they separate the music so it’s only transferred if/when the fan requests it (read: cheaper) and environmentally more friendly and sustainable (read: cheaper) to boot.
Pure music downloadables, like Sundresses Motel and mallory’s the first one hundred years reissue are essentually pure profit vehicles. After set up charges, the only remaining expenses are design and printing. Printing paper or card stock is much cheaper than pressing or duplicating CDs (which also require printed paper and card stock for packaging!).
We could write an essay on each of the bullet points above, but you get the picture: Musicating merch is great tool to generate more income from current and future fans.
At the One Movement For Music conference in Perth, Australia, The Beggar Group’s Director of Digital, Simon Wheeler discusses the new role of music blogs in the post-radio market.
The Beggar Group holds and runs labels, including 4AD, Matador, and XL. So this paradigm shift is a big deal in the indie world. The idea is to empower blogs to give away select tracks that focus promotion in the same way singles once drove radio charts.
Awesome! A major player in the most vital part of our industry is going all-in for digital promotion, moving beyond radio! While we here at bands.theallnightparty.com see a future for music in community-oriented radio, we’ve long realized that commercial music radio is dead. Clear Channel et al have relegated music to the weakest stations on the FM dial, and the slap-dash, half-ass “Jack” format (basically an iPod on shuffle) has eroded listenership overall. Satellite and public stations are the thoughtful broadcast option. So discovering new music has to happen somewhere else. Of course, this is what music blogs were made for! Change is good.
Today, artists enjoy the benefits of affordable recordings and releases, but face a much bigger challenge than earlier generations when it comes to breaking through the noise to reach new fans. In a more limited media landscape, the paths to attention were well-mapped roads. Whether you were selling cereal or rock and roll, you relied on the same radio, tv and newspapers, working with simple ad-based models. For a known, fixed sum, anyone’s work could be put before the public, who would either rally or ignore it entirely. Those days are gone. Anyone with an internet connection can put their work on a blog or YouTube, and anyone with a credit card can make public bets on their careers with Google AdWords. While everyone can play, the net effect is a noisy marketplace, crowded not only with thousands of competing artists, but literally hundreds of microniches all vying for the same eyes and ears. This places a premium on true originality, which is one of the only sure ways to get attention.
Fortunately companies like The All Night Party are springing up to meet this challenge. We help indie artists leverage new media to create and expand their visibility and opportunities to engage fans. New media-based music products are in our DNA:
ANP Chief Dave Davis authored the first Enhanced CDs featuring regional artists (from his own band Sex Device to Ditchweed), way back in the mid 90s when he formed UltraInteractive with partners Michelle and John Curley
Davis chaired the Mastering workshop of the 113th AES Convention, focusing on New Media for Music with colleagues including Bob Ludwig, Bobby Owsinski, Mike Sokol and Bill McQuay.
The DVD-Music format provided a platform for Davis’ work through the 2000s, including Bridges, his Grammy-Nominated recording of clarinetist Eddie Daniels, Skillet’s Alien Youth, a reissue of a classic Soft Machine performance for DVD and countless others.
The All Night Party was created to push things much farther for regional indie artists.
Out of the box we released The Sundresses’Motel and F*ck Yeah I’m With the Sundresses (pictured at left)… These download cards are fun and affordable, not to mention collectible and buzz-worthy. If you attended Midpoint Music Festival in 2009 you probably saw people walking around town wearing I’m With the Sundresses.
The Big Idea: Create products at more and different price points so fans can engage with the band, and reward artists for memorable performance.
When everything on your merch table costs $10, fans with $1-9 are cut out of the fun. Dollars they might prefer to spend on something memorable and tangible get left as tips or spent at the bar. If you’re on Ohio band playing in NYC and counting on fans mentioning your name at the door, this can be crucial – merch sales might represent the majority of your pay for that show! By adding 2 items for $2 and $5, The Sundresses began making as much for merch as they previously earned at the door on some nights.
Cools as these products are, we knew we could do better. We reinvented the back-end and download mechanisms, and built the next redeemable download card from scratch, hosting from our own website. This led to three new products for mallory: a reissue of the band’s sold out debut, the first one hundred years, a download version of their brand new ANP release, …before it grows, and a digisingle featuring the songs kopvriet and gratis.
With mallory we began our push towards “musicated merch.” Admittedly, $2 buttons are a modest introduction, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, right? Besides: the “product” is the music, not the button!
Ultimately the difference between our musicated merch and competing redeemable download cards is the music itself. Whether delivered on buttons, stickers, name-tags, posters or key-cards, the look, feel and form reflect the ideas and sounds contained in the music in collectible wrappers. There are many companies who can bang out attractive cards in every shape, color or size. The All Night Party creates vehicles that reflect your music and attitude.
People go to shows because music and performance touch them emotionally. There’s a social aspect too – a shared experience with friends is often richer than the same experience alone. Souvenirs evoke strong memories long after the event, but music, like smell, touches our emotional core. So getting your music into a fan’s ears is much more important than getting a t-shirt on her back! The real power of new media is it’s ability to attach songs to any and everything.
Creative digital design is The All Night Party’s niche. And we’re just getting started: We’re already working on the first regional iTunes LPs and other cutting edge products, including iApps for iPhones and iPods. A new middle class is springing up in music – artists able to make a living doing what they love, minus a label deal. If you’re serious about your music, you should call us. Seriously!
In the age of iTunes, artists can’t afford to wait until they’ve completed a full length album to release their latest material. New songs are crowd-tested at shows, making composition and the recording process more interactive — fan reactions are one part of a process we call “continuous creation.” So we took on the challenge of getting music into the hands of fans more quickly, without relying on traditional download services. After all, on your merch table it’s all you, but on Amazon and iTunes you’re competing with Radiohead and U2. Musicated Merch levels that playing field.
The Big Idea here: We want to fill the void below $10 on the merch table. Bands have no trouble selling $10 CDs and panties, $15 tees, $20 hoodies and whatnot. But making cool products for $1, $2 or $5 is a real challenge. Download cards get that done. And you can hang them from tee’s, panties or random chochkis… whatever it takes to make the sale.
Before we bothered to reinvent this particular wheel we researched the best existing providers. We dug into Fizzkicks, Dropcards, Nimbit and CDBaby’s download card/code offerings, and asked bands we know how well they worked. To make sure we truly “got it”, we used the leading vendor’s services for The Sundresses first new release since Album of the Year, Barkinghaus, Sundresses Motel.
Sundresses Motel is printed on a plastic keycard and delivered on a “Do Not Disturb”-style door-hanger. The print and packaging is cool and merch-worthy, and the downloadable music unique: Larry Nixon, a brand new track leads off, while a rare demo of To The States closes the set. In between you’ll find just one previously released mix (The Most Evil Thing You Can Do fromTourist), and 3 freshly remixed or finally released tracks. At $5 it’s a bargain, but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
The Sundresses are committed to a path of Continuous Creation, incrementally recording, mixing and releasing their next album, with fans participating through feedback and response. It’s possible the “official version” of Larry Nixon will sound nothing like the Motel version, but equally possible that the Asbury Park,NJ performance will be the basis of a later release. In a real sense, fan’s response to the song shaped the process! The mix and entire project was conceived and created in real time: The club ftp’d the tracks to Brian Niesz, who mixed them, for the band’s approval upon return. By then it had gotten great response on the road, which got everyone’s attention. So here it is!
Fuck Yeah I’m With The Sundresses was another, more modest release, based on the cheesy nametags you often get at conventions and festivals. Built around tracks from Thedresses albums and EPs, the idea was to make an affordable sampler to hook casual fans… complete with a clear tag frame, this one sells for just $2. But $2 is still more than $1, and the plastic card is hardly environmentally friendly. We had to do better.
So we did it ourselves! We built our own download platform, specifically to enable bands to do more with their music, and support products and ideas we’ve not yet thought of. We tried out the new system with mallory’s catalog. In addition to their latest, “…Before It Grows“, their debut “the first one hundred years” was sold out, so we added it to the queue.
Finally we built a single out of the songKopvriet (backed with Gratis) to hit that $1 price point in the real world. Want more? For $2 you get buttons, like those for the album on the left! mallory t-shirts can be bought with songs attached! etc. etc.
Feature-wise, our cards work just like the competition’s. Visit a URL, enter a code, download tracks. But in terms of engagement with your fans, our cards do much more:
Our cards land on custom-built pages that look however you want them to look, not based on a template.
You set the terms of the deal for your fans… one download or 100 per code.
You can create your own codes, on the fly! In our world, “I love you” is as valid as “xd40gya77″ for a code.
Attach them to any merch — you can even embedd codes and URLs in physical products
Use them on your website, and for promotions (give away codes to visitors etc).
Cool, eh? It doesn’t cost a fortune or require a big, open ended commitment. For a flat rate of $50 we’ll set you up to print your own cards for up to 300 downloads (you decide how to break it down – one per-card/code or 100 card/codes with 3 downloads each). If you supply press-ready art, we’ll print them for you on recyclable cardstock – cards start at $0.20/each. Got a lot of titles? Talk to us and we’ll work out a deal.
Not surprisingly, Google’s move into the music space has brought plenty of controversy. I’ve read all kinds of breathy rants in the week since it’s introduction. Over on MusicPowerNetwork.com Dave Kusek’s freaking out in Google Music and the New Payola – some things never change .
When he attack’s Google’s Marissa Mayer for providing a straight answer, Mr. Kusek exposes his agenda: Advancing the case for subscription-based music services over pay-to-own models. He crows “Haven’t you guys heard about the future of music? The per-track model is not sustainable.” I must respond: Only in Mr. Kusek’s dreams.
Today iTunes has far more customers than all subscription services combined. 100% of music sold there is paid for by fans, per-track. Amazon and WalMart have found this model attractive enough to mimic, and this has led to even more sales. Indeed this model’s gained traction in the video and book spaces, as well as music. So from a commercial perspective, Kusek is at very least “not yet” right.
Speaking as a guy who counts on musicians being able to make a living selling recordings, I find such assertions troubling. Artists deserve and still require payment for their labors. Would The Beatle’sSgt. Pepper, or the band Gorillaz exist without albums? There are too many compositions to count that exist purely as recordings. To compare music to cell minutes, or worse, clean water, is dumb. There’s no basis for such a comparison. Cell minutes are purely a commodity after a network is up and running, and costs are known and fixed over the life-span of the commodity devices that deliver the service. Music is 100% bespoke, and costs are continuously variable, with only delivery commoditized. And water is a limited natural resource, with very high infrastructural costs that cannot vary by much (delivering water is no easier in the 21st century than it was in the 19th or 1st centuries, in many respects it’s harder and more expensive!). You can’t live without water, or even have a community without it’s presence. Not so music. Hyperbole overtakes reason through such claims and comparisons.
The article contains some valid issues, alongside the hysteria. He sees a problem with Google’s business model, which places sponsored results above organic ones. The concern is that a paying retailer, as opposed to the artist, will almost always own the top spot in these searches. This is a real concern for struggling local and indie artists, who’ve managed to get decent distribution. Rather than getting the lions-share of a $10 retail sale, in Google’s model that reward goes to the sponsor, while the artist gets a smaller wholesale cut. But aside from potentially losing the sale entirely, there are benefits to balance the risk for professional musicians. Pros WANT third parties to do the dirty work of selling. While you make a little less money, retail sales are a much better measure of an artist’s true demand, and market value. You get SoundScan credit for your sales, and credibility with retailers and distributors when you move products through those channels. Time spent stuffing envelopes and hoofing to the post office to fulfill tiny retail orders is usually better spent in the studio or on the stage. If you’re serious about making a living from your music, your job is making more and better music.
Maybe Mr. Kusek is an unpaid blogger, or hobbyist musician. From that perspective, this is a real concern: Most sales and income for indie artists are direct-to-fan, and it will often be easier for the artist to close a sale like this than a faceless retailer. Once at Amazon or Lala Band X faces stiff competition from Radiohead and The Flaming Lips! So the only real risk/concern of listing LaLa instead of Band X is losing the sale entirely. In the case of an organic search that would turn up your song as the result, that risk isn’t very great. Just don’t suck!
I have to wonder if the author has ever used Google AdWords or other services. Truth is Google has been one of the most effective and affordable ad platforms ever conceived. You can bid whatever you like for impressions, but only pay for clicks – in this case, actual sales. So, if you’re an indie band that really DOESN’T want to sell music at retail for whatever reason, you can STILL capture all of those sales by out-bidding competitors. Bids are market-based, so while you may pay a fortune to get the top position to sell The Beatles Number 1, it’s unlikely you’ll have to bid much for Dave and The Kusek‘s self-released opus. So if AdWords are a guide, you might have to pay $0.26 to outbid Amazon. But even if it costs $2.26, you only pay when you get a sale. If that bothers you, take your wholesale cut and move on. For many titles and artist, it might be worth bidding a couple bucks to hang onto that retail margin. It’s all good: you pay no more or no less than Amazon or a major label for the privilege of serving that fan. Here at The All Night Party we bid against bigger companies all the time – it’s quite affordable and when we care, a no-brainer. Put up or shut up, as they say.
All bids are bound by a budget, so the top rank rotates as bidders get clicks/sales up to their daily ad budget. The first 100 might go to Amazon, then LaLa might get the next 100, and so on, if you have a “hit” song. Sure, WalMart might decide to own your hit, and use it as a loss-leader with an artificially high bid. But why would you care? You’ll get paid for those sales, without having to fulfill the order or deal with the customers. WalMarts loss-leader is your gain. Win-win.
After declaring himself prophet and suggesting streaming subscription models were the only way forward, Kusek criticizes Google for streaming previews. Does he considers current micropayment models mature or somehow fair? If the per-track model is “not sustainable”, the streaming model is much less so. No one but the biggest stars generate significant revenue from streaming, nor can they. A stream-based ecosystem would eliminate the nascient “middle class” of artists, able to earn a small but sustainable income making music by replacing significant merch and music revenue with random pocket change! For musicians, streaming payment models are an express train back to the 19th century. That wasn’t a great time in our biz! Let’s assume Kusek is right, and streams are the only way forward. And let’s say Google paid compulsory rates on a per-preview basis. In such a world, artists not on big labels would make less than they do today, as we replace the bad-old per track model with Kusek’s “bucket/all you can eat” model. Preview streams cannot replace per-track revenues.
Lets put a finer point on it. Many well-managed local bands without labels already sell more than $200/year in per-track downloads. The same bands get royalty checks for streams that are less than 1/10 that number. That’s the world we live in. Metering requested streams would make it worse, as artists lose “charity/tip” sales from fans who want to support the band with a small purchase they might never listen to. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that fits Mr. Kusek’s preferences generating more income for indie artists than the status quo. If he gets his way, bad gets worse.
It’s fun to bash big companies like Google. They often deserve it. This initiative may turn out to be as bad for artists as Mr. Kusek suggests, but the implied cure is worse than the disease, and the critique doesn’t hold water for working artists. But really who knows? Not Mr. Kusek (or Mr. Davis for that matter!). The analysis here is too sloppy and not well reasoned (unless the audience is hobbyists), so you can’t really draw conclusions.
Out of the box we released The Sundresses’ Motel 
Ultimately the difference between our 
In the age of iTunes, artists can’t afford to wait until they’ve completed a full length album to release their latest material. New songs are crowd-tested at shows, making composition and the recording process more interactive — fan reactions are one part of a process we call “
Fuck Yeah I’m With The Sundresses was another, more modest release, based on the cheesy nametags you often get at conventions and festivals. Built around tracks from Thedresses albums and EPs, the idea was to make an affordable sampler to hook casual fans… complete with a clear tag frame, this one sells for just $2. But $2 is still more than $1, and the plastic card is hardly environmentally friendly. We had to do better.
