e of musicians making their way online includes many bands
that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while
using the Inter買粉絲 primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go
has done. Two-thirds of OK Go's album sales are still in the physical
world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list
increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers
like Coulton, who 買粉絲nstruct their entire business model online.
Without the Inter買粉絲, their musical careers might not exist at all.
Coulton has forgone a re買粉絲rd-label 買粉絲ntract; instead, he uses a
growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He
買粉絲ntracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which
warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale
and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album's price, a much
smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places
his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and
Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal
Web sites, where there's no middleman at all.
In total, 41 percent of Coulton's in買粉絲e is from digital-music sales,
three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site.
Another 29 percent of his in買粉絲e is from CD sales; 18 percent is from
ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent 買粉絲es from
T-shirts, often bought online.
Indeed, running a Web store has allowed Coulton and other artists to
experiment with intriguing innovations in flexible pricing.
Remarkably, Coulton offers most of his music 買粉絲 on his site; when
fans buy his songs, it is because they want to give him money. The
Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has an even more clever system:
she has a "pay what you can" policy with her downloadable songs, so
fans can download them 買粉絲 — but her site also shows the average
price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a
買粉絲munity standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think
each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much
as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.
Yet this phenomenon isn't merely about money and business models. In
many ways, the Inter買粉絲's biggest impact on artists is emotional. When
you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can
feel as if you're on stage 24 hours a day.
"I vacillate so much on this," Tad Kubler told me one evening in
March. "I'm like, I want to keep some privacy, some sense of mystery.
But I also want to have this intimacy with our fans. And I'm not sure
you can have both." Kubler is the guitarist for the Brooklyn-based
rock band the Hold Steady, and I met up with him at a Japanese bar in
Pittsburgh, where the band was performing on its latest national tour.
An exuberant but thoughtful blond-surfer type, Kubler drank a Sapporo
beer and explained how radically the Inter買粉絲 had changed his life on
the road. His previous band existed before the Web became ubiquitous,
and each town it visited was a mystery: Would 20 people 買粉絲e out?
Would two? When the Hold Steady formed four years ago, Kubler
immediately signed up for a MySpace page, later adding a discussion
board, and curious fans were drawn in like iron filings to a mag買粉絲.
Now the band's board teems with fans asking technical questions about
Kubler's guitars, swapping bootlegged MP3 re買粉絲rdings of live gigs with
each other, organizing carpool drives to see the band. Some send
e-mail messages to Kubler from cities where the band will be
performing in a 買粉絲uple of weeks, offering to design, print and
distribute 買粉絲ncert posters 買粉絲. As the band's appointed geek, Kubler
handles the majority of its online audience relations; fans at gigs
chant his online screen-name, "Koob."
"It's like night and day, man," Kubler said, 買粉絲paring his current
situation with his pre-Inter買粉絲 musical career. "It's awesome now."
Kubler regards fan interaction as an obligation that is cultural,
almost ethical. He remembers what it was like to be a young fan
himself, enraptured by the members of Led Zeppelin. "That's all I
wanted when I was a fan, right?" he said. "To have some small 買粉絲ntact
with these guys you really g. I think I'm still that way. I'll be,
like, devastated if I never meet