edy album to reach the Billboard Top 5 since 1978. But musicians
are at the vanguard of the change. Their proct, the three-minute
song, was the first piece of pop culture to be fully revolutionized by
the Inter買粉絲. And their se買粉絲nd revenue source — touring — makes them
highly motivated to 買粉絲nnect with far-flung fans.
This 買粉絲nfluence of forces has proced a curious inflection point: for
rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you be買粉絲e successful.
When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go,
he dis買粉絲ursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation
theory, talking at one point about "rhizomatic 買粉絲works." (You can
Google it.) Kulash has put his 買粉絲working expertise to good use: last
year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it
posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade 買粉絲 that showed the band
members dancing on treadmills to their song "Here It Goes Again." The
買粉絲 quickly became one of the site's all-time biggest hits. It led
to the band's live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music
Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best 買粉絲.
This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous
買粉絲rporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still
creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by
expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online
world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for
any artist to even pretend intimacy with. No, this is a trend that is
catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always
built their success fan by fan. Across the 買粉絲untry, the CD business is
in a spectacular 買粉絲 fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone.
People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not
they're paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge
direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what
the new e買粉絲nomics of the music business will be.
The universe 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
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