Making Freemium Pay: An Artist’s Perspective. With the much anticipated US launch of Spotify and the successful IPO of Pandora there’s a very palpable sense of momentum in streaming music.
And that’s great news, the future of music revenues will depend upon a successful transition from distribution based models (downloads, CDs etc) to consumption-era models (on-demand streaming etc.). Yet, there’s a growing sense that the current Freemium business model just isn’t fit for purpose. I’ve written before about the challenges of squaring the consumption circle (see my post here for more).
There is a direct tension arising from record labels feeling they don’t get enough from ad-supported music, and from the services themselves feeling that they actually pay too. To complicate matters even further, it is becoming increasingly apparent that artists aren’t getting enough out of ad-supported music either. 2000 Things to Generate 20,000 Fans. Author David Meerman Scott made a honest and realistic quote, “if you want 20,000 fans you must do 2000 different things that each generate 10 fans.”
This was my favorite quote from 2010 and I am going to take this on as a challenge for 2011 for an ambitious project to give you 2000 different things you can do to generate 20,000 fans. I am defining generating fans in a few different ways: Introduction to the Business of Songwriting.