the role of the live show
Oct. 3rd, 2005 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiriasSome passing thoughts on music promotion, probably not unique or deep since it's not my area of expertise.
I see four basic ways that a band can promote itself to potential fans.
1) live shows
2) CDs
3) radio and other public media
4) word of mouth
I think that strategy 1 is how all bands have to start out. When ticket prices are low, it's a good deal for the fans: small investment of money and time, good chance to evaluate talent, and usually a wide selection of songs from various parts of the band's history. Now, however, even modest bands (like Cat Empire, whom I saw Saturday evening) may sell show tickets that are at parity with album prices. It's no longer a cost-effective way for potential fans to investigate you unless you're playing low-key gigs in small places. And when buying a CD is the most cost-effective legitimate way to investigate a band, people will either ignore you or they will start to look to illegitimate means. This is why strategies 3 and 4 are so important. Radio is great if you're already big, because it saturates the audience with your sound, subtly changing their preferences to something more like what you've got. But it doesn't do much for small artists. Small artists are stuck with truly-public media - like the scary fileshare songwriter's death knell that is the Int0rnet - and word of mouth.
These thoughts occurred to me in part because I discovered this morning that my Cat Empire CD is "copy-protected," which means that it was printed in 2003 deliberately using a format not recognizable by contemporary CD-ROM drives. Thankfully, I'm using a 2005 drive and so I was able to carry through with my new plan of copying the entire thing to my hard disk out of spite. The only reason it really matters to me is that I want to include one song of theirs on my long overdue mix CD, which AFAIK is fair use. I expect that at least some of my friends will be interested in what they hear, maybe interested enough to buy a CD (copy protection notwithstanding). And otherwise, their market within the USA? I ... don't think it's that big. (If a woman fresh out of college with modest music biz experience can get hired as the US tour manager, it really can't be that big.) Me using my little bit of social clout to spread the word about this band to people who would not otherwise perk up their ears at the name can only do them good. Even putting the entire album on the net (which I don't intend to do; large-scale music trading with strangers lost its fascination for me about second semester freshman year) would be likely to do good. When your status is "largely unknown" (which is the case with most bands, I'd wager) you can't really go anywhere but up. So I think a better peace needs to be made with this technology, because there aren't actually too many options for small artists that suck less.
But really this post started out as me being a little wistful that live shows aren't still the cheapest and easiest way to get into new music. Unless you're content with your local music scene, that is. :)
I see four basic ways that a band can promote itself to potential fans.
1) live shows
2) CDs
3) radio and other public media
4) word of mouth
I think that strategy 1 is how all bands have to start out. When ticket prices are low, it's a good deal for the fans: small investment of money and time, good chance to evaluate talent, and usually a wide selection of songs from various parts of the band's history. Now, however, even modest bands (like Cat Empire, whom I saw Saturday evening) may sell show tickets that are at parity with album prices. It's no longer a cost-effective way for potential fans to investigate you unless you're playing low-key gigs in small places. And when buying a CD is the most cost-effective legitimate way to investigate a band, people will either ignore you or they will start to look to illegitimate means. This is why strategies 3 and 4 are so important. Radio is great if you're already big, because it saturates the audience with your sound, subtly changing their preferences to something more like what you've got. But it doesn't do much for small artists. Small artists are stuck with truly-public media - like the scary fileshare songwriter's death knell that is the Int0rnet - and word of mouth.
These thoughts occurred to me in part because I discovered this morning that my Cat Empire CD is "copy-protected," which means that it was printed in 2003 deliberately using a format not recognizable by contemporary CD-ROM drives. Thankfully, I'm using a 2005 drive and so I was able to carry through with my new plan of copying the entire thing to my hard disk out of spite. The only reason it really matters to me is that I want to include one song of theirs on my long overdue mix CD, which AFAIK is fair use. I expect that at least some of my friends will be interested in what they hear, maybe interested enough to buy a CD (copy protection notwithstanding). And otherwise, their market within the USA? I ... don't think it's that big. (If a woman fresh out of college with modest music biz experience can get hired as the US tour manager, it really can't be that big.) Me using my little bit of social clout to spread the word about this band to people who would not otherwise perk up their ears at the name can only do them good. Even putting the entire album on the net (which I don't intend to do; large-scale music trading with strangers lost its fascination for me about second semester freshman year) would be likely to do good. When your status is "largely unknown" (which is the case with most bands, I'd wager) you can't really go anywhere but up. So I think a better peace needs to be made with this technology, because there aren't actually too many options for small artists that suck less.
But really this post started out as me being a little wistful that live shows aren't still the cheapest and easiest way to get into new music. Unless you're content with your local music scene, that is. :)