Animal Magnetism

You don't have to hang around music clubs for too long these days to overhear a conversation about finance or marketing. For today's musician, fluency with business concepts has become the new "chops". Many view the recording industry, turned inside-out by the internet, as a sort of Wild West-a power vacuum ripe for the next big idea: Recording Industry 2.0.

One of the more popular small ideas I've come across is the obsolescence of records as finished product. Many artists now see them as either a means to an end (building fans, marketing themselves to clubs or promoters) or as fringe benefits to fans. Many also see the importance of physical CDs as diminishing. To be marketable CDs require professional cover art and design and the all-important bar code, both of which in turn require either a substantial investment of money or willingness to partner with a label (and often to relinquish some proprietary rights); hardly worth it unless they can net substantial revenue. If you view a CD as nothing more than a delivery system for your sound to a fan's ear, the MP3 rendered it obsolete 10 years ago.

Some go still further, viewing the music itself as fringe to the business. The most important activity of your enterprise, they say, is to sell. Time spent perfecting the "product" that doesn't translate directly into return on investment is time wasted. I'll call it the "membership model": instead of buying CDs, fans pay a "membership fee" for exclusive access to the artist-unreleased bootlegs, video diaries, first crack at concert tickets, "private" events. Certain artists, like ‘Lil Wayne, have used the membership model with remarkable success. Artists with small record sales to begin with are, the thinking goes, in a better position to capture market share than signed artists dependent on high-volume sales. You recruit a corps of devotees, all paying a menial monthly fee (or maybe a one-time membership fee), in exchange for which they get exclusive access to...you. Those membership fees, in turn, finance everything else.

All of which begs the question, does it work?

Let me digress. This week I curated a bill of four bands at a Brooklyn music club. Since jazz has a smaller audience than rock, folk, klezmer, and apparently traditional Irish music (one such band, playing next door, was a hit with patrons), it often makes sense to pool your audience: 50 combined fans who stay for the whole night look just as good to owners as 4 different groups of 50 who rotate in and out throughout the evening. As curator, I sat through all four sets. You can learn a lot about the business of music by observing how various groups sound, how they're managed, and what sort of crowds they draw.

The bands differed markedly in their presentation. Some had used online promotion, others word-of-mouth. Some had CDs out, others not. But one band brought the lion’s share of the fans and enticed the greatest number of “regulars” to stick around. The combination that triumphed had little to do with the media used for the group's promotion and nothing whatsoever to do with their time slot. The factors that counted ended up being the quality of the music and the charisma of the band leader. Hardly rocket science. You're friends with somebody who hangs out frequently, then you check out his band and the music makes you excited. In one fell swoop he's ignited the rare alchemy of endorphins that causes fans to swoon.

What does this have to do with online fan clubs and the decline of the recording industry? That depends why you think Lil Wayne fans or Radiohead fans are so fanatically devoted to their bands. Do millions of people go to the websites, download and forward the bootlegs, read the tour diaries and wait in line for days for concert tickets for the privilege of being a fan? Sure: It's "cool" to be a Radiohead follower! But that’s not enough.

Something attracted you to the band in the first place.

Bottom line-website or physical CD, we're still selling a product. People will flock to Jamba Juice because of a nuanced combination of the taste of the drink and the way being a customer of the company makes them feel, but they won't go simply to be there. And jazz musicians are in the unique position of depending on our products more than average companies for two reasons: Number one, we're often starting from virtual "unknown" status with every potential customer (unlike, say, J. Crew, we can't create buzz about an offshoot product by dropping unspecific "hints"-people have no context by which to judge our credibility). Number two, our fans are far more discerning than average-quickly deciding whether a group has "got it" or not.

Buzz percolates from the bottom up in the jazz world. The groups I've seen succeed, small or large, are powerful evidence that the most potent marketing tools are still a great product and word-of-mouth. But jazz musicians-and local musicians in general-can and do benefit from online marketing and music sales. For us, the internet is most effective as a tool for broadening the impact of the product. It can also help to retain new fans your music attracted in the first-an announcement from stage after a particularly killing set generates sales of Myspace MP3s like little else. (Conversely, the frustration when I hear a great group and can’t download their music anywhere is palpable.) In the end, many musicians have either one half or the other: There are clever marketers with inferior products and great artists no one will ever hear. In the proverbial Wild West, those with ability to produce memorable performances and the savvy to spread the impact enough to sell songs and swell the ranks of fans, are a precious commodity.