Demand Satisfaction!

There are more than a few Internet geeks who have chased the life of a rockstar. It’s a bit of poetic justice, perhaps, that the daily existence of more and more recording artists resembles that of an Internet worker. Clive Thompson (the endlessly insightful writer who penned the excellent Wired article on the See-Through CEO) exposed this new reality of emerging musical artists in his recent article in the NYTimes Magazine, Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog.

The article explores how remarkably different the music business is for Internet-enabled artists as they seek to grow their fan-base, develop income streams, plan their tours, and really, everything else. In fact, these artists have everything in common with the companies we talk about on this blog, the ones that are enmeshed in the life of the Web, actively engaged with their most passionate customers and fans. Surprisingly, they show that even rockstars need better ways to handle their own customer service (or “fan” service, if you will). Jonathan Coulton, a singer-songwriter from New York is a good example:

Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.

And he’s not the only one:

When the Hold Steady formed four years ago, [guitarist] Tad Kubler immediately signed up for a MySpace page, later adding a discussion board, and curious fans were drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. Now the band’s board teems with fans asking technical questions about Kubler’s guitars, swapping bootlegged MP3 recordings of live gigs with each other, organizing carpool drives to see the band…[But] the Hold Steady’s online audience has grown so huge that Kubler, like Jonathan Coulton, is struggling to bear the load. It is the central paradox of online networking: if you’re really good at it, your audience quickly grows so big that you can no longer network with them…Virtually everyone bemoaned the relentless and often boring slog of keyboarding. It is, of course, precisely the sort of administrative toil that people join rock bands to avoid.

The flip side is that artists are innovating in how they interact with their audiences, and we should all be paying attention to how they’re doing it. Artists are developing truly symbiotic relationships with their fans. Here are a few observations on the practical ramifications of this:

• The more successful they are, the harder it is to keep up with the customer interaction (whether it’s email or MySpace friend requests)
• While there is increasing transparency with fans via blogs and discussion boards, it’s hard to always know how to behave without traditional boundaries
• When given the chance, fans will act as the artist’s “promotions department”
• With minimal prodding fans will provide endless tips, suggestions, artwork, music videos, web site support, and business advice
• Using polls of fans’ from each geographic area, artists can plot tour schedules that are virtually guaranteed to reach a critical mass of fans

This reminds me of a graphic I posted a while back showing how different kinds of companies interact (or don’t) with their customers:

That’s not quite right given what we’re learning here. So here’s an updated graphic that reflects how this new generation of artists are interacting with their fans. Emerging artists are gaining a unique advantage vis a vis stadium-filling superstars by doing what they could never hope to do–engage directly with fans.

Some artists, like Jane Siberry, have embraced transparency and fan cooperation to a remarkable degree. She’s created an honor system for selling her music that not only replaces DRM with trust, but avoids fixed prices altogether.

[Sibbery] has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community 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.

All this artist-community collaboration sounds great, except it’s not as easy as it sounds. The pressure to stand out, compete with other bands, and figure out what works can be crushing.

Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.

Myspace has provided a more focused environment for artists to reach out to fans, but even here the social dynamics can spiral out of control quickly. Thompson calls it an “arms race for fans,” and when a band is successful it can lead to tens of thousands of new fans. So many, in fact, that these overwhelmed artists are starting to use software robots to auto-approve all the incoming friend requests.

For the artists that don’t get this kind of traction there is also an alternative: software robots that create fake MySpace users whose sole purpose is to friend-request the band. And while these “fans” won’t do much for record sales, at least they won’t contribute to the anguish of email overload.