It's now cliche to assert that mass media business models are dead. It's no longer hard to either make or distribute media products. Markets are awash with digital product, which people expect for free. Artists today have to apply their creativity to other ways of producing unique value that people will buy.
At Sceneverse, where I work, we are becoming huge fans of the band One-Eyed Doll (Wikipedia), not just for their music, but for the whole way they create a scene around themselves that keeps them in touch with their fans and economically viable.
They sell what's rare.
For digital music files which have become hard to price, they sell album downloads on a pay-what-you-want basis. But if you buy an "appreciation package" involving a physical CD from them, you do so secure in the knowledge that each one is individually signed and bitten by the band's lead singer and guitarist, Kimberly Freeman. We bought some, and you can see the bite marks. They also sell buttons and baubles and stuff that fall off her costumes during their performances, (she is insanely energetic). They sell paintings of band members, thank-you notes handwritten by the duo, personalized thank-you videos, and other artisan products (understanding that these are FUN pomo-goth-slasher-freak-tregan-playing-hard-touring artisans). Items are priced by the degree of personalized attention the duo pour into them for the specific fan.
The bitten CDs and costume detritus put me in mind of Derrida (that's how much of a nerd I am). These are traces - marks of clawbacks - taking the product out of abstraction and connecting it to the material, physical person of the artist again. You could say it reminds us that artists are real people who need to survive, but it is too easy to be blithe about this market shift when you frame it that way. It's also a good example of Mike Masnick CwF + RtB = $$$ formula, but I want to resist formulation for a moment, to appreciate the deeper dynamics that make the formula work here.
In the value universe hypothesis proposed (and further developed) by economist and fellow Sceneversian Greg Rader, the bite marks on the CD "rehabilitate" it, in the following sense. A CD hovers perilously between economic quadrants in Rader's model.
- Is the CD a political-economy good? (A bearer of legally-enforceable intellectual property?)
- Is it a transactional/commodity good? (A "thing" you might find in a bin or rack for $10?)
- Is it an attention-economy good? (A heavily managed "star" product from a "fame" industry?)
- Is it a relational-economy good? (A way of personally thanking Kimberly and Junior for their art, and their dedication to making kick-buns experiences for us?)
The bite marks add flesh to how you consider this item. It's a trace of the non-metaphysical, which claws the product over much more in the direction of the relational economy than most CDs are - even autographed ones. (Music. Reloaded. This time, it's personal.) One-Eyed Doll are masterful relational marketers. Their offering actually covers all four Raderian value quadrants, but they strongly downplay their legal right to extract a price (obscure its legibility), and pump up the personal touch. They walk the incredibly delicate tightrope between offering relational, attentional and transactional goods with Venti integrity and a big invigorating shot of sheer camp.
Kimberly is certainly a persona. The real person that she is exceeds what we as remote fans can know about her, but she makes her presence known with a very physical trace of a moment - a moment when she considered us in particular, even if abstractly. The broken bits of her costumes are traces of the ferocity of her performances, of the activity pattern in life that she is. These traces themselves are not metaphysical. They are not pure hype or simply symbolic. Each one costs her some of her own life's focus.
One cannot escape metaphysics - these artists are replacing commodity fetishism (mass-producible, like the Coca-Cola brand marks) with relational fetishism. In (what might seem to be) less metaphysical terms, a materials engineer looking at the bite marks using an electron tunnelling microscope might just give a molecular description of the indentations in the material lattice of the substrate, and not care what made the marks. We imbue them with presence, with the subjectivity, agency, intention and affect of an author. We make them hosts in a communion with their source as we imagine her.
But that willingness to read presence into a trace (that if anything should alert us to absence and presence simultaneously) - that craving for presence that Derrida messes with and frustrates in his writings... that is a great marketing driver! If that hunger for presence drives all of Western civilization, and has since antiquity, that's a damn strong market trend to ride! It's a very smart way to start thinking about a business model.
One-Eyed Doll have their way of doing it, but other independent musicians are also - of sheer necessity - feeling their way around the new economics of culture, and doing more and more things to build up high-relational-value offerings that they can authentically and with integrity exchange in ways their fans are willing to pay for. This new music industry may not enjoy the same economies of scale that the old attentional economy of mass-market pop stars did, but it will be delightfully weird.
Integrity is key to this. This return of artisanal economics in the music industry is an example of the "new spirit of capitalism", where capitalism goes to the edge of the market, to things that exceed the rationalized production of industrialism, to mine authenticity and to return with products that bear its stamp. Not every indie rock group could offer the kind of value One-Eyed Doll does, and if they did, One-Eyed Doll would have to think of new stuff, to stand out from the crowd. One-Eyed Doll both is goth-y and makes fun of it, and they make fun of the vampire craze in pop culture. Bitten CDs take their meaning in the context of the whole conversational culture they create with their fans around that experiential stance.
Marketing in the way One-Eyed Doll does means cultivating weirdness, and being very clear about the weirdness you offer. That is the business you are in.
There is something you offer that your fans connect with. There is a distinctive communion, outside the easily-explained, outside the generic comparisons people may make between you and every other musical act out there. That is your product. It's probably something you can't quite put into words - something that may be the mojo in your music, or maybe the way you address the mix of dedicated fans and first-time listeners who turn up at your shows, the way you make great evening for them, or the comic perspective on the world you embody... maybe it is in the imaginary world or alternate reality your music creates for listeners who "get" your music... the kind of pain you give expression to for people, the masterful way you faithfully deliver on the awesomeness of a genre, the surprises and new sounds your technical skills let you produce... something that can't be churned out in a factory is the real thing you have to offer people.
If you connect your weird relational goods to that unique and authentic source of weird value, it is starting to look like you can build a business as a musician again. Communications technologies give you the relational reach to connect with your fans in these ways. In this new post-megastar economy, you may not be able to buy a castle in Scotland (at least not a big one in good repair). But you may actually be able to make your living managing your band, your brand, and your time, centered around the activity you most want to do.
There are definitely worse ways to spend your mortal moments.
No comments:
Post a Comment