The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Since a not-insignificant portion of my peeps and potential clients are organ grinders of the artistic sort, I thought I’s pass along Kevin Kelly’s thought-provoking article on making a living as an artist in the 21st century, 1000 True Fans.

According to Kelly,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

[snip]

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Kelly’s formula is at once breathtakingly simple and yet compellingly feasible:

First, create 1000 True Fans. According to Kelly, this involves finding and converting 1000 regular fans to True Fans by connecting with them personally and directly, which is an imminently rational goal and one that any artist worth their salt should be able to do, given access to such basic resources as an Internet connection, some basic marketing smarts and a salable product or service.

Second, Kelly estimates that a True Fan will spend an average of one day’s income per year on a favorite artist, although of course some will spend more and others less. For easy math, he rounds this sum out to $100 per True Fan. At this rate (which is, you have to admit, an entirely realistic reflection of what many of us spend on our own favorite artists in a year’s time) 1000 True Fans + $100/year = $100,000.00 per year gross, a nifty living by any artist’s standards.

The key, he points out, rests on that personal contact. You’ll need to nurture, connect with and personally involve these True Fans. Of course, for the average artist, this isn’t a problem. You want to reach out and touch people personally and profoundly. You want to enter into a conversation with them and hear their responses to your work. You want to learn about them and geek out over mutual interests and so on. That connection is a vital part of what makes your art worth doing. It’s fun. And it’s one of the reasons why you sing/paint/play/film/photograph in the first place. (For those who don’t, however, he suggests that an intermediary or manager can handle this task perfectly well.)

Obviously, as Kelly himself points out, the requirement of 1000 True Fans applies best to the solo artist. Bands, comedy troupes, painter’s collectives and other groups would have to increase their effort to achieve enough True Fans per member to scale the formula. But nonetheless, it does scale relatively easily. Also, the number of fans varies depending on the type of media, price of the work, costs and so on, although not by so much that it upsets the formula in very many cases. Finally, Kelly notes that this formula only applies when the fan support is direct (people go to your site and buy a download) rather than indirect (people buy your book or click on a blog ad, which spreads the money out over a wide variety of middlemen). Indirect income means you’ll need far more True Fans to support you in a reasonable manner.

There are several interesting case studies mentioned in the article, including an author that funded his novel through direction donations and a musician who is paying for the production costs of her next CD through a truly creative, tiered level of direct support ranging from…

…$10 “unpolished rock,” which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it’s made, to the $10,000 “weapons-grade plutonium level,” where she promises “you get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing - we can fix that on our end.

Wrapping up, Kelly has this to say:

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty…I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Social Media //