1,000 True Fans and the Importance of Milestones in Your Music Career

Posted on 08. Oct, 2009 by refe in STRATEGY

In any well-managed business each member of the team has a set of specific measurables to help them – and their employers – know whether or not they’re on track. Without these milestones it can be very difficult to remain focused and accomplish long term goals.

Artists and musicians are no different – except that they may need this structure even more than their white-collar counterparts. A career in music is something that builds slowly and takes constant, focused attention to properly cultivate. The goal is sustainability. You want to have the means to quit your day job and support yourself with your music. It can take years in the trenches to reach that point, and without strategic goals and milestones it is easy to lose focus. The most frustrating thing for an artist to wake up and realize they’re off track and have been treading water for months (or years!)

1,000 True Fans

One of the best music-career milestones that I’ve come across is the concept that Wired co-founder and blogger Kevin Kelly dubbed ’1,000 True Fans.’

The concept is fairly simple, and since most of you are likely already familiar with it I’ll just provide a brief explanation. If an artist can cultivate a base of just 1,000 fans who are radically committed to his work, those fans will provide enough income to support that artist. The theory goes that each ‘true fan’ will spend on average about $100 per year on the artist. That adds up to an annual revenue stream of $100,000. Even after expenses that should be enough for any individual artist to live comfortably.

There is a common argument against the 1,000 True Fans concept. If you are a member of a band it may have jumped out at you right away. $100,000 per year gross may be enough for an individual artist, but once you divvy that up between the members of a four- or five-piece band it starts looking a bit measly.

Fortunately, the math isn’t as bad as it sounds. Remember – these 1,000 True Fans represent only the most committed subsection of your fan base. There many other fans - what Kevin Kelly calls ‘Lesser Fans’ – contributing to your career. I’m not going to use the term ‘Lesser Fans’ because I don’t like it. Instead, I’d rather use the terminology that Tom Silverman used at the New Music Seminar here in Chicago on October 6. Silverman split fans into four categories: super fans, active fans, passive fans and potential fans.

Think of your fan base as a pyramid. The super fans are the smallest group, but contribute the most revenue per fan. They’re at the top. Beneath them you have a much larger group of active fans. Instead of spending $100/year, these fans may spend closer to $20/year on your products and shows. Yet, because there are about five times more active fans than super fans, their gross contribution ends up being about the same – $100,000 annually. The total revenue from these two groups is $200,000/year.

Below that you have your passive fans. Again, there are about five times more passive fans than active fans, but they only download your most popular singles, resulting in a spend of about $2 per year. This group contributes about $50,000 per year.

Potential fans of course make up the largest group at the base of the pyramid. These are people that may not be aware of your work, but who have an appreciation for the style or genre of music you play. Maybe they follow similar bands. This group contributes only a fraction of the revenue of the previous group, but when it all adds up may equal something along the lines of $5,000 per year.

That brings our total to about $255,000, or a quarter of a million dollars. Split that up four ways and although you won’t be able to afford that Bentley you’ve always wanted, you each should be living comfortably. And remember, this is just the revenue coming directly from your fans. This does not include sync licensing, sponsorships, grants, royalties, etc. The actually number could be closer to $300,000.

To 1,000 and beyond

The 1,000 True Fan marker is a milestone, but your career shouldn’t stop there. Obviously, you want as many people as possible to hear and enjoy your music. The bigger the tip of the pyramid gets, the more that will trickle down into the rest of your fanbase. Each super fan is going to influence several other people (sometimes hundreds, thanks to social media) and evangelize a few new active and passive fans who have to potential to one day become super fans themselves.

In a follow-up post I’m going to address how to go about cultivating these 1,000 True Fans. One of the most frequent questions that arises when this concept is discussed is, ‘How do I get there?’ I’ve put together some strategies that will hopefully help to answer that question.

In the meantime, is this outline clear? Let me know your questions, comments, concerns and I will try to incorporate them into the follow-up to make sure all of this is as helpful as possible.

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Tags: 1000 true fans, artist resources, bands, kevin kelly, music, new music seminar

16 Responses to “1,000 True Fans and the Importance of Milestones in Your Music Career”

John

08. Oct, 2009

While it’s interesting to segment fans into groups and see how things might break out, you should be careful about taking a top forecast based on a hypothetical scenario too seriously.

There’s also some big problems in the math: for instance, it doesn’t follow that money spent by a fan equals revenue for the band in a 1:1 ratio. After all, you don’t typically take 100% of the door at a show, and at least some sales will be either from a vendor who takes a cut (iTunes, CDBaby, etc) or in a tangible form that cost money to produce (eg: a CD) or both. So, for every dollar spend by a fan, what is the actual gross revenue for the artist? Even 50% is probably optimistic. And then you need to fixed costs for overhead (for instance vehicle, insurance and fuel for a touring act) and even downtime.

If income is half of actual revenue (a third is probably more realistic), then that $255k is really more like $63k (assuming there’s no manager to take a cut, or a booking agent to take a cut of live receipts). That’s potentially adequate for one person, but comes out to $15k a person for a four piece band. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but living below the poverty line is not exactly the goal for most people, which means they would need to supplement their income with some sort of regular job, which would take time away from building their base of 1000 true fans making that goal even harder to reach.
- refe
  
  08. Oct, 2009
  
  Well, if the artist is smart they are going to be pushing their fans to buy directly from them. There are a growing number of services that do this without taking a cut, or at least without taking the kind of cut that iTunes requires. Nibit comes to mind.
  
  Also, these same 1,000 fans can be leveraged to cut down on that overhead. Build a solid street team. Run contests to solicit t-shirt designs from your fans, then find out who has a screen printing set up and give them free stuff in return. Or do the screen printing yourself. Find fans willing to put you up in their house. If you can’t pull that off (or aren’t comfortable with it) Motel 6 is offering free lodgings to musicians right now! There are lot’s of ways to reduce costs – that’s part of running a business.
  
  If an artist is going to take the DIY route, it is truly a ton of work. There’s no getting around that. But it is becoming easier and cheaper to do, with new (mostly free) services popping up every day.
  
  Also keep in mind the other revenue streams in mind as well, like sync, royalties, sponsorships, etc.
  
  Obviously these numbers are loose projections. What the math looks like for each band or artist will depend on how they have developed their business chops.
  
  I believe that the 1,000 True Fans mark is an important milestone rather than the ultimate goal in a sustainable career. The idea is to cross that threshold and continue to grow.
Suzanne Lainson

08. Oct, 2009

I’m really interested in seeing the nuts and bolts of this discussion. I worked with an artist who did achieve this at a local/regional level (grossed around $150,000 annually) and could have grossed $1 million annually had she chosen to go national (she was happy staying local/regional).

But I’ve worked with other artists who haven’t been able to sell as many CDs or cultivate as many loyal fans or are willing to play 200 shows a year like the artist I cited above.

So part of making it work is having the right music, the right stage presence, and also being a workaholic. It’s really hard to find artists/bands who bring all of that to the table.
- refe
  
  08. Oct, 2009
  
  There should be a disclaimer before anything that is written on this blog or others like it:
  
  “The following information assumes that your music isn’t terrible.”
  
  You’re right though – cultivating fans with this level of loyalty is not simple. But the activities kind of are. I don’t want to get too far into it here because I’ve already spent the past hour and half writing it up as a post, but there are specific things that have proven to engage fans and increase buy-in.
  
  DIY takes a lot of work, no question about it. Concepts like these are by no means a fool proof system that allows artists to coast through their careers. They simply attempt to break it down until it become easier to understand and manage.
  - Suzanne Lainson
    
    08. Oct, 2009
    
    What I think is important is impressing upon artists that having great music isn’t enough. Every artist I have worked with has had great stage presence and great music. But some won’t put in the time to continually connect with fans. Others have music that, while good, doesn’t lend itself to drawing fans to multiple shows each year.
    
    That successful artist who I mentioned has music that makes people feel good. So her hardcore fans attend nearly every show because it’s a fulfilling, uplifting experience. But another artist I’ve worked with plays rather gut-wrenching music. So while it’s a great, moving show, it’s not something you necessarily want to put yourself through every week.
    
    I think the bands that play upbeat, danceable music probably have more fans willing to travel around the country to catch the never-ending party than the more angsty artists. Think Grateful Dead or Jimmy Buffet.
John

08. Oct, 2009

I agree that something like 1000 True Fans is a useful goal, and again, I think that segmenting your fan base by commitment level is useful.

However, my point isn’t about controlling costs (eg: street teams and sleeping on people’s floors), but in having a more realistic understanding of the difference between how much a fan spends with how much revenue that actually generates because there’s no way it’s anything like a 1:1 ratio.

The basic point that bands shouldn’t look at their fan base monolithically is completely valid but you should be careful about actually planning based on numbers someone arbitrarily pulled out of the air.
- refe
  
  08. Oct, 2009
  
  That’s a very important point, and I’m glad you brought it up.
  
  These numbers are designed to be an informed guide to help artists to get the concept. As with any broad strategy, individual artists and bands will have to take a look at what they are able to do, and the resources available to them, and figure out a specific strategy that fits their situation and goals.
  
  And as far as the revenue generated by individual fans I would encourage you to think beyond CD’s and t-shirts to more creative options like purchasing a house party, one of a kind artwork that ties into the music, etc. These may take time to produce or perform, but they the profit margins can be much greater than the conventional offerings. And they are more interesting and engaging for fans.
1000 True Fans and the Importance of Milestones in Your Music … | Work4Real | Whatever be your curiosity, tuned on information

09. Oct, 2009

[...] Show original post here [...]
Justin Boland

09. Oct, 2009

Felt anti-climactic. I was expecting you to address the question of who to plan for the 1000 fans by laying out milestones, based off the title. It was still a good, detailed breakdown on some real-world math for Kevin’s catchy concept.

Side note: I was skeptical of both Gladwell and more especially the Heath brothers who wrote “Made to Stick” until that Kevin Kelly thing really drove it home. Repeatability is a core feature of viruses in nature, I don’t why I had doubts…1000 True Fans is something people feel compelled to pass on and it’s come to frame the debate to an amazing extent since he wrote that.
- refe
  
  09. Oct, 2009
  
  Most of the ‘how to get to 1000 fans’ tips are coming in future posts. I posted the the first one today.
  
  Kelly’s model isn’t perfect, and as some have pointed out the math may or may not work out depending on the type of band and what their situation looks like.
  
  Even so, I think it’s a great goal for emerging bands to shoot for. It’s too hard to start your music career saying, “I’m going to sell a million records.” That’s too big, and that’s really not how the business works anymore anyway. You can’t go by record sales numbers anymore, it’s about fans.
  - Suzanne Lainson
    
    09. Oct, 2009
    
    The advantage of the 1000 True Fans concept is that it gets artists thinking in terms of a definable number of fans spending a certain amount of money to generate a potential living income.
    
    It’s not as simple as some have suggested because it takes time to reach enough people, and some artists won’t ever find enough fans to pay the money, but at least it starts to break down the numbers into something approaching a business plan.
    
    I usually approach the numbers from the reverse direction. How much money do we need to generate? To do that, how many people do we need to reach? How much will each of them spend and what will they spend it upon?
    
    I did a blog post talking about the fact that if a band wanted to gross $200,000 a year and do it by selling t-shirts, did they think they could sell 10,000 $20 t-shirts a year?
    
    What worked for that artist who was grossing $150,000 with a mailing list of 3000 fans was:
    
    (1) having grown up in her playing area (so she had made lots of friends over the years),
    (2) working as a bartender in a music venue for 10 years until she finally felt secure enough to do music full-time,
    (3) putting out a CD of great songs every year or two (she has 8 available now), so that she always had multiple CDs to sell at shows,
    (4) having a deep list of outstanding original songs (just from her albums alone, that’s about 80+ songs),
    (5) playing everywhere constantly over the years (solo in coffee houses, full band in clubs and outdoor concerts),
    (6) playing music that people can dance to and that they never get tired of listening to.
    
    And a few other things, too.
    
    The necessary number of fans didn’t happen overnight. And when she first quit her bartending job, she was losing money on her band gigs because she agreed to pay them more than she was making per gig. That first summer as a full-time musician she was able to live on a $5000 private party gig that she got. So she had a bit of a financial cushion as she lost money building her club following.
    
    But bit by bit she would play a venue and go from a few fans to 20 fans to 100 fans to 200 fans, etc.
    
    I’m not sure everyone can put together the time and financial support in order to build a career until they hit the necessary number of fans to support themselves. That’s why some people raise their eyebrows at the 1000 true fan concept. How do you get to that point?
Justin Boland

09. Oct, 2009

D’oh…the question of how, not “who.”
Mike

11. Oct, 2009

Really interesting post. I’ve never seen it broken down in terms of fans before.

It is nice to see a more practical angle discussed when talking about music as a career.

Having the drive and the patience is of course crucial. Danny sent us a story a while back where he talks about having a financially successful job but not being happy. He chucked it all to pursue his dream of playing music full time.

Check out his story at the link below. And if you like it give him a vote.

Thanks.
http://www.ahamoment.com/vote/danny
Artist Booking Agent

18. Oct, 2009

I really enjoy reading 1,000 True Fans and the Importance of Milestones in Your Music Career | creative deconstruction . It’s very interesting. Hope you will post something like this again.
Music Business en vrac #7 | Piratage, Revenus en hausse, revenus en baisse… | B comme BoxSons

24. Oct, 2009

[...] veut qu’avec 1000 vrais fans un artiste puisse vivre de sa musique. Régulièrement critiquée cette approche revient souvent sur le devant de la scène. Tout le problème vient du “True Fan”. C’est quoi un True Fan. Il vaudrait mieux parlé de [...]
conversão de fãs em potencial, mídia social e estratégias na internet - quatroevinte mc

30. Dec, 2009

[...] entende um pouco de inglês e se interessa pelo assunto, eu recomendo muito a leitura desse artigo aqui, sobre o a “teoria dos 1000 fãs” e a importância de ter uma base sólida de fãs [...]