"Have fun, make art."

Art For Art’s Sake

The constant talk of the need to monetise music is somewhat confusing to me. Just because you make art, doesn’t mean that you deserve to make money out of it.

art –noun

1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. (Dictionary.com)

Re-read that again then just for yourself “… what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance”. That’s what should be both the motivation and the payoff for musicians, to make something beautiful and significant.

Whats more, great art is rarely spawned by the singular desire to make money. (I’m sure many would argue that the two things are mutually exclusive) why did Bowie make “Changes”? Why did Lennon and McCartney write “A Day In The Life”? For me, if you want to make money, become an accountant. If you want to make art and make music, then get on with it. Making art is not the precursor to making money from your art (if you make an axe, it doesn’t mean someone should by rights buy that axe from you).

Do you make and perform music? Why did you start to play? Why did you join a band or do your first performance? Think back, what was your motivation?

For me, I can trace my lineage directly back to seeing my Dad playing rock ‘n’ roll to friends and strangers at locked door/closed curtains drinking sessions held outside of licensed pub hours. He performing for the entertainment of others, for no charge. His payment; the lit up faces and smiles of people sharing in the experience. In essence, my Dad is a Fun-Pusher.

This is why I’m proud to say, “I’m in Hope and Social, and I sell fun“. Now while it may not be the trendiest or coolest product (it’s not sex, it’s not good looks, the right hair or skinny jeans), it is a currency all of our own. We have our own particular brand of fun – it involves fans and new friends alike, and it goes with us to every show. We create an experience and something different happens at each and every show. What’s more, unlike a CD/a record/an mp3, it’s not copyable; you can’t put it on a disc or a hard-drive and play it on your mp3 player.

Why we don’t deserve to earn from music

Firstly, your art may not be to the liking of many people; hell, it could be rubbish. Furthermore, people may not want to give their money to you. That’s right, people may be making their decisions based not on how good your stuff/product/music/package is, but on how much they want you to have their money. There are many and varied reasons why people may choose not to buy your wares, what we can do however is give people good reasons to buy (On a similar subject and for some further reading, here’s a great post by John Sheldrick on Music Think Tank about the many reasons Why You Should Pay For Music).

While I don’t think anyone deserves to make money from their music by right, I do believe that artists deserve the opportunity to make their music making sustainable, and then hopefully profitable. Part of that is minimising costs; making sure it’s not costing you to say put on a show , or perhaps press your CDs, taking advantage of social media, digital distribution and the new, free ways of connecting with people. This is why I urge people daily to sell their music as a PayWhatYouWant download (and physical CD if you’ve got the stones to do so). PWYW gives people the opportunity to not only pay what they want, but also who they want. It is with this in mind that musicians need to push forward now, with a desire to make art, to do great things and to move people to want to part with their money, and put it into your bank account.

So, Why Make Music? Why Make Art?

I am driven to make music, I’m in part defined by it. I must do this, I cannot function without music being a central and vital part of my life. If you don’t feel that way, then maybe its’ worth thinking about other ways of making your living? Music is such a powerful and attractive force that non-musicians also seek to work in music; PR’s for example will work, often for far less money than they would in say retail PR just because they want top work in music, the same must surely go double for the musician.

I remember when I first started writing music, it was my hope that one day someone would come up to me and tell me that something I’d made had moved them, in the same way that music has moved me. If someone tells you that your music is the soundtrack to their getting ready for a Friday night, that it helped them through a difficult time, or that it’s inspired them to make art, then there’s your musician’s wage right there. I believe, should be the pre-cursor to your musical career; this has to be the drive that makes you write, rehearse and perform.

The “hopefully inspirational”, but probably actually just a little bit self congratulatory bit

Through PWYW, through special events and through peddling fun like I saw my Dad do for free twenty years ago I’m now in the band I’ve always wanted to be in. Hope and Social have grown into an old-style, good-time show band. Like a Yorkshire E-Street Band, we’re a spectacle, an event. We’re certainly not just a gig (though if that was the case, we’d be a damn good gig). What we do is economically sustainable, it pays for itself and sometimes a bit extra for us all to live on, but mostly, it is the reward in itself. Furthermore, by adopting and embracing new opportunities to connect and share with people, we’re now at a point when we’re far more viable than anytime when we’ve invested thousands of pounds on advertising, PR, pluggers. Sustainability first, then profitability.

Just as important as taking advantage of all the new opportunities we have today though, let’s not waste our lives, time and energy complaining that everyone gets their music for free and start giving people damn good reasons to put their money where your singer’s mouth is.

Hope and Social at the 'Come Dine with Us' event.

The new music industries work in a very different way than the record business of the ’60′s. The precious 7 inch of plastic discs of that decade (when music demand far outstripped supply) were rare; clamoured for. Music lovers saved their pennies and tens of them would gather round a single radio to hear the charts. People flocked in droves to record shops to hear the latest discs and treated their vinyl with the cotton glove respect that’s reserved for the finest of diamonds. People Treasured Music.

Today’s music environment is very different. With 13 million bands on [cough - spit] Myspace alone, a growing live scene, thousands of pieces of music becoming available free online daily, and most all forms of recorded music being easily copy and shareable, we can’t consider Music itself to be the carrier of our currency. The Democratisation of Music means more supply of music, and that means that the expectation is that it sells for less. What’s more, music is copyable, shareable, reproducable and even if only say 4% of the bands on Myspace are any good, that’s over half a million bands to compete with.

So, what can we sell?

If we can all now make, distribute and sell music, to succeed we’ve got to differentiate ourselves from the crowd & give people something they can’t get elsewhere. If we can give people something that isn’t repeatable and isn’t copyable then all the better. So, what’s unique and not copyable? A feeling, or an experience. We have a saying in Hope and Social. Have Fun, Make Art. It’s become part of our ethos. If it’s not fun we don’t do it; and if it sounds fun we should probably ask others to get involved. It may not be the same for your tribe, but for Hope and Social the currency we deal in is “Fun”.

3 Course Meal in a Crypt

Come Dine With Us

With the “Make Art, Have Fun” mantra resounding in our communal larynx, we took a demo of a song that sounds vaguely like French supermarket music, added the germ of an idea that a cheese and wine night could be fun and multiplied that by the effervescent mind of the brilliant Ben Denison‘s.

What we we came up with was a great way to galvanise our close fans, to get them involved in making art with us, to have a lot of fun and to raise money to fund our music making. We invited our fans to our home, the studio we’ve recorded all our albums to date in (and the venue for the Crypt Gig last year). We promised to cook great food, to have the band wait on, and play at our guests tables and finally, once everyone was suitably relaxed drunk, record a song together. We named it “Come Dine With Us” and we invited people by song.

The Event

We’ve already blogged about the amazing people who helped us pull all this together, but to see them in action is something else. A picture says a thousand words and all that:

Hope & Social • Come Dine With Us [Behind-the-scenes] from 3B Media on Vimeo.

We turned our studio into a French Bistro for the evening, we served a 3 course gourmet French meal to 70 people, the band waited tables, played at people’s tables, silent auctioned one-off items and recorded a song with our good people.

Offer Value

Our (initially flummoxed) drummer Gary Stewart (who joined us this past year) said, “I don’t understand… so you just think stuff up that you want to do, and people pay for you to do it?” and quite simply the answer is yes. When we do special events, we do our best to ensure that we give value to those who care enough to attend. We price it as something we could afford to do. Through this we’ve built relationships with our fans which enables us to sell unique events such as our Crypt gig last year and Come Dine With Us as far more than a standard gig.

People buy into our events because they know it will not only be a good time, but also that we’re not trying to bleed as much profit out of them as maybe we could. All our standard releases are Pay What You Want. People know we’re not in the game of ripping people off. Most importantly though, people know we’ll include them in the night and as in the case of our recent Come Dine With Us event, we might well make a song with ‘em for our album.

The Wine Bottle Orchestra

The Song

James Hamilton wrote a wine bottle orchestra part, we tuned 50 wine bottles, asked guests to bring an instrument of their choice and we made art. We recorded the song live along with our fans singing, blowing, clanking, banging and singing along. As Ed Waring said in his recent blog:

“Eurospin is not my favourite song on the album but it’s kinda my favourite bit on the album. Watch the amazing video below. You got to love the amazement on our faces that it’s working and the fact that the crowd just make it look so easy…”

Hope & Social • Eurospin from 3B Media on Vimeo.

… additionally however, the story of how we made this song has helped us reach many new fans.

The Footprint

More from 'Come Dine with Us'

The response to the event and the concept of the event has been amazing. In advance the twitter and facebook communities were rife with activity around the event, and by turning our guests into band members on the record itself, they became the evangelists for our record.

It’s not by accident that the tools we use to sell and promote our work online include the option to share. There’s the 3B Media videos, and the bandcamp music which can be easily embedded on most websites. Bandcamp also has the transformative “Post to twitter” and “Post to Facebook” direct links and through the stats package we can see this appearing daily in people’s posts. There are new blogs sprouting up about the event, and through selling more Fun we can reach out to even more new people.

The music industry has changed, however if you know your band and if you know your tribe you can give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Find that thing and that‘s your currency!

Tales from the Crypt

The following is a post from Rich Huxley of the UK band Hope and Social. Rich will be contributing a monthly series giving insight into his experiences as an independent artist. 

Following on from my first guest post here on Creative Deconstruction, I wanted to focus on the wider implications of one of the special events I talked about there, and the release that followed; to expand on the financial viability of the event/the release and the other reasons why this special box-set and concert package are proving valuable for the band.

The Deal

On the 17th October 2009 Hope and Social held a special concert in our studio ; the ticket-price was also to include a box-set (band blogs about the event and the box set here). Exclusively limited to 110 places, and priced at £25 ($40), we asked our fans to join withus in the place that gave birth to our debut album, to bring themselves in good voice, to bring a candle to light the way to the studio and a piece of writing for use by the band, and to help us make an artifact, a work of art and a record of the night. Strong advocates of the Pay What You Want model, we made this one-off event and it’s accompanying box set our first ever minimum price package.

The box set

What you got:

1. A ticket to the “Be the Architect” show at our studio “The Crypt”; a two hour performance.

2. A leatherette (woo, posh!) box containing:

• Two CDs: a 68 minute live recording of the night’s performance “Be The Architect” and the band’s debut album Architect of this Church (the architect of the church is buried within the crypt. The wall bears a plaque, which is where the name of our album came from) with accompanying download.
• An 80 page book containing photos of the night, and the writings of all the attendees (we asked that everyone bring a piece of writing, a hope, a though, a wish, or, seeing as we’re in a crypt, a “prayer”).
• A brand new Hope and Social song with lyrics made up of people’s “prayers”, on download.
• A 139 page PDF photo slideshow of the event.
• A credit on the album for your part in its creation.

The Benefits

Community

It’s very important to us that our fans have a sense of community. We have a great time with audience participation and want people to feel like they’re a part of this thing, and that everyone matters.

This sense of community is our key currency as artists in the new music landscape. Attention and love are just as important as having great music that people want to consume. If the band did one thing on this night it was to make our fans feel special, like we’re all in this together.

It’s worth mentioning that this single event has done more to bring our fans together than anything else we’ve done. It gave our fans the opportunity to connect not only with the band, but also with each other. And while the vast majority of those who came to the Be The Architect Crypt Gig were existing fans, the reach to new fans has been wide and far, and continues.

The Internets

The internet footprint for this show and for the box-set has by far surpassed any single event we’vedone before, even including our Glastonbury shows.

The twitter hashtag #cryptgigwas very well populated before, during and after the event. On the day of the show in particular fans, helpers and band alike were uploading pics of the venue as we set up, audioboo-ing, tweeting their geographical progress on their way to the show, uploading twitpics during the show and generally spreading good vibes for the band and the event. More recently, as people havebeen receiving their box-set, #bethearchitecthas been spreading the news of the lovely artifact.

"Community is our key currency as artists in the new music landscape."

Even more pronounced however has been the blog footprint. Not only have we featured in fan’s blogs, but the box-set has created enough of a storm for being a beautifully crafted and crowd sourced artifact that it’s been featured on new music blogs like newmusicalorder.com and included on the bandcamp blog about physical releases. There have been photo blogs about the event, as well as the box-set, and the band’s facebook pageis still pickingup comments around the release. Our blog page for the release is populated with comments and flickrand facebook photos again are spreading our word for us.

A video made by Phil Barber, photographer for the night is now up on Vimeo, again it’s something that our community can share. This feeds back into the community aspect again as now we’ve made the connection with Phil. He wants to work with us again and make a video for a new track.

The Money

We had 110 people at the show which brought in £2750-00 ($4,400.00) and after expenses and the manufacture of 200 of the box sets, we’d slightly overspent. We spent £3,000-00 ($4,800-00), so as we are selling the set for £35 (£56) after the fact, we actually needed to sell another 8 sets to break even (bit of an error of planning but hey, that’s being in a band so far as I can tell).

Fortunately, the day the box-set went on sale we sold 12 units, so we were straight into the black, every box we sell now, online or more likely at shows is pure  profit… I say profit – this doesn’t account for any time put in by band members, probably in the region of 300 man hours pulling this together. We don’t get paid as such. What’s interesting to me is that really supports Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans“. If we were selling 1,000 box-sets, then we’re making £30,000-00 ($48,000-00); that would pay for a quarter of the bands year to live and be able to work on music. Hopefully, we’re getting there.

The Invisible Benefits

Something that people never seem to talk about in new music industry blogs is that there are some people that you just can’t reach online. Additionally, they leave no internet footprint. There is no blog to follow an event or a release, there’s no twitter feed, flickr pics, facebook page comments, this is stuff that’s not trackable and not online.

What’s more, it’s probably the majority of people, even ardent music fans may not be active as a force for artists on the internet. I can’t count the times (certainly up until this year) where I’ve bought a CD or a download or went to a great gig, and didn’t talk about it online… what I would do though is talk about it with friends, play them the music, recommend going to a gig. These are invisible benefits.

Inertia

I find it particularly interesting with Be The Architect, that people are actually sharingtheir own work, their own writings and pictures of themselves. Whether traceable or invisible, the sharingof the “Be The Architect” night and box set is all the more because it’s much more than just a gig and a box-set; it was a unique experience for band and audience alike, and that the fans made this happen with us seems to make them all the more passionate about sharing.

There’s a number of reasons why the band I’m in are called Hope and Social. We’ve always been sociable people, always wanted our shows to feel like it’s a gang of us, like we’re all in this together, a community. Also, we’re optimists. We believe that people are generally good, and that most people want good things for all human beings. We hope that if we invite people into our world for a few hours at a show, for an hour on a record that we can connect with and lift people a little, make people forget the humdrum, and see beauty. We hope that our sociable tendencies are a force for good. (Also, there’s a great record called Hope and Adams by a band called Wheat that’s just incredible, so we stole shared in that idea a little bit.)

It’s through this that everyone who worked on the Crypt Gig with us was willing to work for free, from lighting to the bar, from manning the door to baking brownies and refreshments to sell. It’s because of this that many of our fans will go to the ends of the earth for us, and it’s this passion that gives the band energy and inertia to move forward.