Doing some musical surfing I happened on a forum for Morrissey’s many dedicated fans. The thread I landed on began with a fan posting an idea:

“I’ve just made a post…suggesting that the bootleggers on this site recreate each Smiths album as live versions…No idea if my suggestion could go anywhere, but I thought I’d post the link here to see if any active filesharers / bootleggers would be interested.”

I scrolled down through the thread and watched the idea take hold. Eventually came this follow-up post:

“This site is brilliant. I post a suggestion at 9.50pm (in UK) with an idea that I thought would take months to see to fruition. I log on at work to find that the box set has been completed!

I work in community development, we say a lot that process is as important as product - meaning that sometimes the way that we do a task (consultative, value based etc) is as important as the end result (achieving social good). But it goes out of the window with this site. Don’t hang about just post up the albums. Brilliant!”

You can find it all here (or you could a couple days ago, though as I write this I note that the site is down, hopefully not permanently)

It is indeed an amazing feat. The entire Smiths catalogue of studio albums recreated by fans from live bootlegs, song by song. Ironically, this sort of intense file-sharing dedication by fans is also quite illegal. If the French authorities were to determine, for example, that someone from France had uploaded a bootleg mp3 to this collective task, then that fan would be punished with the legal suspension of their right to access the Internet! (Yes, the new French copyright law is extraordinarily harsh and misguided, just like the one that is to be proposed for Canada.)

But apart from the remarkable networked achievement, and apart from the weird illegality of the process, something else stands out here: Morrisey makes not a cent from all this intense engagement with his music. Why? Not because it decreases his commercial CD sales, for few of these mostly fan-produced live recordings were ever even commercially available. Rather, because Morrisey has no way to monetize all of this dedication from his networked fans.

Of course if he was on 76fanclubs, he could make all of his live recordings freely available for fans to play with and still make lots of money by monetizing their dedication via an online fanclub.

I’m not sure that I’d join it – Morrisey is an odd cat – but my wife is a big fan of his and would certainly be among the first to sign up. I will say that seeing The Smiths in ’82 was utterly thrilling. An amazing band and an amazing artist. No wonder his fans are so busy…

My one quibble would be to say I think he’s not spending “too much” time on this stuff. He’s quite obviously a thoughtful guy and perspectives like his are valuable.

On April 9, Usher weighed in on the controversy that blew up after Billy Bragg wrote “The Royalty Scam“, an op-ed for the New York Times. I think the nub of Bragg’s argument was this: “The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.”

Not long after that, the founder of TechCrunch, Mike Arrington, weighed in with a forceful essay called “These Crazy Musicians Still Think They Should Get Paid For Recorded Music.” Arrington argued that Bragg was wrong to suggest that social networks are responsible for decreases in recorded music sales, saying “Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.”

So when Usher decided to jump in on April 9, he wrote “Artists have been signing and getting screwed forever by the old model but that doesn’t mean they should, doesn’t mean its fair and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for something better. The money is still in music, its just moved from the record companies to the ISP’s, mobile and social networks. It’s gone from copyright holders to ‘the pipe’.”

I don’t know whether musicians are “owed” money by the social networks that host their music and materials. I doubt there’s a single legal point in their favour. I’m not holding out much hope that Zuckerberg or the other creators of social networks are going to feel a moral imperative to support musicians. And I’m don’t think someone like Coco Love Alcorn (May 17 at BobCat House Concerts, btw) putting up songs on her Myspace page is an equivalent to Bo Diddley getting screwed by Chess Records.

But Usher is right as well. He writes “In my fantasy musicians would band together, create their own Ning, host their own ads and get a cut of the revenue and the equity.”

What he’s talking about is what we want to do. We want to take the focus off the ‘product’ and put it on the process; we want to give fans an opportunity to support the bands they love DIRECTLY, and we want to give artists an opportunity to develop relationships with their fans in an authentic, transparent, and manageable way.

In another of Usher’s posts, he likens the ‘new world’ of the music industry to landing on the moon. Usher’s orders, as the Neil Armstrong of that mission: “you can stay on the ship and dream of the days when life was good and the CD was king (all intellectual property), or you can walk out onto the surface, and start to explore…” 

So put on your moon boots and come on over, David. We’re ready for you.

This is an extremely important idea in this day and age, when connecting with fans - no matter how dispersed and remote they be - can happen efficiently and creatively via the web. In fact, this is basically the idea behind 76fanclubs.

Consider how the web changes things. Previously, having 1,000 dedicated fans was not actually enough to make a living, especially if those fans were spread over a wide area (10 fans in St. John’s, 10 in Vancouver, 10 in 98 places in between). There could be no economic benefit to touring to reach that fan base, (costs are far higher than revenues), nor to releasing a CD via standard commercial route (no label will pick up an artist with such a small fan base, and if they do, the likelihood of those 1,000 fans finding that CD in their local CD store is remote, and of course only a small fraction reaches the artist from a CD sale anyway). Radio play isn’t likely either, further reducing potential revenues.

Supposedly the web was going to change this. But has it? Not really. Not yet. Sure, bands have websites and fans can visit them, but few artists can stay on top of their ecommerce biz, assuming they have one, which most don’t. Besides, with the proliferation of file-sharing and the decline of CD sales, selling CDs off a website appears a dead-end street anyway. So where is the solution?

Our approach is somewhat radical. We’ve tried to rethink the whole notion of the economic relationship between a band and its fans. We say: first, conslidate your dispersed fans into a database so you can manage them as a community. Second, nurture your relationships with them by sharing music, pictures, thoughts, etc. with them on a regular basis. Thirdly, and most importantly, give them a simple way to share cash with you, in exchange for all that stuff, via an online payment tool. Not on a per-song or per-CD basis, but as an annual renewable membership in your musical world.

And 76fanclubs is just a simple platform for enabling that exchange without any muss or fuss.

There are plenty of other advantages to this system as well (economic simplicity, autonomy, sustainability, etc.) We’re not saying our model is perfect, or that it is 100% developed. On the contrary, it’s a work in progress. But we believe it can help musicians significantly increase their revenues immediately, simply by doing what they already love to do: making music for their fans on their own terms.

In the current musical economy, those 1,000 distributed fans create next to no revenue for an artist. Using 76fanclubs those 1,000 fans would typically generate about $15-20,000 annually directly to an artist. Or course, if you can build a fanbase of 2 or 5 or 10,000 then your revenues will rise accordingly.

All we’re saying is, compare the our economic model with others and draw your own conclusions.

In addition to recording and editing on the cheap, musicians are only a high-speed Net connection away from being in the music distribution business. “What would make this a better world is if the independents could compete in music distribution with the major labels,” envisions Gotcher. “That’s the future of music-on-demand, and I want to play a key role in developing the consumer side of that technology.”

Of course, the article was in Wired, so that makes that level of prescience less improbable.

Don’t know who Peter Gotcher is? He was behind Digidesign, the company that created ProTools. Not long after this story ran, Digidesign got bought up by Avid. Gotcher is now a venture capitalist and still kicking around ideas around that side of the music business. In fact, he just poached the head of Yahoo! Music for a new venture.

It seems  a shame that even with people that deeply-pocketed thinking about it in 1995, that developing of tools like 76fanclubs has taken so long.

Hat-tip: Fistfulayen

Evans starts off by arguing that the music industry has essentially “blown the last decade by trying to hang on to a business model that is antiquated and ill-equipped for new digital era in which we work, live and play.”

Then he points out that Warner Music’s new hire, Jim Griffin, is proposing a surcharge on internet bills that would provide unlimited access to music. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, the plan would institute a $5 monthly fee on your Internet service bill. That’s the same amount as the proposal from the Songwriters’ Association of Canada.

Is it time for a tax? My gut tells me no.

I’ve been coming up with this theory for a while now about P2P downloads from the consumer’s point of view — and keep in mind, I don’t do P2P. Every time I’m tempted, I think of the musicians that play at my house concerts and that this would be money out of their pocket, and I can’t.

So here’s my theory: people don’t download music for free out of a desire to stick it to the musicians (although if it’s a super-rich one that might be partially true); they do it because they want music and they don’t give a fig for the “record industry”. If they see anybody as a deserving victim, it’s the “music business”.

In a world where the RIAA sends 5,000 threatening letters a year to music lovers, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

So what’s the solution? A tax! One from the music industry, then another from the songwriters, maybe one for the American Federation of Musicians…

There’s gotta be a better way.

But here’s the thing. Very few musicians, as they sell those CDs, bother to find out who their buyers are. And without that information, they lose out on a great opportunity to build a sustainable and economically potent fanbase.

76fanclubs says: never sell a CD without getting the email address of the buyer. Because those buyers are your economic future. Damn, they’re your pension fund, your retirement plan, your freedom 55! If you can aggregate all those fans, if you can know them, nurture them, and monetize them year after year, your economy will mushroom.

But how? 76fanclubs of course.

Simply make sure you explain to each buyer that each CD purchase includes a year’s membership in your fanclub. (You can also sell annual memberships in your fanclub and give the CD itself away as a gift to new members.) But either way make sure you get the buyer’s email address and enter it into your 76fanclubs fanbase. Then keep feeding your fans music and love using 76fanclubs’simple scalable publishing tools, so that they in turn will keep feeding you.

The goal is to renew your fans year after year. So that instead of being a one-off CD sale, each fan purchase lays the groundwork for an ongoing economic relationship that could pay off 10 times over. And you can do it, because off-the-stage CD buyers are hardcore fans. They saw your show, they liked it enough to buy a CD, and they may even have purchased it from you personally! (Nothing builds fans devotion like actually meeting you.)

These are people who care about you and your music and who have proven they are willing to be a part of your economy. It’s up to you to ensure they don’t disappear forever. Don’t throw away your fans. Treat them as a renewable resource in your sustainable economy.

We learned that 76fanclubs can be different things to different people. At least a couple of our attendees saw it as an excellent method of selling subscriptions to upcoming CDs. Others saw it as a high-quality email management tool. Some saw it as a service exclusively for their most devoted fans. And still others thought that perhaps, as one silver-tongued songwriter put it, “76fanclubs isn’t Evian, it’s tap water.” In other words, rather than seeing 76fanclubs as a subsection of your economy, imagine it as your primary economy.

All in all it was a successful encounter, with a lot of expressions of support for 76fanclubs, and a lot of interest in trying it out. Now we just need more musicians to start using it. That’s how we’ll all really learn just what 76fanclubs does best.

We’ve been rehearsing for months.
Learning our parts, honing our chops.

Now we’re waiting nervously backstage, ready to take our best shot at rocking your world.

76fanclubs is in the house!

76fanclubs isn’t really a band, but we’re definitely all about the music.
We’re all about connecting bands with their fans.

The way we see it, nobody else really needs to be involved.

But we also know that when the curtains open, what we think doesn’t matter.

The question is: what will you, our special guests at this exclusive preview, think of our work?

Will you pelt us with bottles? Give us a smattering of applause? Or will we get a standing ovation?

It’s time for us to face the music, so we’re inviting you to be the first to experience this Alpha version of 76fanclubs.

If you’re a band, start a fanclub. Publish music and pictures, upload set lists or laundry lists. Find out how 76fanclubs puts you in charge of your band economy. And if you’re a fan, find out what it’s like to have a personal pipeline to your favourite band.

But please, give it to us straight. We want to get 76fanclubs exactly right,
and to do that we need your feedback. So tell us what you need 76fanclubs to be.

Click on the Feedback link on the site or send us an email at:
Feedback@76fanclubs.com

Why? Because our brand new app is live at last and I am one proud poppa! Long live 76fanclubs!

What does she look like? Well, let me take you back a little…

When I first started gigging in the late 70s I was getting paid about $75 bucks a night to play clubs in Montreal. 30 years later I still sometimes play for as little as $75 bucks a night.

Pathetic isn’t it? But I’m a musician and I love to play. And 75 bucks – or something like it – is the going rate in a lot of North American clubs. So I suck it up. But the fact is – as all of us working musicians know – that musicians are bottom feeders in the existing music industry. People spend billions on music, but the vast majority of that money goes to businesses not bands.

So what does that have to do with our little bundle of joy?

Everything! Because the whole purpose of 76fanclubs is to help you make a better living as a musician. Our goal is to connect you with your fans so they can pay you directly for access to your musical world.

Hey, we know that’s a big dream, and our newborn app has a long way to go before she’s standing on her own two feet, kicking ass and rocking your world. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and the 76fanclubs team has been going full out to deliver a healthy, happy baby.

So please, have a cigar, and give our little app a slap on the ass. We’ve got a lot to celebrate!