topic: music

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Microfinance comes to music

27 Mar 08
in

From Tune Your World: 1,000 True Fans to Launch Calabash's Music Microfunding Platform!

What's the solution for how to survive as a struggling musician in the 21rst Century?

According to Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelly's article, 1,000 True Fans,  an artist needs to find only 1,000 core fans -- defined as those who will buy everything produced by the artist. If each 'True Fan' is willing to give up a day's wage ($100)  each year to support the artist, then an artist can earn $100,000 per year.

It's a simple formula for artist success and it is exactly the path that Calabash is currently developing to allow fans to microfund working musicians. Calabash is changing the way the world finances music by applying the principles of microfinancing to the music industry.

This is impressive - crossover from international development ideas to music. The important idea here, and the difference between something like emusic/magnatune is that instead of framing the buyer's contribution to the artist as a percentage of the sale price, which makes understanding one's total contribution difficult (what's 1385 x 0.75 x 65c in dollars?) this system foregrounds the total contribution one makes and connects it with the artists total income. The system appears to be currently designed in the style of Wikipedia-style "fund drives", with a chart tracking the current contributions vs the overall goal.

What is interesting about this is that it is easier for someone to make a value estimation on an artists' music and pay appropriately, but also to know how well (or badly) a favourite artist is doing, and pitch in appropriately. If I find my favourite Garifuna musician is  barely scraping by at $35,000 a year, I'll put more of my music budget towards him than, say, Bjork. Not only is this more power to the artists, this is also more power to the people.

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6 Moments in a Concert: Additions to the Experience

17 Mar 08
in

Extra-performative elements of a recent concert by the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra.

  1. The preliminary discordance: which is not actually a discordance, but the simultaneous tuning of a full set of instruments before the performance begins
  2. The turning of the pages: as the choir sings, and reaches the end of one page; there are ripples of page-turning that pass through the choir, regions of coordination, late-turners, all visually apparent as little bits of white appearing and disappearing across the sober black field of choir robes
  3. The standing up of the choir: as the choir gets up from their benches (but why do they do that?) there is a momentary hush; robes rustle together like a breaker on a shore, and suddenly the choir is still, poised, ready to deliver
  4. The putting-down of the violins: twenty violins go from neck to knee, from horizontal to vertical, all at the same moment. And wait. The reverse is not quite as spectacular.
  5. The coughs in the silence: during interludes in the music, coughs pop out like firecrackers, as if they had been held back and could not be resisted any longer. Echoes travel round the auditorium and set off further rounds of coughing, like a ball in a pinball machine that has been hit too hard.
  6. The crackle of flipping through the program: as the music drops to a gentle whisper, just moments after a sheer crescendo, the pages of hundreds of program booklets crackle as they are turned by an audience intent on following the words, unaware that the effect they have on a sensitive listener is not unlike the sound of a million locusts alighting on a dry cornfield. But they intend well, so we forgive them
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