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Looper's Delight
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Hi all, In the midst of having very little success in booking a short midwest tour, I stumbled on this article about Kim Boekbinder, who has been experimenting with "pre-selling" tickets to her tour gigs before she books the gig. (Think kickstarter campaign.) Info on that is here: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=12929 http://www.kimboekbinder.com/shows/ That's a great idea, and another whole discussion. So I started thinking, "Well, Kim's a much more successful artist than I am, in a genre of music that does well in hip music circles these days. I'd probably get a big fat goose egg if I tried it." ...And yes, that's true. I'm by no means a successful or popular musician. But then I started wondering - how many listeners do I actually have, and how many would be likely to come to a show if they knew I was playing in town? So, I went to last.fm and crunched a few numbers. I tried to make my estimates conservative, but the results still came out mildly encouraging. Pasted below are the results I just posted on another list in another discussion. note 1: This is not really intended to be about me specifically, but an example of an artist who has a couple cds out, which are available on the popular downloading sites, but brings only about 5-15 people to a local gig. note 2: Last.fm is a site in which users track their own listening habits. However, you can look up an artist and see how much their music is getting played by the site's members. Paste: According to Last.fm, there are 223 Last.fm members who have listened to (or scrobbled) at least one track of mine. Some fuzzy math: Given from the listeners I can see on last.fm, I assume that I personally know or have met about 10% of these folks. I'm also going to guess that less than 25% of people who purchase or listen to this kind of music are members of last.fm. (It's probably more like 10% of listeners have last.fm accounts.) So, multiplying my last.fm listeners by 4 or 10 to estimate 100% of all listeners, there is somewhere between 800 and 2200 people out there who have purchased or downloaded at least one song from me. (That's a good deal more than my uneducated guess would've been.) Of these 800 to 2200 people, I probably know about 10% of them. (And that 10% would of course be concentrated in the bay area.) The tricky question is: How many people who have listened to my music like it enough that they would attend a concert of mine if I was in town and they knew about it? I'm going to be conservative again and say 10%. (I'm very likely to attend concerts of indie acts that I've listened to at least once, but I don't think I'm a typical US listener in that regard.) So, that makes somewhere between 80 to 220 people, mostly based in the USA or Europe, that would possibly attend a show of mine if they knew about it. The last time I toured, I didn't meet a single person who had heard of me before. If I could somehow get in touch with that 80 to 200 people, that would make a significant difference in my current (dismal) attempts to book a tour. So what to do? Hmmm.... ...and if my math comes up with 80 to 200 people, imagine how it calculates for you folks who have actual talent and/or charisma! -- Matt Davignon mattdavignon@gmail.com www.ribosomemusic.com Podcast! http://ribosomematt.podomatic.com Rigs! http://www.youtube.com/user/ribosomematt