How many fans do you need to “make it” in music?
What does it mean to “make it”? Is it an amount of money? A number of streams on Spotify? Followers on Instagram? In reality, the definition varies from person to person.
Personally, I have no desire to be rich or famous. I just want the freedom to do whatever I want. One unavoidable aspect of freedom is financial - doing what I want requires money. To me, “making it” simply means: earning enough to do whatever I want.
I’d wager the majority of people reading this are like me - they just want to make enough money with their art to be free. Defining your “enough” with an exact dollar amount is helpful. It gives you a clear target to aim at, and a benchmark to measure your progress against. Most importantly, it enables you to calculate how many fans you need to get there.
1000 True Fans
In 2008, Wired editor Kevin Kelley wrote a now-famous essay called 1000 True Fans. His idea is that most creators start out with a desire for millions: millions of fans, dollars, etc. But you don’t need millions to make a living.
The core idea of the essay is simple: creators only need $100 of profit per year from 1000 “true fans” to earn $100,000 - a comfortable living for most.
“A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.” - Kevin Kelley, author of 1000 True Fans
This equation can (and should) be tailored to your goals and life circumstances. In Prague, where ABC is headquartered, $30,000 is a decent salary. It’s more than the average per-capita income in Czechia. If this were your goal, you would need just $30 in profit each year from 1000 true fans to make a living with your music.
Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
How to Get 1000 True Fans
If you started at zero and added 30 new true fans per month, you would reach your goal in 3 years. Also, you probably know a few hundred people already.
Many great courses have been created on building an audience, some of which are available for free on YouTube. The paid ones are usually of higher quality, but all will involve the following main themes:
Quality content is king. Technologies like social media and streaming enable easy mass distribution for your music and content. High-quality content encourages sharing, which means your distribution network can grow passively (without your promotion efforts). This is true of your music, videos, and whatever other content you create. Just read the story of Hozier’s Take Me To Church music video for inspiration.
Think community. Start with your family and friends. Play open mics and free gigs. Busk. Form a solid base of local fans, and engage intimately with them. Really getting to know the kind of person that’s drawn to your music will help you draw more of those kinds of people in. Focus less on converting strangers into followers, and more on converting your followers into true fans. This will pay you dividends as true fans will a) stick around longer, and b) become your “brand ambassadors” - creating new fans for you.
Collaborate. Approach creators with similar target audiences and fanbase sizes. Ask them if they’d be open to collaborating. Don’t take it personally if they don’t respond or say no. Leave the door open for them if they change their mind. It doesn’t need to be another musician - it could be a visual artist, a photographer, a writer, anything. Focus on how cool the end product could be, rather than how many followers you could earn. Once again, quality is king.
How to Earn $30 of Profit from Each True Fan
If you expect streaming to be your primary source of income, don’t. At .0033 per Spotify stream, you would earn $3.30 if each of your 1000 true fans listens to your music once. However, streaming is necessary for exposure. It should be seen strictly as a vehicle for fan creation, much like social media, which can then lead to true fan conversion. It’s the base of the pyramid below:
Source: Andreesen Horowitz
The image above is from an article by Li Jin called 1,000 True Fans? Try 100. He outlines a strategy by which creators can aim to earn $1000 from each of their 100 true fans to reach the same goal of $100,000.
As Li mentions, these strategies have inherent differences. The 1000 true fans are motivated by a desire to support the creator, while the 100 true fans are motivated by their own self-interest and growth.
There are ways artists can employ this strategy, such as by offering a songwriting bootcamp. It could include 1:1 sessions, high-quality specialized training, and other means for providing enough value to justify the cost of the course. In our example, the artist would need 100 of their fans to sign up for their $300 bootcamp in order to reach their goal of $30,000.
This strategy is worth considering, as it significantly lowers the total number of people the artist needs to convert into true fans. The challenge is to develop a product or service (or a combination) that 100 people will be willing to spend $300 on - no small sum.
Regardless, every creator, no matter what their strategy, should be focused on converting each fan from one tier of the pyramid to the next. Free Content Consumers -> Patrons -> High-Value Purchasers.
Here are a few tools and strategies you can employ to monetize your fanbase.
Free Audience: Audius, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, blogs, etc. The purpose of these platforms is to distribute your content, establish your identity, build a following, and engage with your followers. These are not your main profit generators - they are used to create a pool of leads you can then convert into true fans.
Donors and Patrons: these are platforms true fans use to show their support.
Patreon: allows fans to donate to their favorite creators. Creators can establish tiers with various perks attached. (ie. for $10/month you will get to vote on the artwork of your favorite creator’s next album)
Swag: T-shirts and other physical goods can be more profitable than you may think.
Kickstarter: crowdfunding for a tour, recording, music video, etc.
Concert tickets
Subscribers and High-Value Purchasers: This tier is less straightforward and therefore lends itself to your creativity. It consists of products that fans desire for their own self-interest. They may want to learn something from you or profit off of you in some way.
Here’s a simple example of how an artist could reach $30 in profit in a year from one true fan:
Paradigm Shift
I don’t mean to imply that this is easy. It’s difficult to gain 1 true fan, let alone 1000. This is simply a paradigm shift. Instead of daydreaming about making millions, take a practical approach: determine your desired income, choose a handful of means for monetization, estimate how many true fans you will need to attain your desired income, and execute. As mentioned in a recent article of ours, the number of tools available to independent artists seems to be growing exponentially. Use them.
Some believe (myself included) that cryptocurrency will fix the music industry. My last article, and the one from the previous sentence, are good introductions to the world of crypto and its usefulness to indie artists. Crypto allows fans to share in the growth of their favorite creators, which incentivizes loyalty. It also allows for the sale of verifiably scarce digital files - NFT’s, which could serve as a high-value purchase item (going back to our example).
These technologies offer a means for developing even closer relationships between creators and their fans. They enable stronger community, exclusivity, and financial incentives for fans. All sorts of interesting experiments are being conducted by artists in the crypto space. I highly recommend keeping a close eye on the space as it develops.
To many artists, “making it” seems next to impossible. Our goal at ABC is to help artists a) realize that it’s not, and b) help them get there. The path to monetization may be getting more complex, but the toolset for doing so is becoming more robust. Reach out to us at contact@artistbridgeconsulting.com.