Where does your money come from? If there’s one area where people have consistently innovated throughout history, the way we resource ourselves would have to be it.
When it comes to the creative types, the concept of quitting your day job and just pursuing your art is a great temptation. But if you’re not going to be a Billboard-topping musician or an Academy award-winning filmmaker, how many fans is it going to take for you to lead a comfortable life?
This is a question asked by many, and attempts to answer the question are available via a series of creative types who have been running the numbers… According to Kevin Kelly, it all comes down to the concept of a ‘true fan’. If you have 1000 people who will just about buy any book you write or any album you launch, you probably only need 1000 of these ‘true fans’, because in concentric circles away from your die-hard followers, there will be still others who will buy your work on occasion-
Kelly has concluded that if you’re a creator (artist/designer/author/videomaker etc), as long as you have 1000 people who love you enough to buy what you do, you’ll be well on your way to linking your income to your passion.
Of course, central to this thesis are the questions of ‘how much is enough?’, and ‘what does life with 1000 fans really entail?’.
Bringing some sharp focus on the downside of living a life reliant on this model, musician, Robert Rich offers this take on life as an artist with about 1000 fans:
“The sort of artist who survives at the long tail is the sort who would be happy doing nothing else, who willingly sacrifices security and comfort for the chance to communicate something meaningful, hoping to catch the attention of those few in the world who seek what they also find meaningful. It’s a somewhat solitary existence, a bit like a lighthouse keeper throwing a beam out into the darkness, in faith that this action might help someone unseen.”.
Scott Andrew doesn’t make a distinction between ‘true fans’ and ‘the rest’. He encourages artists to run the numbers on clearing $20 from each fan (a fairly modest number, really). How many fans would it take to quit your day job? He explores the mathematics of this in a rudimentary way –
Brian Austin Whitney [once] pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.
…Here’s an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that’s how many fans you’d need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you’re making $30K yearly, you’d need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you’re willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans.
Of course, if you’re going to manage your relationships with your fans through the various traditional and new media options, you may well need a team of staff who can support you and your art, keep your fans in the loop, etc. so it’s probably best to do the numbers on how you’re going to pay them, too!
This kind of modelling is a great way of looking at breaking outside the mainstream, because it puts your audience – the people you want to reach – at the centre of your planning. After all, art that keeps the audience in mind is far more likely to touch, move and inspire – and surely that should be the whole point?
Thanks to Suzi Dafnis, who’s tiny tweet inspired this post (and its title).
Doesn’t it also depend on your kind of art? If your business model is working from home creating great viral videos and selling tshirts based on them, you could probably live off 1500 fans buying two shirts a year.
But if you’re a musician, a fan giving you $20 a year through traditional paths of merchandise, album and ticket sales, you need a lot more fans or a lot more money per fan to cover your expenses. $20 a year in ticket sales and $20 as an online donation is a huge difference. Probably about $17 difference.
So can a musician survive from 1500 true $20 fans? Yes and no. If Bon Iver wanted to retreat back to his mountain cabin for a year to work on new music, I bet he’d find 1500 fans willing to pay $20 to subscribe to a blog and feed of demos. While he’s in the cabin, could another musician live from touring to 1500 fans scattered around one country if they were paying $20 each? Unlikely. It’s probably closer to at least $100 per fan to make the $20 profit.
Kevin Kelly’s model makes sense for some artists, but Scott Andrew’s calculations are really only applicable if your art needs no more than a laptop and the internet.
Great post, Tim.
As a blogger I found the spot where I could do generate enough revenue do it fulltime was appx 80000-100,000 pageviews/month
A core of those people are “regular readers” (its hard to estimate maybe 10-20%), the rest are people who came, found the information they were looking for and disappeared back into the internet
I have no idea how many are “true fans” who read all the blogposts because measurements of web traffic and visitor actions are so inaccurate
Nice post Tim.
Passion attracts loyalty.
Loyalty attracts community.
Community attracts Support.
Interesting post Tim. I guess if you have 1000 ture fans and the number will continue to grow through word of mouth. That is if your work can be duplicated for resell purposes.
Nice post, Tim. I remember reading the same thing in Seth Godin’s book a few months back. That said, I also remember thinking that 1000 people who would buy anything you do were also a lot harder to come by than it might initially seem. I can’t think of many (non-high profile) people who would have that.
The idea of finding 1000 people who are casually interested in you is easy. You could probably build this on Twitter relatively quickly. But getting to the next level where people care enough to spend money rather than attention on you is a challenge.
So, say, you need 1000 people to pay, you probably need a “pipeline” of 10 x that number. That’s where it really does become a fulltime job – keeping up with 10,000 people, providing value to them in their lives etc – with the aim of “converting” them into paying/supportive members of your tribe requires considerable amounts of planning and effort.
I’m not saying it is impossible. Just wondering whether many of us have the capacity to actually deliver on this.