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Connecting to fanbase / Touring / some encouraging figures



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