Invest in your favorite musicians
There’s of course been plenty of head-scratching and brainstewing over the years about how to build new, viable business models for musicians. Plenty of fingers have been pointed at file sharing networks as the root of all profit-falling evil, but despite the bad press and expletives, several artists have embraced p2p and have started thinking creatively about how to tap into their wired fanbase.
During the Free Culture Workshop at the iSummit 08 in Sapporo, Yale’s Leah Belsky shared her research with Yochai Benkler and Byron Kahr on the success of voluntary contributions. Their study, Everything in its Right Place: Social Cooperation and the Production and Distribution of Creative Works (PDF abstract), argued that the online platforms interfacing between musicians and fans can strongly impact the artist’s bottom line. Ultimately, the study concluded that design features (particularly how well musicians pull on their fans’ heartstrings) can positively affect the frequency and size of donations.
Take stock in a band
Now there’s a new game in town. The Guardian reports that the music execs behind bands like the Kaiser Chiefs are offering up “bandstock” to fans. Just as filmmakers like A Swarm of Angels opened their production process up to paying community shareholders, musicians are applying the same logic and inviting their community invest in their work.
Kaiser Bricks by Christoph!. CC BY-NC-SA. Fan art for the Kaiser Chiefs
The Kaiser Chiefs, for example, let fans buy shares at £10 increments. Then, after achieving a certain agreed amount of funds, the band will tap into the money to record their next album. In return, investors are given credit on the CD sleeve, priority ticketing, a copy of the album, and a percentage of the CD’s profits.
This model definitely has some potential, but it seems to lack the extra feedback loop with its fans that A Swarm of Angels and music sites like Jonathancoulton.com offer, namely a chance to contribute to the creative process. If bands like the Kaiser Chiefs really want to get their community on board, they should think about involving them more in the area that fans care about the most: the music.
www.iworkfortheinternets.com
In other cool t-shirt news, The Waving Cat recently announced:
Launched: www.IWorkForTheInternets.com
Posted by Peter Bihr at August 1, 2008I’ve mentioned it before: I work for the Internets. Together with two co-conspirators, we also set up an on demand print store. More importantly, though, I just got the website to go with the shirt: www.iworkfortheinternets.
Admittedly, it’s all still very much under development – so far I’ve just taken the stylesheets from my other domain peterbihr.com – but there you go. Also, the shirt shop on Spreadshirt isn’t designed at all yet, and we might have to find a solution with cheaper shipping outside Germany.
Feedback is highly welcome, of course. For the time being, there’s a few photos (with very mixed picture quality) of what the shirts look like on www.iworkfortheinternets.com.
If you’re feeling inspired, the design can also be remixed in C-Shirt fashion. (Read more about C-Shirt)
And as Peter says, we’re hoping to develop storefronts for easy shipping in different regions (thanks Paul for pointing this out!). One option is CafePress for US shipments. Any recommended print-on-demand t-shirt services for shipping elsewhere?
The Futures are with C-Shirt
Nihau! Been offline for awhile, due mostly to taking a long and necessary vacation in Kunming and Chengdu, China. Before that was the whirlwind of webby openness at the iSummit 08 in Sapporo, which I’ll hopefully be posting more about soon.
While at the iSummit, the “I work for the Internets” shirt made an appearance, and the concept was taken to the next level by CC Japan’s C-Shirt project, a clever and fun way of sharing and remixing t-shirt designs. At the moment, C-Shirt is hosted at Nota, a “casual collaboration” platform that in Sapporo proved itself to be fairly intuitive and even fit for touch screen development. What’s even cooler is that each C-Shirt comes with a Quick Response (QR) code, which is a type of barcode that can be scanned by your mobile phone. So if you spot a C-Shirt you like, you can scan the code and be taken to the URL hosting that design, remix it, or order it right then and there.
If you haven’t come across a live and walking C-Shirt yet, you can still access all the designs through Nota. To do this, you’ll have to create an account (ask me if you’d like an invite!) and then either pull up an existing t-shirt design or start your own. In Nota’s editing mode, you can manipulate the design’s layout, colors, and text, plus upload your own graphics. Although some of the formatting tools are limited (for example, only five fonts are supported), you can still achieve a good range of styles and effects.
Then, once you’re happy with your design, you can send it to the printers. This step requires some expensive equipment, but for the iSummit, CC Japan brought their own printers. I predict, if Nota has any merit, other t-shirt shops like Spreadshirt or Cafepress will add support for sharing and printing designs through the C-Shirt model. I know I sure had fun with it.
Premiere of the “I work on the Futures” C-Shirt:
Other cool C-Shirts walking around:
“Piracy funds terrorism” by Vlidi:
“I support Free Culture” by BobChao:
All designs on C-Shirt are CC BY-SA
