I've been spending a serious chunk of my days developing outlines and writing descriptions of our bands musical goals, connections and business plans. This has involved a lot of time just sitting and thinking, trying to conceptualize the future of our content and media driven entertainment formats.
As a musical artist today, you have to work traditional promotional venues: shows, print media, press etc. Then you have to have a serious handle on social networking, myspace, facebook, ilike, imeem, lastfm etc. Furthermore you have to be in touch with the blogs, and all internet press, and also generate enough content to be relevant in a culture where people around my age and younger go through hundreds of new songs a week sorting out what to keep and throw away from a single listen. Videos, reality tv, designs, merchandise, remixes, exclusives, the content has to keep coming.
My question is how much content does a fan want? I don't want to know the everyday actions of my favorite bands, I'm not sure how well our political or spiritual views match, so I don't know how attached I want to be to that, but I still want content from dope artists at a fast rate, I'd listen to a new song, watch a new video or read writing from MIA every day if it was available.
So say my band goes and begins to develop far more media content to release outwards. At what point does the law of diminishing returns come in? Will we stop attracting new fans and start spending too much to not get enough sales back with existing fans at a set point? In a world where everything is increasingly free should we just try to be ahead of the curve and go for completely sponsor based income on all product and shows?
We've been discussing quite a bit the point of selling out. Our band is unique in that although we have leftist views and subject matter we're still very much in touch with both pop music and pop culture and make music that reflects all of the above, music that can still maintain a mainstream appeal. Our most viable option to be able to get the money to generate audio and video content in high quality, and then get physical and online releases of that content, is to work with corporate sponsors. I've learned through my work with my company Easel that advertising methods are changing, companies are now more open to spending marketing budgets on event and lifestyle sponsorships. However, statistics on the success of these sponsorship projects vary, and there are a lot of intangible factors that make it a connection rather than rational based industry when actually selling packages. Reminds me a bit of the music industry, strangely enough.
Should we be vying to have a huge sponsor take care of all of our work? Would mentioning them on mixtape intros, putting them on our artwork or (gasp?) including them in songs be going to far, or is this simply a viable option to allow us to continue our art creation in today's entertainment marketplace? Our current strategy is attaching to smaller sponsors and simply including them in branding opportunities, but we need larger options now that we're at the point where we need 10,000 promotional cds and videos that cost 5k etc. a point of production which is over our heads as individuals to generate, even with our growing show and cd sales revenues.
Timing has become so essential now that our fanbases go through media so fast. One of our most popular songs, Scottsdale, is a song about various cultural hedonism that goes on in one of Arizona's infamous party places. It's not necessarily a life we live, but one that's hard to escape knowing about if you're in the club scene in Arizona. People have attached to the song greatly because it mentions real places and real people, and shouts out many infamous Scottsdale urban legends (the five ni**a rule at PussyCatLounge, Brian Durkee, 944, sex in the skybox etc.). Because of this almost a hundred people I've come across directly feature the song on their myspace, we book shows to do just that song, and we've established a solid group of people in that scene who know who we are.
We are also lucky enough to be on the radio with a more serious song, Gravity, and to have a lot of love from the hip hop community for our street single Minority Report. Both of these songs are personal and serious and heartfelt, which gives us hope for the music we want to do. Scottsdale started out as a spoof and the fact it turned out a banger kinda drove it farther the we expected. Hot Rod from G-Unit called it the most strategic move we ever made, strange that we didn't approach it like that when we did it. The point of all this is that we have an extremely short window, about two months, to take advantage of what we have achieved from Scottsdale and Gravity, establish everyone as fans, and then produce another wave of media to keep these people interested for the next few months. We have to continue this process essentially until we start getting serious income or we get a record deal.
Now the next wave of media would probably be video. Producing, promoting and recording all the songs we've done so far has cost us about 5k we've come up with ourselves, and countless hours, not cheap, not expensive. Videos for Gravity and Scottsdale would run us about 7500 total, and allow us to remain in the mix for another two months while we spent another 5k to get more songs together. We get about 250 a show currently, we have a show around once a week, and our cd sales just about cover the costs of the cds we give away, so theres no real way for us to generate this income back in this market, if we do more shows than that we'll oversaturate and no one will book us, and local clubs don't have the budgets to get us 2500 for a show, nor are we really worth that yet, we're still on the come up.
So its almost a necessity for us at this point to work on a corporate level to insure we can keep developing content. This is new ground though, say we drop a mix cd "Bacardi Presents Silver Medallion" and we distribute 5-10k cd's through our affiliate stores, radio connections, venue and promoter connections and shows etc. Will fans still rock this cd, or are they likely to regard it as less real because it has corporate attachment. If the first track is a Bacardi shout out, will the listener even make it to the second? Knowing this point of compromise, what a new fan will except from a corporate standpoint is crucial knowledge for us right now, because we don't want to make a mistake with thousands of cds...
It's not an issue of the company branding either, they will get their lifestyle base branding no matter what, just me mentioning Bacardi as an example will have the few hundred people who read this consider them as a company that does lifestyle based sponsorship and put that name in the readers subconscious. People might even google the brand, I don't know. The listener will hear the name, see the branding etc. no matter what if the cd is distributed, the question is on our end will our music see the respect we need to have as serious artists? Times are changing quickly, and these questions are very important to our bands success.
Just some food for thought I've been dwelling on, back to drawing up this sponsorship package :)
