getfansi-blog

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Taylor Swift was right to leave Spotify. We must update America's antiquated music licensing system.

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How (and why) I learned to love failing my customers

Yep. You read that right. I LLUUUUURV it. I didn't always. It took some serious effort to get to this point too. Some of my most cherished customer feedback:

"I don't know why I can't find [enter failed UX flow here]"

And

"If I don't see [enter missing feature here] soon, I'm going to have to quit."

And even

"You mentioned your service does [enter imaginary feature we wished we already had here], but it doesn't. What are you guys doing over there?"

Truthfully, building an amazing product is incredibly hard work. Wouldn't you just like to know if your product is ACTUALLY amazing? How are you supposed to know if you're on the right track? Humans... that's how.

Courage and Humility

Have you ever had a great idea, shown it to a bunch of people, only to have it either shot down or ignored? Think about what artists do at every show; They go to a different venue, with a different set of humans in the audience, and they basically hope that what they've got will survive the crowd's response. There's always that chance that the audience just... doesn't get it. The artist could very easily get shot down or ignored - and many do. It's a huge ego boost when you get it right... but it totally humbles you when you get it wrong. An artist has two options in this scenario: take the criticism and apply some changes, or persevere at more shows until they identify their core audience. I believe the best option is actually a hybrid of those two. My advice? Be courageous enough to try ideas out early and often, yet humble enough to do apply critical changes while identifying more and more people in your core audience.

Clearly, the same applies to building technology products. The faster I get the idea into people's hands, the faster I can understand it's weaknesses. I don't really need to identify it's strengths. People don't quit products because of strengths. When we first started Fan.si, we printed out the fan club signup forms on paper and manually entered credit card information into our payment processor's website. We've come a long way since then and we have a long way to go - but we try to move quickly to identify problems and we build on the knowledge our artists and their fans give us. It's a fast feedback loop and it's awesome, but it's also totally scary. We've become much more robust over time, but that's only come through being open to constant feedback and then humbly assuming we don't have it perfect yet.

So that's how and why I learned to love failing my customers. Here's hoping you'll learn to fail yours too! ;)

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Custom Artist Cards... A live event MUST-HAVE.

Why Cards?

The card is a visual representation of your fan club at a glance, it is as an affordable advertisement piece at a live show to your fans. The card will have a photo of you or your logo as an artist on the front and your price points and a way that they can sign up right there in their seats on the back.

How Do I Use the Cards?

In the absolute best case scenario, invest in your show by having one on everybody’s seat when they come into the event (assuming there are seats). 

You can tell people to pick up one on the table when they leave, its a free picture essentially, this is a great way to direct people to a merch table where you can talk to them about signing up to your fan club or partner program.

It's also a wonderful tool for potential busy tables for when people are trying to sign up on iPads or computers you’ve provided. You can let people know that the card that they got or the one that is on the table, will walk them through step by step how they can sign up on their own smartphone.

As well, a card allows them to be able to walk out of the concert and sign up at home, with that said this is the worst case scenario, you want people to do something while they are emotionally moved to do so. If someone however, slips out with one there is a way they can still sign up.

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Landing Page Video: Why should you create a Video?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a video is worth a million!  It is the best way to welcome your fans to your fan.si landing page.  Your fans are there to meet you!

How long should the video be?

We recommend between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.

What is the content of the video?

Why you're excited about this platform (it will allow for a new deeper engagement with them as a fan)

"Thank you for supporting me, really looking forward to having you as part of my inner circle."

Here are some great example videos:

Jacob Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjYudZ05Byw

Pavlo: http://vimeo.com/97943716

What quality should the video be?

The video can be fully produced, but doesn’t need to be.  It can easily be shot on your smart phone as a personal message to your fans!  

Where can the video be shown?

It will be on the home page of your Fan.si page.

You can use it on your your social media,feeds as the initial tool to get people to your site -  make sure you add your url at the end of the video (fan.si/mybandname)

At a live show during an intermission or before the show begins

At your Merch table playing on a tv screen or laptop

What if I dont have a video yet?

You can go live on Fan.si without it but we recommend adding one as soon as possible.

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One issue that we've been hearing (over and over again) is that it's increasingly difficult to reach your full fan base when you post on Facebook.

Although Facebook is free to use, Facebook is primarily an advertising company, so it's not in their shareholders interest to make it easy for artists/brands to reach their fans without paying for ads.

Here's a recent link to a study done by Ogilvy - the ad agency.

Organic reach of the content brands published in Facebook is destined to hit zero. It’s only a matter of time. With the impending end of organic reach, what are …

The good news is that we're able to solve this problem! Every time an artist posts every fan gets notified. What's more, from every email we're seeing huge click rates and engagement on each post!

We'll post more in-depth stats as they come in.

If you're trying to engage your fans, why not check out Fan.si?

http://fan.si

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A new Canadian Independent Music Association study on the economic impacts of musicians surveyed more than 1,500 artists and industry workers

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Interview with Fan.si’s Earliest Artists: Jason and Charmaine Grace Brown

Independent Musicians (and married couple) Jason and Charmaine Grace Brown (http://fan.si/jcb) were the first artists we approached to help us beta test our platform. Newly formed in 2013, dedicated to touring, and highly talented, they were gracious enough to accept and become our first case-study... 

Why did we pick them? They’re talented, natural artists. Already having committed to traveling, writing, releasing projects, but also new enough that the data wouldn’t be based on a pre-existing fan-base. We wanted fresh data. We needed to find out if fans who went to their concerts would behave the way we predicted they might. For Fan.si as a platform to work, we wanted strong evidence that a proportion of live audiences, upon hearing and making a connection with a new artist, would pull out their wallets and vote in favour of that artists’ long term success. This is the amazing interview with Jason and Charmaine Grace Brown: 

Q: How long have you been performing? 

We started doing Christmas house concerts in December 2012, and it turned into something we didn't expect! People loved the music and we loved doing it...so over the course of 2013 we began performing more and more, and as of January 2014 we are now doing music full time! It's been a whirlwind year!

Q: What kind of venues do you play? 

We play a variety of venues—we do a lot of house concerts, along with church events, coffee shops, clubs and corporate events. 

Q: When did you start using Fan.si? 

We started using Fan.si in November 2013. It was a great time to start, because we had on average 5 events a week for the month after that. Gave us lots of chances to experiment with how to give the Fan.si appeal and how to interact with people after the event. 

Q: Were you surprised with the results?

We have been surprised and so excited about how Fan.si is working for us! At first we were super sheepish about asking people for money but after a couple events we gained confidence and realized it wasn't as difficult as we thought it would be.

We are so new to this: to performing together and to the music business side of things. We had no idea people would go beyond just saying "wow your music is awesome!" to actually signing up to give to us on a monthly basis. But they are!

Q: Why do you think it’s working? 

I think for us, it's our combination of songs and stories at events. We certainly have not perfected our craft (we're working at it!), but we are committed to always bettering our songwriting and bringing a fresh sound for people to listen to. 

But something else we are getting good feedback on is our "storytelling", for lack of a better word. We love sharing our life experiences and being authentic and vulnerable onstage. Our concerts are easily half song half story. There's not much we wouldn't share on stage. This creates moments to connect with audience members, gives them something they can relate to. They can say "yeah I struggle with that too. I'm not alone." Nobody wants to feel alone. So if through a song or story, they find a moment that moves them, they want to somehow bring that experience home with them. And given the option of "buy a CD" or "stay connected with Jason and Charmaine's music forever", we find consistently at every show there are people who choose the latter! 

Q: This is not an unbiased question(!) - Would you recommend Fan.si to other artists? 

Hands down, absolutely! Because of Fan.si, we've been able to take our music from a part time hobby to actually doing this full time. We are so encouraged by the number of people who are now part of our team, and the money is obviously so helpful! Plus, the team at Fan.si have been amazing to work with--helping us try new things, giving us tons of encouragement, answering a million questions, and tailoring our Fan.si experience to our music and what works for our fans. 

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Fairly straightforward “traditional” business models (primarily retail) have been disrupted, but a new, multipronged “community”-based model is poised to significantly increase the overall pie.

Uhm... Did this dude read my last blog post and just... copy it? ;) 

here: http://getfansi.tumblr.com/post/74063316964/fan-si-enter-monthly-micro-patronage-for-artists

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Fan.si: Enter monthly micro-patronage for artists

13 years ago I stood in front of 18 congregants at a tiny little Finnish Pentecostal Church in northern Ontario, Canada. I remember it clearly. We played four well-known hymns: Three at the beginning of the service and one at the end. After the last song, as we were packing up our gear and getting ready to leave, an old lady came to me with a stack of cheques…

"Here you go young man. I want you to have these. I was a musician once and I know how hard it is to pursue this as a career. You all need this more than I do". 

Are we insane? 

Starting a music/tech startup is like looking over a vast field of dead bodies (http://allthingsd.com/20130713/take-a-trip-down-music-startup-memory-lane-dont-trip-on-all-the-craters/), turning a blind eye, and saying that despite the live-fire, you’ll make it to the other side alive. You have to be insane to start a music startup today. The cards are heavily stacked against you even purely from a funding standpoint. Many VCs and Angel investors have been burned by the music industry. It’s hard to even start a conversation about the opportunities in the space with “money guys”. And yet, fundamentally, it’s in times of great flux when there are a lot of problems to solve that opportunities arise. I personally think we’re dealing with a “breach in the levy” type of situation when it comes to problems in the music industry. Call me an opportunist if you like, but a flood of change is coming and I happen to have been privy to one of the many canaries in the coal mine: Social Games.

Social Games: My canary in the music industry’s coal mine

I spent 6 years co-building a social/mobile gaming company on Facebook/iOS/Android. It’s still doing well. Very well. After a lengthy sabbatical from my role as CEO, I asked my co-founder if I could step away. We came to an exit agreement. All is good. What I learned during those 6 years opened my eyes to the opportunities screaming at me from the music side of things. You see… I was signed as an artist and songwriter to a major label just as my gaming company was starting to do well.   The moment I was signed, was the moment I stopped making money making music. You heard that right. It’s a good thing my social gaming company came to be, otherwise, I’d have been in a rather precarious position (just married, baby on the way - nothing to fall back on as a high-school dropout). It was this dichotomy/irony that struck me the most: I was signed to a major label - which made me look good from the outside, but made me less money than ever from music; while my independent/direct-to-the-players social gaming company, with no marketing spend and no publishing company was raking it in online - one tiny transaction at a time from a dedicated 2% of the user base. I asked myself if the same could hold true in music. If I had somehow secured ongoing revenue from the very dedicated group of music fans I had built over the years, could I have made a respectable living? I did some quick napkin math and…..the answer looked like a resounding “YES!”. The problem was not a lack of support from fans. The problem was the business models were not built with support for the artist in mind. It was in this topsy-turvy world that the ideas for Fan.si were incubating. 

An illustration

Indulge me by following along with this illustration. Imagine the artist being the social gaming company, and the gamer being the fan. In the music industry, much like in the gaming industry, there are gatekeepers. These gatekeepers own the pathway (read “sales channel”) to the end-user. The gatekeepers in the music industry have traditionally been labels and publishing companies (Sony, EMI, etc.). The equivalent in the gaming industry have been publishers (EA, Activision, etc.) If you wanted your game/record on a shelf, where the fan/gamer foot traffic was, you first needed a relationship with one of these few gatekeepers. You paid a lot for this access to fans/gamers. For games, the Publishers held (and still hold) most of the retail space where the vast majority of physical game-buying happens. In the music industry, for the most part, these sales channels also belong to the major labels/publishing companies. 

Then came the internet…

Here’s what the internet keeps doing - it introduces systems and mechanisms which deflate the cost of once-expensive processes and makes them really affordable and sometimes free. iTunes is a great example. The trip to the record-store shelf has become a couple swipes, a few characters and a flick from anywhere you’re sitting (and it’s become even less steps if your phone has a fingerprint reader like the iPhone 5s). Deflationary economics is something Brad Feld coined (I think) in this blog article in 2011 (http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/12/22/the-amazing-power-of-deflationary-economics-for-startups/) and in my opinion, is the reason Fan.si is off to such a great start and will continue to be an important tool for artists and fans to come together.

In Fan.si, we’ve combined a recurring payment model, analytics for artists to bring value to the relationship with their fans, and a simple way to keep supportive fans happy. It’s a nice rounded, relationship-oriented tech package which allows artists to be supported directly by their fans on an ongoing basis. Truly, the technologies that allow Fan.si to exist have only been around for about 12 months now. Some of the technologies we use at Fan.si aren’t even publicly available yet. 

Nothing new under the sun…except…

Direct support from fans to artists is not a new idea. It’s been happening for centuries. Before record labels ever existed and were the “in” thing, if you were an artist and wanted to make a career of making art, you needed a patron. The patron would shell out enough money for you to survive as you created the piece for them. They might get this work of yours months, or even years later. Perfectly reasonable right? Well… it meant you really had to be good and you had to catch the eye of some wealthy bugger who felt you were talented enough to give you the resources you needed while you crafted your piece. And as a patron, you had to singlehandedly, or as an organization, have enough money to support the artist in an ongoing way. It was expensive and time consuming, and quite risky…. but it was direct from fans. 

The world has changed a lot since then, but fans haven’t much changed. We still love music. We still want a connection with the artist. Unfortunately, for the last 100 years or so, the gatekeepers were the ones controlling access to the foot traffic. That is… until foot-traffic became internet eyeballs. Before the era of internet crowd-funding there hadn’t been a simple way for those of us who wanted to connect with artists to do so for nearly 100 years (unless they were local and we knew them personally). The internet on our mobile phones breaks down that barrier, much as it did between my social gaming company and the players it continues to serve in 180 countries around the world. Now, a fan base can be built entirely digitally without anything more than a webcam and a dream. (Throw in some talent and your chances are even better).

Crowd funding is almost good

There are some major problems with the current crop of crowd-funding platforms however. The predominant problem for artists is consistent revenue. Crowd-funding platforms have primarily been offered for creators to use on a project-by-project basis. These project-focused crowd-funding models provide artists with the same lump-sum funding model that labels have provided to artists for the last hundred years. For example, Artist X has Project Y and will request funds for said project from online supporters. Online supporters can contribute to Project Y until the campaign for Project Y is over. Project Y’s campaign completes and lump-sum is delivered to Artist X. Once Artist X spends the collected resources, completes Project Y, and delivers it to supporters, a whole new cycle with all of the relationships needs to be rebuilt. Artist X is now forced to consider how to approach Project Z to convince supporters to contribute again. Why? Because they’ve spent the money they committed to spending. Why is this the default model? If the problem for artists is a consistent revenue from their ongoing work toward their craft, then there has to be a better way - or at least a different way. In my opinion, there is a better way: It’s called monthly micro-patronage. 

Anyone can be a patron

With Fan.si, any music fan can be a patron. For as little as $2 per month, fans can contribute to an artists’ career. The fact that (nearly) everyone has a payment terminal in their pocket makes it more viable than ever to cast a wide net and get many micro-patrons. With Fan.si, the artist has a wealth of tools to offer any number of perks to these fan-funders. An artist can grow an active pool of supporters and build a healthy career for themselves without pandering to any gatekeepers at all. The relationship with fans is direct and intimate. The business model is also incredibly self-balancing. If you suck as an artist, fans will simply not support you. If you’re good, fans will get behind you. It’s in the artists’ hands to make that connection or not. Fan.si’s responsibility is simple: make the tools to connect artists and fans amazing. The simpler, and better the tools, the greater the relationship between fans and artists. This will lead to longer support, which will extend the career of artists and increase the value of the platform. 

That old lady wrote us twelve cheques for $100 to support us for a whole year. She committed $1200 to our collective future. She believed in us after hearing only 4 songs. That may not seem like a lot to you, but it was a LOT to us. We were floored. She had a chequebook with her, and the time to help us out in a massive way.

Here’s the sad truth. What happened to us that day is happening right now somewhere in a dingy bar, or in a church, or at a massive EDM festival or on some Youtube channel somewhere: Some artist is connecting with a fan in a deep way. The problem is that either the tools aren’t there for that fan to take action, or that fan doesn’t have the time. Fan.si is just starting to provide these tools, making it easier and faster for fans to support artists. Our goal is to make supporting artists so easy that the name Fan.si becomes synonymous with being a serious fan. We can’t wait to see what artists and fans accomplish together. 

Thanks for listening :)

J.

Visit Fan.si at http://fan.si and sign up!