I thought it’d be fun to use Last.fm statistics to try to devise a measure of “audience devotion.” Using the most popular act in the Last.fm database (The Beatles) as a comparison point, I looked up the total number of listeners and the total number of plays for 49 other acts. They include some of the biggest names in “indie” rock, some fairly unknown local acts, and a few various names from my iTunes library. I divided the number of plays for each artist by the total number of listeners to create a “plays-per-listener” ratio and then ranked the spreadsheet by that number.

As the article notes, it’s hard to game this number, so it should be a stable indicator of popularity. If your music is tracked through the last.fm database, this could be a good metric to track your own success.

Tangentially related, Coolfer has another analysis of trends in album sales, this time highlighting the continuing shift from an industry dominated by a few top sellers:

As the theory of the long tail would predict, the Top 200 accounts for a lower percent of total album sales today that it did three years ago. Between July 2004 and June 2007, that percent dropped about five points to about 35% from 40%.

There’s that long tail again…

unless you make mainstream pop or hip-hop music, WHY BOTHER WITH A MAJOR LABEL? They’re not interested in artist development. Hell, EMI won’t EXIST by time you put out your SECOND album, never mind your third or fourth. You want to get caught in that vortex?

It’s no secret that Lefsetz thinks the executives at the major labels dug their own collective grave. Most people who follow the industry probably feel the same way. So why did his rant grab my attention? One passage in particular:

Don’t swing for the fences. We live in a niche world. Don’t carpet bomb, hitting those not interested, rather just appeal to the core. And the core will support you, buy your CD even if they’ve stolen the tracks, as a badge of HONOR!

Lefsetz is right on the money here. Not only do we live in a niche world, but the Internet has given rise to, what Clay Shirky calls, meganiches. With hundreds of millions of users within your reach, your niche can appeal to a tiny percentage of consumers and still be huge. Further, independent music practically defines a long tail market place. Amazon and the iTunes Music Store should serve as good examples of why that’s important.

This leads to an unrelated piece in NY Magazine. The greatest generation gap since rock and roll has nothing to do with indie music or music promotion, but the thesis it presents is important to anyone involved with either:

When I was in high school, you’d have to be a megalomaniac or the most popular kid around to think of yourself as having a fan base. But people 25 and under are just being realistic when they think of themselves that way, says media researcher Danah Boyd, who calls the phenomenon “invisible audiences.” Since their early adolescence, they’ve learned to modulate their voice to address a set of listeners that may shrink or expand at any time

If you’re much older than 25, the people described in the article probably seem odd. But make no mistake: The future does indeed “belong to the uninhibited.” And anyone planning to market music will have to understand that audience, for soon they will make up the lion’s share of the 18-34 year-olds most music sellers want to reach. (Even in a world of meganiches, you still need consumers with disposable income.)

The teens and twenty-somethings who grew up with a ubiquitous internet have views on copyright, property, privacy, and music that differ considerably from those of their parents, or even their older siblings. I thought this quote, from Xiyin in the NY Mag article, captures it best: “To me, or to a lot of people, it’s like, why go to a party if you’re not going to get your picture taken?”

If you think she’s talking nonsense, that parties were just fine before camera phones and Facebook, then ask yourself this: Do you at least know how to market your music to someone who thinks like Xiyin? Because you’ll need to …

Previously: Big Label Problems, Opportunities for Indie Artists

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With the traditional business model failing, it seems that future success in the music industry will require novel approaches. The big labels have been slow to adapt, however. And the opportunities they’re missing leave some great openings for independent artists.

Witness the plummeting price of CDs. Thanks to iTunes, the big box retailers now want CDs they can sell at $9.99:

Physical retailers are pressuring the labels downward on price (of course, Wal-Mart is the biggest culprit) because they don’t want to be undercut by iTunes 9.99 on all single albums. We’re rapidly moving to a 9.99 world on the big sellers.

CD Baby’s $13 CDs were a bargain when Amazon charged $18 a pop, and that helped independent artists sell albums. So on the face of it, major retailers selling $10 CDs looks like bad news for us little guys. But the RIAA would have us believe that the cost of CDs should have risen over the last two decades. The industry is clearly, perhaps willfully, out of touch. And therein lies our opportunity.

As indies, we’re not tied to shareholders and a business model that we must defend with ridiculous cost-of-living calculations. We’re not even tied to $13 a CD. Or $10, for that matter. In fact, as Koopa showed last month with their download only single on the UK Top 40, we’re not tied to CDs at all.

Compounding the industry’s woes is the real concern that CD sales are headed for a tipping point:

But the specter of a flattened physical is now looming, and Goldberg pointed to markets like Taiwan and Korea, both of whom have experienced physical drops of about 70 percent over a 3-4 year period. For the most recent week, album sales were 14 percent below year-ago tallies, part of a multi-week trend.

We’ve seen a steady decline in CD sales over the last decade, but thanks to Walmart’s, Target’s, and Best Buy’s use of CDs as loss leaders, the big labels have a guaranteed market for their wares. If public interest in CDs continues to wane, these retailers will conclude that floor space covered with racks of CDs can be better used to sell iPod accessories. And as with falling CD prices, the major labels’ lack of response to this threat presents opportunities for artists willing to experiment with creative marketing.

So what’s an enterprising unsigned artist to do? Michael Wolff’s article Facing the Music is a few years old, but still eminently relevant. He offers this advice:

If you’re providing free entertainment, which is obviously what the music business is doing, then you have to figure out some way to sell advertising to the people who are paying attention to your free music… Or you can provide stuff that’s free, and use the free stuff to promote something else of more value that people, you hope, will buy — now called the “legitimate alternative.” (Putting video on the CD is one of those ideas — though, of course, you can file-share video too.) Or sell the CD at a level that makes it cheap enough to compete with free (free, after all, has its own costs for the consumer).

CDs may not disappear overnight, but it’s clear that the business of music has changed. If you ever plan to sell your music, the uncertainty in the industry right now presents opportunities unlike any you’ve had as an independent artist.

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Sometime in the next twelve to eighteen months CD sales are going to decline so precipitously as to cause the major labels to rethink their digital strategy. With the iTunes Store no replacement for discs, they’ll be forced to authorize a new method of distribution, just to maintain their bottom lines.

His thoughts are generally aimed at professional producers and A&R folks, but as the industry adapts its business model to accomodate the Internet and iPods, independent producers and artists become increasingly important. If your interest in recording is more than a hobby, knowledge about the business (even in the form of expert prognositcation) is crucial.

And David Geffen, apparantly, is done.