Scaling Amanda Palmer

On 5/23/12 1:57 PM, my friend George Mokray sent me a link:

http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/23551030051/where-all-this-kickstarter-money

Steve Provizer replies:

Thanks for sending that. I don't really think you can scale what Amanda Palmer has done down to the level at which almost everyone (especially a jazz musician) operates. At any level you try to implement it, creating the materials and doing all the things she talks about is a full time job with big expenses. In fact, it's more expensive per unit to produce fewer cd's, vinyl, printed material, etc., so your percentage costs on a smaller scale are higher. 

Palmer ends up with about $100,000 after getting a million, so 10%. A year's Kickstarter effort that brought in, say, $100,000 (a very high return for a jazz project) would result in $10,000 and, as I said, I think the higher percentage outlay per unit would reduce that amount; far from a living wage.

I suppose it is THE FUTURE OF MUSIC [insert reverb here, as you say], but its influence will always be subject to the differences between the bent of one person to be a lawyer, one to be an accountant and one to be a musician... Some people, like Palmer, have the head for more than one of those things, or the entrepreneurial skill and/or charisma to pull it together and essentially become their own label, as she has. 

The reason people want to be signed by a label is that they don't want to do or aren't good at doing that range of tasks and willingly give up the control that Palmer achieves. It's not realistic to think that most musicians-especially us senior jazz citizens-will undertake this serious entrepreneurial effort. On the other hand musicians, to their detriment, are often not proactive enough in this process, especially on the accounting side, and the result has been a real lack of fiscal accountability. Historically, this has drawn a certain amount of malfeasance and villainy into the industry and musicians have gotten screwed. 

If you'll pardon my French, this is not an easy bifurcation to try and rectify. On the one hand, you have the drive to create and listen to music, which is rooted in the need for transport, release, ecstasy, etc. On the other hand, you have number crunching, selling tickets, learning HTML, etc. 

It does take all kinds and perhaps what we need here, as my mentor Broadway Danny Rose says, is "Acceptance, forgiveness and love." To which, I might add: "And Musicians-keep one hand firmly on your wallet."

"The Jazz Entrepreneur-Threat or Menace" by Steve Provizer

Blogmeister Chris R. bemoans the lack of entrepreneurial spirit among local jazzers. I more or less demur.

There are musicians out there exercising the old entrepreneurial spirit and bestirring themselves to various exotic gig locales and this is surely a better strategy than bemoaning one's fate while passively waiting to be discovered. But does it mean that all or even most jazz musicians should scurry from their caves and try to sell their wares to the unwilling masses?

Let's acknowledge that there will forever be a gap, nay an incipient conflict, between the dispositions of the Player of the music and the Seller of the music. God bless the child that's got both sides, but that's Halley's comet rare.  I mean, look at the ultimate fruition of the entrepreneurial spirit: our friend Wynton M. His skills in both are high, but the psychological result and cultural impact are, well, mixed. Maybe success doesn't inevitably turns anyone into a-god help us-"spokesman," but once cast in that role, it takes someone with the singular spirit of Coltrane not to fall into the divisive ego trap laid by jazz flackery and the media.  

I myself wandered for years in the Twilight Zone inhabited by so many jazz musicians. In a scenario that may be familiar to many of you, every half-assed musical money-making scheme ended in semi-disaster and narrowed the already small distance between me and the guys with the butterfly nets from the local loony bin. Now, I am predisposed to pontificate against the middle path.  Either go ahead and hustle your ass off, or spend your time getting real good at what you do and trust that your audience-or maybe a Seller-will find you. No bemoaning of fates allowed.

Explicatus Addendum:
In "Unions and the Fame Myth"  I wrote about the need for musicians to take matters into their own hands. But that's energy put to a different end. Unionizing has a different upside. It doesn't mean you get to eliminate the middle man, but it may mean that you'll be able to weed out the pimps.