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Why are sales hard for Artists? Analysis from 100 artists, venues, marketers.

Currently, artists are required to invest their time, resources, and money up-front when producing and selling merchandise and physical recordings, without the appropriate data to estimate sales. The same applies to booking performances or tours and selling tickets. Most venues in major music cities around the world are “pay to play.” That means that artists have to spend what little money they have, again up-front, to book their show with the venue, and are left with the burden of selling enough tickets to cover that booking cost. This is, by definition, gambling.

There are two primary economic factors at the heart of this problem:

  1. Demand is unknown - Not only do artists lack useful data on their fragmented audiences, they also lack a platform where they can conveniently le verage that data to communicate or interact directly with their audiences (hence resorting to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and email).

  2. There are no Price Discrimination mechanisms - If understanding demand answers the “how many people are willing to pay?” question, then price discrimination for artists answers the question of “how much are they willing to pay?” More than 80% of artists we’ve surveyed state that they don’t know how much their audience or fans would be willing to pay for a t-shirt, a vinyl press, or a concert ticket. When we asked them to explain how they go about setting their prices, the overwhelming response was: “I just kinda guess, and if I’m wrong, I usually lose money...which is most of the time.”

Artists function like any other business. They produce a product or service and sell it to their interested market. However, the gatekeeping of the music-industrial complex prevents non-mainstream artists from making sales or accessing relevant and actionable data, therefore upholding the vinyl ceiling and concentrating wealth at the top of the hierarchy. In the digital age, we have the power to leverage fragmented consumer bases to dismantle this system and make music a viable business for the most important stakeholders: the artists themselves.

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