Josh Feese succeeds with unique sales pitch

Radiohead made headlines in 2007 when they allowed fans to pay whatever they wanted to for their new CD, and several other artists followed suit. That was a great thing, for it was a fine example of offering choice to consumers. Rather than assume they would steal the music if given the chance, the band let consumers decide what the music was worth.

Drummer Josh Freese is building on that notion with his second solo album, Since 1972. He is offering packages that cost between $7 and $75,000. The low end price gets you a digital download, the top end gets you a five-song EP written about you and your life, recorded by Freese, one of his drum sets, "take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from TOOL's Lamborgini," and Freese's membership in your band for a month (plus much, much more).

It seemed like an inventive lark when it was announced earlier this year. But then a funny thing happened: People took him up on it. In a post on the Nine Inch Nails message board, Freese writes that "I have sold 150 of the $50 of the packages and all 25 of the $250 packages (those went in the first 24 hours.) In less than a week I have sold 4 of the $500, 2 of the $2,500, 2 of the $5,000, and the big old $20,000 package!"

The $20,000 package sale has earned Freese some press. Wired.com's Underwire blog has the story. It seems fan Thomas Mrzyglocki had some inheritance money and a desire to get away from things for a while, so he bought the package and hung out with Freese for a week. According to Wired.com, Freese said, "I really do like the kid and know that it's a bizarre experience for him."

Meanwhile, Freese has earned unbelievable press for an album that would likely have garnered a handful of reviews had it come out through traditional means. Giving fans a choice, and being willing to go well beyond the norm, has earned him some fans, some notoriety and some cash. Though, he tells Wired.com, it's not about that: "I've made a little bit of money," he said, "but I'm not out shopping for cars, you know what I mean?"

Labels subsidize success in bid to break big acts

Coolfer reported last week about comments made by Edgar Bronfman Jr. at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media and Telecommunications Conference, and I found one of his statements interesting. I agree with him, but he doesn't take things far enough, and his shortsightedness is part of the reason why the music business is failing.

Asked about artists releasing music directly to consumers as opposed to going through major record labels, Coolfer reports that Bronfman "firmly defended the value of the record label model and the company's role as financier and risk-taker. "This question is a decade old," he said while recalling his days with Polygram in the '90s. After ten years, Bronfman said, the answer is that it is still very complex, complicated and expensive to launch an artist. Record companies are only entities putting up the capital against the launch, and record labels will continue to be the only ones in a position to do that. He finished with a bang: 'The artist going direct is a false notion, has been a false notion and I think continues to be a false notion.'"

He's right, up to a point. Yes, it is extremely expensive and time consuming to launch an artist these days. There are examples of bands and artists that have gone it alone and made a fairly successful career for themselves (Ani DiFranco, for example), but they are few and far between.

The problem, of course, is that labels are fickle, and after putting hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of dollars into breaking an act, they'll cut their losses if it doesn't work. That, perhaps strangely enough, works very much to the advantage of artists.

No one can break an act like a major label. They offer top-flight production, graphic arts, tour support, ad buys and more. A band can go from a regional phenomenon to a nationally known entity in short order. Even if they do nothing more than flop, their name is out there, and their fan base will have expanded significantly. Once they are dropped, that name recognition doesn't go away. Many artists have taken that path, knowing they would make next to nothing during the major-label stint, but consider it an investment. I remember interviewing the Posies' Ken Stringfellow years ago after the band had been dropped by DGC. He said he'll always have the people that discovered him thanks to DGC's promotion as an audience who will likely pay attention to what he does in the future.

So, Bronfman is right: Major labels are still the best way to break bands. But any band with an ounce of sense would bolt at the end of that first contract, guaranteed, unless they're one of the tiny fraction of acts that blow up big, to make more money on their own. Meanwhile, the labels lose money because they spend so much trying to break big acts but don't have the patience to let an artist's audience grow over time.

Blurt: mag to web and back again

This may be a first: A magazine that folded and morphed into an online-only product is now set to launch... a magazine.

Harp magazine, one of the best music titles to debut in the past decade, folded last March. It was purchased by JazzTimes parent Guthrie Inc. in 2003, and in announcing its closure last year, Guthrie CEO Glenn Sabin said, "Unfortunately, Harp's critical acclaim never translated into sustaining commercial success. Harp's lifecycle was ill timed with the precipitous decline of the music software industry, coupled with the consolidation of the consumer magazine newsstand business and rising paper and postage costs."

Those behind the mag, including publisher Scott Crawford, quickly regrouped and launched Blurt, an online magazine/web site. It is essentially Harp online, with a normal daily-updated web presence and a quarterly magazine. That product was essentially a magazine in all aspects but the presence of paper. Instead, users would click through pages in a dedicated web-based viewer.

At the time, Crawford lauded the “green-minded, digital-only format,” conveniently forgetting that Harp's old-fashioned print-on-paper format was doing just fine until commerce intruded. And now?

“It’s sort of a new paradigm,” Crawford told FOLIO: magazine. “We’ve gotten to the point of wanting a physical product to help brand the site—we want it to be the ‘soul’ of the web site in print.”

Translation: web ads sell at only a fraction of the cost of those in print, and if we want to survive, we'd best get ourselves on the newsstands. The magazine will appear quarterly and will retail for $4.95. It will debut in mid-March.

It's an interesting trajectory, the polar opposite of most newspapers and an increasing number of magazines. It will be interesting to see if the magazine repurposes online content, or vice versa, or whether it will offer completely original content. As a commenter on the FOLIO: piece points out, many web sites have tried and failed the move to print, including eBay and Motley Fool. Blurt's leg up comes from the fact that most saw that as an extension of a print title that already sold 60,000 copies a month, which should make Blurt's 30,000 print run a reasonable proposition.

I for one welcome the change. While I was a Harp subscriber from the beginning and have kept up with some of Blurt's coverage, I've read no more than the first digital issue. If I want to see stories laid out on a page, I want to be able to hold that page in my hand. Blurt online would do better to ditch that aspect of its presentation and stick to frequently updating its web page, leaving longer-form pieces to the print product.