I just had an inspiration, and I thought I’d throw it up here and see what you thought.
I’ve been saying for a while that the more popular a band is, the less likely they are to sell records now. Why? Because more people want and have their work and are willing to share/seed/pirate it. I’ve said that less popular bands will sell more records because it’s easier to just go to their (hopefully soon Dbasr) site and buy the music than try to find it on the Pirate Bay or some other torrent site.
But I was thinking about this the wrong way. It’s not about actual sales numbers; it’s about sales-to-shared ratios. (Or sales-to-pirated, if that’s the way you think.) The more popular a band is, the lower the sales-to-shares ratio; less people are buying, more people are sharing. But a really popular band with a low s2s ratio will still move more actual units than an obscure band with a high s2s ratio.
For example, think of Justin Bieber. (God help you.) Let’s say the grand total of Justin Bieber album transactions — where a person obtains a Justin Bieber record, whether they pay for it or torrent it or what-have-you — in a week is 100,000 copies.
Now, let’s assume a 1:9 s2s ratio; for every 100,000 records Justin Bieber sells, 90,000 of those are shared/pirated, and 1,000 of them are actual sales.
Now, let’s look at, I dunno, Big Friendly Corporation. BFC might move 200 albums a week. (I would actually love to see that; go buy their record right now!) Their s2s ratio is much higher, because you can’t get BFC records easily from torrent sites. Let’s say it’s 8:2; for every 40 records that are pirated, 160 are sold.
Those are encouraging numbers, but the fact is that Justin Bieber still makes assloads more money from record sales than BFC does, because the actual volume is so much higher that even a tiny fraction of sales versus shares is still a substantial amount of money. If albums are selling for $10 each, Justin just made $10K to Big Friendly’s $1600.
So far, so good. But — and here’s the thing I realized — there’s a point somewhere in the middle, not easily quantifiable, where a band is selling enough records to make reasonable money but not popular enough that they’re losing sales to piracy.
Let’s pick a band like Dusty Rhodes & The River Band, who are equally awesome to the BFC but who tour a lot more and have a bigger audience. DR&TRB sell their album through their website, or have it available through iTunes, etc. (I assume they do, this is hypothetical).
They’re right in that sweet spot; if they play 5 shows a week and 100 people from each show want to obtain the record, that’s 500 record obtainers. But since it’s hard to find DR&TRB’s stuff on the Pirate Bay, they’ll have a 9:1 ratio. They’re selling 450 records a week. At $10, that’s $4500 a week in sales — not Justin Bieber, but respectable.
I’m making these numbers up, but you see my point — somewhere in the middle of obscurity and megastardom, there’s probably still a point where bands can make money because purchasing their album is still easier than pirating it.
I don’t think bands will ever make the kind of money they did pre-Napster, though that’s an entirely different subject. But I do think they can make some money — maybe enough to make the effort and cost of recording worthwhile.
Now, if they only had a tool for doing so… 