For musicians, 1000 true fans may be the way to lift their sales and therefore their careers out of the flat plains of the Long Tail. Looking for information about 1000 fans, I entered ‘1000 friends’ as a search term in Google – it returned 12.2 million results. Here are the Google results.
In this context there isn’t much difference between ‘fans’ – who support musicians and artists, and ‘friends’ – who tend to support causes and the environment. For instance, 1000 Friends of Houston wants 1000 people to donate $100 each to kick start an initiative to improve livability in Houston. Meanwhile the musician Jill Sobule put up a web site asking for donations to make a new album. She needed $75,000. If you visit the site today she happily proclaims that she has achieved her goal and recording is under way. Here’s her original post setting out her goals and the different levels of donor participation.
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I have re-read this entry about four times because I am still blown away that a recording artist got over 80K in donations to make her record. Staggering. How did the “I Kissed A Girl” singer raise 83 freakin thousand dollars?
I just read Sobule’s site to see where 80K goes without a shiny disc involved, and lo and behold there IS a shiny disc involved. Not sure why…and her donation levels were so cutesy I nearly shot myself in the medulla oblongata. Pure syrup.
Sobule’s site promises any donor of 10 thousand a chance to sing on her album. I’m afraid if I had 10K to throw down I would insist on my own lyrics. I personally would love to join Sobule on a ultra-twee version of “Mongoloid” by DEVO. It would just be…WRONG.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:05 pm