Passionirates: Why Allowing People To Download Your Music Might Make You Successful

Has anyone else noticed that despite the seemingly never-ending number of startup music services, only a handful ever are used by the public at large? For the most part, all I ever hear about these companies is an article about their inception on hypebot or Digital Music News, and then they proceed to fade into oblivion. In a recent article Neil Cartwright explains why so many of these companies never go anywhere: they aren't appealing to the right crowd. Neil, citing The Tipping Point to prove his point, says that most companies try to market to the indifferent masses when they should be aiming at the passionate few.

The article includes a chart, which classifies 12% of the population as being passionate about music. Enthusiastic fans make up 25%, casual fans make up 27% and the people who couldn't give less of a fuck come in at 37%. Most music services (including artists and record labels) try and aim at the last category, when they should be aiming for the first. The reason is that people who are passionate about music actively seek it out more then anyone else. They spend countless hours trawling through the underbelly of the Internet to find new and exciting bands. And after crawling through all the crap, they will share any gems they find. They'll post about it on Facebook. They'll blog about it. They'll play it for their friends. They'll talk to anyone who will listen (and even some who won't). Why? Because this new band/service/label/whatever is FUCKING AMAZING!!!!!!

From here, the effect grows and grows, trickling down through the enthusiasts and casuals, until it reaches The Tipping Point and manages to get the great unwashed on their side. This is how a band or music service (really, any service, but it's more true of music and art) gets big: not by going directly to the masses, but in a sort of trickle-down effect (Reaganomics, when applied to music, apparently does work after all). According to Neil, this is why most startups fail, and how the big services (he names iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon) got big in the first place.

This is also why you should let your music be pirated and shared. In fact, you should upload it to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid yourself. You should hand it out to your local record store clerks. You should throw your album or demo up on Mediafire, and send it to every niche blog that'll take it. Why? Because these are the methods by which the enthusiastic fans find their music in the first place. Don't take my word for it though, check out this study that shows that people who download music are 10 times more likely to pay for music as well. This is the mark of the enthusiast: someone who defends their downloading by saying "I'll pay for what I like", and actually will.

And I should know. After all, I am an enthusiast. I used to run a blog that reviewed and, ahem, "shared" music. A majority of my money and energy goes towards discovering new music. At last count, I have about 8 months worth of music (that's sorted, there's at least another month that I haven't gotten through yet) if it ran continuously, and I have listened to all of it at least once, often more then once. I have also talked about bands, and then watched them get big: local thrash metal band Havok being one such example. While I can hardly attribute their success to myself alone (I'm not nearly narcissistic enough for that), I can contribute it to the combined proselytizing of me and my ilk.

This is why you should let people download your music: it gets it into the hands of the people who matter, in terms of marketing. And because it's free, an enthusiast is more likely to take a chance, and give you a listen. Granted, at this point you need to be talented enough at whatever you do to catch and enthusiasts ear, but if you ever had a realistic shot at being successful, you needed that talent anyways. If you do manage to impress the Passionirates (passionate pirates, for those of you who struggle with portmanteaus) though, then it's off to the races.