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crowdfundingHello, I write choral music (YouTube playlist) which I share online for free, and this is funded by my kind supporters at Patreon. I've been on Patreon for three years, and it has changed the way I work significantly. In this post I'm going to talk a bit about trying to increase my income, but I don't want it to sound as if I'm ungrateful to my existing patrons! They are all lovely and I am very thankful for their support.
I spent some time this afternoon setting up Hootsuite to tweet links to my work again, and it occurs to me that I'm possibly going about it the wrong way. I currently have a whole long list of tweets and use auto-schedule to put them in, then edit them to spread them out a bit more so I'm not just spamming people constantly.
That's fine -- but I usually link to each piece of music once per cycle, and a cycle takes around a week and a half.
It strikes me that it might be better to link to each piece of music two or three times per day for a set number of days, possibly as long as a week for the ones that have broader appeal/catchy tunes. This is because the signal:noise ratio on Twitter is really quite bad, and the 2500-ish people who follow me there are not going to see something if I only post it once. I would have to re-jig the wording a lot more because duplicate tweets tend to get rejected by Twitter, but this may actually be a feature rather than a bug.
Another advantage to the style I'm considering, of course, is that I can then focus on seasonally-appropriate pieces: both at the time they are relevant, and three, six and nine months beforehand (when people are planning repertoire, essentially; while they tend to do this in batches, some work a term ahead, some half a year, and so on). And more people singing my music means the sheet music gets in front of more people, and at least with my newer works, that means more people find out about my Patreon, and that's good.
So, I'm probably going to try this. I'll need to make a calendar, figure out when my various works are relevant and work backward from there to figure out when to link to the demo tracks.
If you use Hootsuite or another social media scheduling app, what have you found is the optimum amount of repetition for a link to a specific work of yours?
A second thing I'm thinking about: Patreon now has an option to hide the total pledge amount from would-be patrons. I'm wondering if I need to do this; have I hit a sort of ceiling where people think "oh, she gets about $306 for each new work, that's more than enough", and don't pledge? If I'm going to be a composer full-time, I need quite a lot more than this; currently I struggle to complete a new work each month. I'd like to get my teeth into longer works, but my time for that is limited when I'm trying to finish something each month so I can get paid; and I don't want to go too far toward really really short works (psalm chants and hymns) because right now I'm doing a PhD and it's important to maintain at least some reputation as A Serious Composer, and in my corner of the musical world that means not too much hymnody. I could rant about why this is wrong, but it won't change the situation.
Now, composers have almost always had the sort of "portfolio career" where they are doing all kinds of other stuff too, and I don't expect to be very different; my work is rather niche, and I'm not going to have the kind of success of someone with two orders of magnitude more twitter followers, for example. But what I'm trying to figure out is whether people are making a judgement about what I deserve to receive rather than what they're willing/able to contribute, and whether being less open about my income would help with that. Another option is talking a lot more about how much work composing actually is, but that runs the danger of getting whiny.
More data would hep me decide what to do! Do you reveal your crowdfunded income? Why or why not? Do you think people who could aren't pledging because my work is a bit too niche, or because I appear to be doing well enough already? I'll probably wait until 2018 to actually decide what to do about this, because I want to see if the planned change in tweeting habits makes a difference; but I'm interested in your experiences and ideas.
I spent some time this afternoon setting up Hootsuite to tweet links to my work again, and it occurs to me that I'm possibly going about it the wrong way. I currently have a whole long list of tweets and use auto-schedule to put them in, then edit them to spread them out a bit more so I'm not just spamming people constantly.
That's fine -- but I usually link to each piece of music once per cycle, and a cycle takes around a week and a half.
It strikes me that it might be better to link to each piece of music two or three times per day for a set number of days, possibly as long as a week for the ones that have broader appeal/catchy tunes. This is because the signal:noise ratio on Twitter is really quite bad, and the 2500-ish people who follow me there are not going to see something if I only post it once. I would have to re-jig the wording a lot more because duplicate tweets tend to get rejected by Twitter, but this may actually be a feature rather than a bug.
Another advantage to the style I'm considering, of course, is that I can then focus on seasonally-appropriate pieces: both at the time they are relevant, and three, six and nine months beforehand (when people are planning repertoire, essentially; while they tend to do this in batches, some work a term ahead, some half a year, and so on). And more people singing my music means the sheet music gets in front of more people, and at least with my newer works, that means more people find out about my Patreon, and that's good.
So, I'm probably going to try this. I'll need to make a calendar, figure out when my various works are relevant and work backward from there to figure out when to link to the demo tracks.
If you use Hootsuite or another social media scheduling app, what have you found is the optimum amount of repetition for a link to a specific work of yours?
A second thing I'm thinking about: Patreon now has an option to hide the total pledge amount from would-be patrons. I'm wondering if I need to do this; have I hit a sort of ceiling where people think "oh, she gets about $306 for each new work, that's more than enough", and don't pledge? If I'm going to be a composer full-time, I need quite a lot more than this; currently I struggle to complete a new work each month. I'd like to get my teeth into longer works, but my time for that is limited when I'm trying to finish something each month so I can get paid; and I don't want to go too far toward really really short works (psalm chants and hymns) because right now I'm doing a PhD and it's important to maintain at least some reputation as A Serious Composer, and in my corner of the musical world that means not too much hymnody. I could rant about why this is wrong, but it won't change the situation.
Now, composers have almost always had the sort of "portfolio career" where they are doing all kinds of other stuff too, and I don't expect to be very different; my work is rather niche, and I'm not going to have the kind of success of someone with two orders of magnitude more twitter followers, for example. But what I'm trying to figure out is whether people are making a judgement about what I deserve to receive rather than what they're willing/able to contribute, and whether being less open about my income would help with that. Another option is talking a lot more about how much work composing actually is, but that runs the danger of getting whiny.
More data would hep me decide what to do! Do you reveal your crowdfunded income? Why or why not? Do you think people who could aren't pledging because my work is a bit too niche, or because I appear to be doing well enough already? I'll probably wait until 2018 to actually decide what to do about this, because I want to see if the planned change in tweeting habits makes a difference; but I'm interested in your experiences and ideas.
Thoughts
Date: 2017-05-03 07:01 pm (UTC)One way to do that would be to make a list of why each song is cool, then match each of those with the intro:
"Awesome Italy" I sang a sonnet! (link)
"Awesome Italy" When in Rome, make music. (link)
"Awesome Italy" I wrote this for (donor name). (link)
>> Another advantage to the style I'm considering, of course, is that I can then focus on seasonally-appropriate pieces: both at the time they are relevant, and three, six and nine months beforehand (when people are planning repertoire, essentially; while they tend to do this in batches, some work a term ahead, some half a year, and so on). <<
If you have a little archive, hand-pimping your backlog is feasible. If you have a large archive, it might be better to make some seasonal resource pages and then go:
"It's X months to (holiday). For repertoire ideas, see my (holiday) page." (link)
"It's (holiday)! Check out my (holiday) songs: (link).
>> And more people singing my music means the sheet music gets in front of more people, and at least with my newer works, that means more people find out about my Patreon, and that's good. <<
When I make rec-reading lists, I put my webpage URL on the bottom. Since you've got a Patreon page, a logical footer on sheet music would be: "Like it? Love you! Want more? Find me on Patreon." (link)
>> If you use Hootsuite or another social media scheduling app, what have you found is the optimum amount of repetition for a link to a specific work of yours? <<
I don't use an app, I use my audience. I promote the Poetry Fishbowl in a few places, then reveal verses of a linkback poem in exchange for people boosting the signal. This gives me access to platforms I'm not even on. \o/ Since you're doing songs, a similar model might well work for you too. It doesn't have to replace your app, you can just add it to see if it helps.
>> A second thing I'm thinking about: Patreon now has an option to hide the total pledge amount from would-be patrons. I'm wondering if I need to do this; have I hit a sort of ceiling where people think "oh, she gets about $306 for each new work, that's more than enough", and don't pledge? <<
I doubt it, although you should test that yourself if you can, because contexts do vary.
Evidence against:
Crowdfunding hub sites like IndieGoGo routinely see a near-end surge in activity, especially if people have a push goal in sight.
I've seen exactly the same thing on my blog, if we're close to a goal, people are more likely to pitch in. The pools -- where several folks join funds to get the quarter-price rate when available -- are also hugely popular. My fans get excited when the numbers get big. If it's heading for a threshold we rarely hit, sometimes I'll throw out a stretch goal like, "If this session cracks $1000 before it closes, you get another free epic."
I was also completely flabbergasted by HOW MUCH money people will spend on poetry. The most I ever got from an editor was $200; I have a few k-fans who have spent more than that repeatedly. Most of my fans have more modest budgets, but don't overlook the possibility of attracting angels. :D
Whether it's the same for music, I don't know.
>> If I'm going to be a composer full-time, I need quite a lot more than this; currently I struggle to complete a new work each month. I'd like to get my teeth into longer works, <<
Talk to your audience about that. I cannot overemphasize the usefulness of this technique. Many of the best ideas in my (and other people's) crowdfunding projects came from the audience.
>> but my time for that is limited when I'm trying to finish something each month so I can get paid; <<
Sometimes it helps to redefine what "finished" means to you. I've done that with some types of writing. Serial poetry, I can finish one poem and post it, as part of a longer storyline. In music, many types such as classical have sections you could break down. Others like folk music have "cycles" of songs that go together. It's doable, but sometimes you have to rethink what you're doing.
When I first started doing the Poetry Fishbowl, it was all one-shot stuff and I envied my friends writing webserial fiction because they could build up a fanbase for those characters. And what did my awesome audience do? Started asking for reappearances of favorite characters/settings, and now serial poetry is most of what I write. \o/
>> and I don't want to go too far toward really really short works (psalm chants and hymns) because right now I'm doing a PhD and it's important to maintain at least some reputation as A Serious Composer, and in my corner of the musical world that means not too much hymnody.<<
Calculate how much you need to feed the idiots, do that much in their style, and that's all, unless you just want to do more.
>> I could rant about why this is wrong, but it won't change the situation. <<
That's for OLD publishing. We're past that now. Sure, there are still dinosaurs holding the fort and will be for some time. But it's not ALL dinosaurs now, and they no longer control the bottleneck. You have internet, you have the world, all you need is to get its attention.
You think this limitation is wrong and stupid? By all means, rant about it. There will be other people agreeing with you, and some of them will have money. Hell, I've sent people money just because I was pissed with someone else I couldn't belt directly, and the disagreement or counterexample caught my fancy. Also watch for other people ranting about how this is wrong and stupid. If you have an archive of short pieces, you can then say, "I agree, it's a stupid limitation. Here's my hymnody page. Want more? Find me on Patreon!" (link)
Few things are as valuable as spotting an underserved market. Are people using the thing those in power are dissing? Does it have an audience and a market? If so, go for it. All you have to do is get their attention. If not, you can always try to build your own. It's doable, just takes longer.
You don't have to change the whole world, just the part you're touching. It's not easy, but it is possible. And I'm never going to hear "There is no money in poetry" again without laughing.
>> Another option is talking a lot more about how much work composing actually is, but that runs the danger of getting whiny. <<
The overwhelming trend is that crowdfunding fans love interaction, love creators, love knowing more about you. It's one thing they CAN'T get from the mainstream. Feed a cat, gain a cat. Also the more you talk with them, the more ideas and solutions and inspiration you get.
>> More data would hep me decide what to do! Do you reveal your crowdfunded income? Why or why not? <<
For most sessions, yes. It's like releasing the bunny in front of the greyhounds: they run better with something to chase. :D
>> Do you think people who could aren't pledging because my work is a bit too niche,<<
If you're not writing what you current fans want, that's a problem. You can solve it by searching for people who want what you write and/or figuring out what your audience wants and writing that. A great deal of what I write is niche, and they're niches the mainstream has zero interest in filling: disabled heroes, superheroes who solve problems without hitting, that sort of thing. My fans LOVE this stuff. My projects are geared to helping us find the overlap between what they want to read and what I enjoy writing. Everyone wins. And it's something the mainstream sucks at, which cuts down the competition.
>> or because I appear to be doing well enough already? <<
This doesn't seem a major barrier in crowdfunding, but YMMV. Among the biggest motives in donation aren't affected by it:
* Love the creator, want to sent them money so they will be successful. More successful is more awesome, take that stupid mainstream.
* Love the work, want more of it to exist. Will happily throw available pocket money (or sometimes much more) at favorite causes/topics.
* Love the creator and/or work, want to advertise support of the arts. Either a regular supporter at modest levels or occasional big donations; get excited over name postings. (I don't seem to attract this kind, but the hub sites sure do, so I know it exists.)
* Ticked off by mainstream, use crowdfunding to fight back. Throws money at favorite patrons or projects based on matching whatever theme just pissed them off again.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2017-05-03 07:32 pm (UTC)I think one issue for me is that I don't hold my work hostage (I put sheet music online under CC by-SA) and I also feel very uncomfortable with any kind of walled garden for people to, essentially, pay for social contact with me (I can't handle feeling obligated in this way, even online). So there's very little that's exclusive about supporting me: patrons absolutely will get access to the work anyway, and most people will find out most of the process stuff too.
Another issue is that a piece of sheet music is really, really not "finished" according to my audience, but I dislike recording (and paying someone else to do it well costs serious money which I do not have); this is partly why I do want to get better at publicising work that does have demo recordings.
One thing I have been thinking about incorporating into my collection of income streams is doing some arranging, though, and it's quite possible that some kind of "Which of these arrangements should I make public? It costs this much!" scheme would work well for me. I am more comfortable doing this with arranging than with composing, simply because if someone else wants an arrangement of "She's like the swallow" for their clarinet, serpent and flute trio, well, I'm not stopping them arranging their own.
Re: Thoughts -- longer reply
Date: 2017-05-05 11:47 am (UTC)Yep. Another way is to vary the hashtags.
Another potential bug in the way I am linking to my work is that I tend to link to the YouTube video rather than to that work's page on my blog; that means it's harder for me to include (and for other people to click) the links either to download the work or to sponsor me on Patreon. That's... not so good. I should be sending them to the blog instead, or possibly to public posts on Patreon where these include the video, or something. (I can test which of these is better by doing one cycle linking only to my blog and one cycle linking to Patreon posts where they're available. Hmm.)
I'm also aware that I really ought to get the hang of the Gram of Insta at some point. I think people there follow hashtags, and this is part of what makes it different? I dunno. Also Pinterest. Urgh. But that will be more blogging-related, I think.
Yes, this too. It's worth bearing this in mind as my archive increases.
I think a difference between this an Patreon is that the goals don't go away and aren't time-limited, and the pledges are a lot more than a one-off; so, people are making an ongoing commitment to support me. That's really good and gives me a freedom and stability I wouldn't otherwise have, but it also makes people think more carefully about pledges than they would if they were spending their budgeted "random entertainment/good ideas" money.
I am earning more per piece than I would expect from a trad publisher for similar pieces, especially considering that some of them are literally fourteen-bar psalm chants; but not going the trad publishing route means I'm reaching a completely different audience than I would with paper, and it's the audience who, er, download things for free on the internet. So I have some patrons who've been around for a long time, steadily giving me $10 or $20 per new work, which adds up over the course of two or three years; and I have some who give $1 because it's what they can afford.
For most of my composing career my main audience have been saying things like "why on earth would you put your music online for free and how are you supposed to get paid that way?" -- in my corner of the music world there is a huge acceptance of the necessity of the current rules and customs of trad publishing.
The other thing is that I don't do recordings, and 90% of the advice I get from people who are a bit more open-minded about things is... do recordings. They'd buy an album of my work, or even a track. But this is decidedly non-trivial to arrange with choral music, so will have to wait until I have more income. The demo tracks that I pay someone else to record have helped, and they are good as demo tracks, but they aren't something I can sell.
Some of my target audience aren't online at all, and I am working on how to reach them. It's all a bit old-skool.
I think I'm already working in the shortest viable units. But I could, possibly, be more intentional about writing pieces that link together in some way, and see if that helps. And this might be especially applicable to arranging, where I could do "Sancta Lucia songs in Swedish arranged for 3 upper voices" as a series, or "Canadian folk songs for recorder duo", or what have you.
I do have to restrain the rants a bit for PhD reasons, but actively looking for people who are ranting about the same things I do is a very good tip; thank you. These are people who have the problem I am solving.
Hmm. Not sure about this, but I could do things like cross-post my worklogs from here (when I do them) to my Patreon feed; easiest if I can set up e-mail posting for one or the other (or both), and I know that's possible for here.
Yes; the Patreon stuff is explicitly ongoing rather than sessional, as already covered, so it's a different dynamic. The Patron Drive in November did help, but I'm not sure how much was "having a Patron Drive at all" and how much was "writing a cool song about a cat, which people liked". (I can find this out by doing it again.)
I think the Venn diagram between "people who are interested in my niche" and "people who crowdfund anything ever" is fairly small. I know lots of people who crowdfund various things but just aren't that interested in choral music, especially sacred choral music (which is my PhD subject). I know lots of people who sing in choirs, but they are choirs that aren't necessarily interested in new music, and compared to the general population, they have larger numbers of people whose social lives aren't online. It's not that they don't use the internet, more that they don't use it for leisure; and I'm not going to be able to shift that (and the people closest to me, who are willing to make some shift just to support me, have done so long ago).
So, reaching the people who are in the overlap is just going to take time. But the good news is that once my work is loose in the wild, it keeps doing this for me.
I think the first two of these are where most of my existing support comes from; I may well be able to get more support in the third category, particularly with name postings.
Re: Thoughts -- where my thinking is now going
Date: 2017-05-05 12:22 pm (UTC)1) Feed cats, get cats: I do actually spend a fair amount of time on socmed, but I don't tend to cross-post much. It's worth my while posting my worklogs to the Book of Face and Patreon, as well as here (probably behind cut tags for the comfort of people who follow me in several places); it's worth my while making more Instagram posts and getting back into weekly "this is what I did this week" blogs on my main blog. I don't have to make any of this a walled garden to make it more accessible than it currently is. I can still burn my words every Wednesday.
2) Try another patron drive, probably in September, and this time make some cumulative goals ("Free postcard/bonus piece of music/stickers/whatever for everyone if I get to $500/new work by the end of this month"); figure out how else to encourage signal boosting (currently, I just ask nicely and hope, and this works on... the same people, every time. Who are great, but that doesn't stop them being the same people every time).
3) With arranging, try holding the work directly hostage, and encouraging named patronage. "I arranged 'She's like the Swallow' for two recorders, and have sent it to my friends who play recorder, who said 'This is nifty'; you can buy the sheet music at [my lulu shop] one year from now, but for £[total amount] I will put it on IMSLP this month for anyone to use, and your name will go in the list of sponsors in the .pdf; for £10 you get a printed copy." Yes, I think this might work. And if it goes well and if I tie this in with working in series, then in a few years it will be "For £[total amount] I will print all these Canadian Folk Songs For Two Recorders in a booklet, the exclusive, signed first edition of which you can ONLY have if you ahve already sponsored at least 80% of the folk songs OR for this special crowdfunding price of £X; if we get to [double total amount] I will commission artwork for the cover." And I can do that with the Swedish songs for Sancta Lucia (which are nicely seasonal, too), and with the horn quartets, and so on and so forth. Horn quartet supporters are likely to be different than recorder duo supporters, and both of them are going to be different than choral music supporters, except for the die-hard artsyhonker fans who will support anything I do because it's me.
I'm not sure of the right timescale for 3). Monthly has some advantages, but I'm not sure I actually have time to produce enough arrangements and do all the associated admin. Quarterly might be better to start out with. I also need to work out whether to host it here at Dreamwidth or at my Wordpress blog, which I tend to keep for more polished updates. I'm leaning toward there.
4) Spend some time finding people who are ranting about late 20th-century copyright models and how it affects their work as choral musicians. Show them how I offer an alternative.
5) Put a link to Patreon as a footer on my work from before I was using Patreon. (I currently have one on new stuff.)
Thank you
Date: 2017-05-05 12:23 pm (UTC)