Trent Reznor: comedy prophet?

Big thanks to Bob Slayer for his comment on my Doug Stanhope entry.  He directed me to an excellent piece by Trent Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails) that offers advice to the 'new / unknown artist' looking to get into the music industry.  The piece takes the broad Kevin Kelly / Chris Anderson ideas around what technology now forces you to give away: -

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site 

And what you can do about it: -

what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan

All of which is Kelly / Anderson / Godin gospel with the added impact that it's coming from the guy who gave us Closer.

Of course I'm unlikely to agree with Bob that I don't understand Stanhope.  I get what he does as comedian and I'm happy to believe that on his day he does it unbelievably well.  But he didn't bring his A-Game the night I saw him in London.  And it's a really dumb gig to drag your wife along to.

I think that Bob's real point was that Doug Stanhope is also interesting because he's a comedian who's gained control of his marketing in a way analogous to Reznor's advice above.  This is something that we all really need to understand.  If you'd asked me a year ago I would have said that the comedy business is different enough from the music industry that Reznor's rules don't apply then along comes Bo Burnham and it seems that comedy is just like music only more so.  This is a guy who can generate 12 million You Tube hits and then storm it at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  Apart from anything else, Burnham looks like he's having more fun than everyone else out there still jumping through competition hoops*.

The only way to get ahead on any stand-up scene is to give your stuff away.  Unpaid gigs are the only way new comics get stage time and they resent the hell out of the fact.  Career nirvana for a comic is the day you do your last unpaid (non-charity) gig.

Maybe we've got it all wrong.  Maybe the problem with most comedians' careers is not that they've given away too much free comedy but too little.

* A happy byproduct of competitions like FHM is that they attract genuinely funny friends of mine like Andrew Watts and Catie Wilkins both of whom blog hilariously well about the experience.

Kevin Kelly vs. Doug Stanhope

As a performer / creator I have long been intrigued by Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans idea.  The logic is pretty simple; first you find your fans: -

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

Then you monetise: -

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

A growing number of the smarter comics I know are thinking seriously about this.  The most commonly cited example of such a comedy career is Doug Stanhope.  Apparently Stanhope has built up such an enthusiastic following over the last twenty years that he can book and fill a theatre in any American city without the involvement of a local promoter.  He negotiates directly with the venue, sets his own ticket prices and owns 100% of the merchandising rights.  Better still, his online following is so strong he hardly need bother with local advertising; by the time you've heard Doug Stanhope is playing your town chances are his fans have already snapped up every ticket.

He's currently doing a run at the Leicester Square Theatre and I went along last night.  I wanted to see a genuine American shock comic and get a look at some of those Kellyesque True Fans.  The audience was 80% male twentysomethings few of whom, in the words of my wife, 'had ever known the touch of a woman'.  I found the show horribly misogynistic, needlessly abrasive and deeply, deeply cynical but I can't say I wasn't warned. 

I'm never going to be one of Doug Stanhope's True Fans.  I'm too old and insufficiently scared of women.  Last night I was happy to be in the minority who didn't adore the show (one punter delivered a Jagermeister to him on stage) before queueing to buy his CD's, DVD's and T-Shirts.  These guys would defend him as one of those comics that you either get or you don't.  You have to buy into his lazy libertarianism to see his act in the right light (4 stars from the Guardian?  Really?)

No one can argue with the fact that Stanhope has made a very successful career out of telling truly appalling jokes very well.  The lesson is that if you want those 1,000 True Fans (and he has many more than that) then you probably have to position yourself at the margin.  True Fandom is exclusionary as well as self-selecting.  If the plan is to create an act that would sustain you with 1,000 fans but that would-doubtless-appeal-to-many-more-if-they-only-knew-about-you then you're actually playing a different game.

Stanhope's entire professional career depends on him wanting to spend his nights with audiences like last night.  He seems perfectly happy to be owned by them.  He has to be.  True Fans crave authenticity above all else.

How much is cool worth?

In the past fortnight I've performed in four improv shows; three in California and last Saturday an eight-hour shift in London's 50-Hour Improvathon. The most commercially successful of these was also unabashedly the least cool.

Tradition dictated that after that show came down we sprinted to the foyer to line up and high-five every audience member as they left the theatre. This was done smilingly without a hint of condescension. As my castmates happily chatted about the show, the cast and life in general it was clear that many, if not most of the punters were returnees. We'd played to a full house so this process took a good fifteen minutes before we could head back upstairs to pack up and change.

This is how you get your 1,000 Fans. By converting monologues into dialogue. By smiling and letting people touch you. By answering questions and asking a couple of your own. By not worrying about being cool.

Cool is the opposite of friendly. Cool is aloof. It's black-windowed limousines, velvet ropes, private rooms and everything else that limits interaction. At a commercial level cool operates on the old one-way producer-to-consumer relationship.

But cool only pays if you've got 100,000 fans each paying $1 for the monologue. This puts you at the traditional end of the Long Tail and good luck to you if you get there. In the book of the same name, Chris Anderson warns that when shooting for 100,000 it's all or nothing. A fanless rock star is just a guy in dark glasses with a day job.

I kick myself for keeping the Scenes from Communal Living cast back for production notes instead of sending them out to chat with strangers who'd come to see the show. By the time we got downstairs only our friends were still hanging around and they were fans already.

Cool doesn't pay as many bills as you'd think.

Getting noticed

I can't log on these days without seeing another piece on 'getting your Blog noticed'. The advice is always the same: -

Find a niche that you can credibly inhabit and stay there. Write specifically and often. One day a readership will find you. Money will eventually follow

I'm okay with everything aside from the last part. There are too many Blogs out there for them all to monetise successfully. And that's just counting those written by persistent, eloquent people who are in it for the long haul. To me the sentiment is little more than that nice but essentially unprovable hippie notion that if you just do what you love then the cosmos will somehow look after you.

The marketer in me certainly relates to idea of writing for a niche. Being someone who is known for knowing about sharks might get you a call if the other expert has his phone off when the reporter needs a quote. Being the recognised expert on hammerhead sharks gets you on TV whenever hammerheads make the news. If fate shines a spotlight on hammerheads then for that moment you're the only show in town.

Do you spend your energy trying to predict where the spotlight will shine or do you get on doing what you love and deciding that you'll be happy either way?

For Bloggers the answer is pretty clear: learn to write well about what you love and see what happens. It's different for comics; the spotlight itself is the thing we love.

Is this what success looks like?

This week I gigged in Swindon and so spent 5+ hours in a car with two other London comics. Being the least experienced act of the three I spent the time listening as the 'alpha comic'* held forth.

He'd been on the professional circuit for twenty years and was a ten-year veteran of the Jongleurs chain of comedy clubs that is the equivalent to Yuk Yuk's in Canada and that club in every American city that caters for office parties, birthdays and bachelorette's nights. Jongleurs is simultaneously the holy grail for UK comics (it pays well) and a focus of intense derision (audiences full of drunk 'comedy illiterates').

His conversation (well, monologue) was peppered with the names of comics from back in the day. Some he mentioned are now genuinely famous and others would be known to British comedy aficionados but most were common-or-garden variety circuit comics still telling their jokes at clubs and pubs up and down the country.

As a headline act he was earning between £150 and £400 a set, so a show a night for five nights a week means he probably earns about £70K before tax. As I was musing a few weeks back, here is a man who's his own boss and who gets paid for doing something he obviously loves, occasionally as far afield as Germany, Holland, Dubai and Singapore. He even has a mortgage; the gateway to Middle England respectability.

So is this what success looks like?

Ten years ago his thinking had been that now he'd made it to the rarefied heights of Jongleurs, it was just a matter of time before he picked up a radio or TV deal. After that he'd be in a position to cut back on the unedifying experience of spending your nights in strangers' cars driving to places like Swindon to perform to fifty non-paying punters for £150.

His analysis was that just as he'd paid his dues multichannel digital television came along and changed everything. Time was when once you'd been on the box you didn't look back. Even if you chose to do a live gig those magic words As Seen On TV! meant you'd be in a larger venue, perhaps even an actual theatre with a proper dressing room and seating hundreds.

In other words his career plan was based on a world where television equaled popularity. Unsurprising when a full 50% of the population of Great Britain watched the 1977 Morcambe & Wise Christmas Special. These days the fact that a comic has appeared on television is no indicator of anything more than the fact that he's been around for a few years. Stick it out on the circuit and sooner or later you'll find yourself doing something for BBC4 at midnight. Except now it's just another £150 gig and only your mum will care.

The fact that I was going to Swindon in the same car to do the same gig for substantially less money means that there's always going to be downward pressure on his earning ability. That mortgage isn't success so much as a predictor that he'll be spending the next twenty years as he's spent the last twenty; in cars going up and down the M4.

* In his wonderful book House of Lies: How management consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time, Martin Kihn has a fantastic graph showing how much junior McKinsey consultants should talk when interacting socially with senior team-members. The parallels between my two worlds never end

At the Edinburgh Festival 5

So much for the Scottish summer.  It's been raining for two days straight which makes flyering very unpleasant and even less worthwhile.  However, the audiences don't seem to be affected all that much.  If you're in town for the Festival, a collection of mostly indoor events, then rain is a reason to see more shows, not less.

But it does mean that audiences tend to stay in the one venue and see a series of shows rather than pick and choose between shows / venues around town.  Given that our show is quite broad in its appeal we benefit from this.  However, the act on immediately ahead of us is far more specialised.  The show is a work of genius but one glance at it's promotional material says it ain't for everyone.

My comments about Long Tail at the Fringe seem to be borne out by the fact that the model breaks down when the distribution (ie punters walking between venues) seizes up.

We had about 14 in last night.

At the Edinburgh Festival 4 (Long Tail analysis)

I was standing at the bar waiting for my drink when a local turned and asked,

"You up for the Fringe?"

"Yes."

"Wanna know what's wrong with the f***ing Fringe?  Too many of the f***ing acts are f***ing sh*t.  You cannae work out what's good and what's not."

(He was, after all, an Edinburgh local)

He had a point.  As I've mentioned in previous posts there are over 2000 shows and the Fringe positively prides itself on the total lack of quality control.  The very best of theatre and comedy is right alongside shows so awful that they beggar belief.

The obvious comparison is between the Edinburgh Fringe and the World Wide Web.  Let's look at the Fringe through the prism of Chris Anderson's 'long tail' model.  We have near enough to an infinite variety of products available and since audiences are happy tramping around the city to obscure venues at all hours, a surprisingly efficient mode of delivery.  The problem, as my drunken Scottish mate identified, is how do you know what's good and what's not?  Price is no guide as some terrific acts are performing in the free venues whilst terrible ones are charging £12 ($24 USD).

This is where the Long Tail analogy falls down I think: much of what's on offer out on the far left of Anderson's tail isn't merely outdated or obscure, it's just bad.  The Fringe is that tail in living colour.

In this environment the various Fringe reviewers wield immense influence as the only vaguely efficient guide of what to see and what to avoid.  I think the more important role is in warning people away from the bad rather than towards the good.  An hour in the company of a delusional idiot who thinks he's the next Eddie Izzard is an hour you're never getting back.

Last night we were standing room only again, which means over 30 in the audience.  And we got reviewed!

The Long Tail

I'm reading a 2006 book by Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired magazine) called The Long Tail.

Whilst its difficult to relate much of the book to my Headcount: 1 model, I was happy to read his thoughts about self-published books: -

"The book becomes not the product of value but the advertisement for the product of value - the authors themselves.  Many such noncommercial books are best seen as marketing vehicles meant to enhance the academic reputation of their authors, market their consultancy, earn them speaking fees, or just leave their mark on the world.  Seen that way, self-publishing is not a way to make money; it's a way to distribute your message."

p77

Anderson is intrigued by the potential of digital technology (including improved efficiencies in print production) to allow more of us to produce and distribute our ideas.  Every consultant is in the ideas business and we're running out of excuses for not getting them out into the marketplace.