Techdirt. Stories filed under "indie"

Latest Humble Bundle Of Pay-What-You-Want Indie Games Raises $1-Million In Five Hours

Leigh Beadon — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:31:00 PDT

We've been following the Humble Bundle for a while, both because it's an interesting business model experiment and because the games are awesome. For the uninitiated: the Humble Bundle is a pay-what-you-want package of cross-platform, DRM-free indie games that gets re-issued regularly with a new selection of games plus a bunch of extras like soundtracks and concept art. Each package is available for a limited time, and the proceeds are split between the developers, selected charities and the people who organize the Bundles. They have pulled some impressive revenue numbers in the past, and the most recent bundle has yet again broken records, raising $1-million in the first five hours.

In some ways, the Humble Bundle is a "give it away and pray" approach, and not necessarily a model for the entire industry—but it also serves as a fantastic example of how to connect with fans and encourage them to spend money. Firstly, all games included in Humble Bundles are DRM-free and available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Secondly, they put a lot of emphasis on the fact that your money is going straight to the developers and the charities—and they give you precise control over exactly how it is divided up. Thirdly, they offer added reasons to spend more than the minimum one cent: for $1 dollar you get a key to unlock the game on Steam, and there is usually a bonus game or two (or more) that is only available if you pay more than the average contribution (which of course also serves to keep pushing the average contribution up). That feeds into another great tactic: they reveal a bunch of live-updated stats about the Bundle as it sells, including sales and average contribution breakdowns by OS (notably, Linux users always have the highest average) and a leaderboard of top contributors. The leaderboard has regulars, too, like Minecraft developer notch, and the "HumbleBrony Bundle" (a group that does a collective fundraising effort within the Brony community), both of whom contribute to the tune of thousands.

All of this clearly works well to encourage participation and support, as the ever-growing numbers confirm. The current Bundle still has nearly two full weeks to go, and with such a huge rush in the first day, it's sure to be the biggest one ever.

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Dan Bull's Free Single Hits The Charts

Mike Masnick — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:25:00 PDT

Last week we wrote about Dan Bull's experiment to release a song, "Sharing is Caring" for free via The Pirate Bay (and other sites) and to see if he could still get it to show up in various charts. As we discussed, it definitely was making its way onto the lists of Amazon UK's top hip hop sales. And, on Sunday, the official UK charts came out -- with Sharing is Caring coming in at number 9 on the Indie singles chart and number 35 on the RnB singles chart. In both cases, "Sharing is Caring" was the top new entrant on both of those charts. While some will say that not making the pop charts suggests this was a failure, it sure looks like a ton of folks were happy to support Dan's effort. As for the US charts, those have a weighted system that includes radio airplay, meaning that there's simply no way Dan could get listed, because he's not going to play the payola game to get on the air. Either way, it was a great experiment, and a job well done by Dan.

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Indie Game Developer Posts Game on Pirate Bay, Sees Positive Results

Zachary Knight — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:59:40 PDT

While many large game development and publishing houses complain about and attempt to fight piracy and torrents of their games, smaller, more flexible studios are attempting to use such avenues to their advantage. Such is the case with No Time To Explain developers tinyBuild.

TorrentFreak points out that tinyBuild saw an opportunity with the Pirate Bay to spread word of their game. The developers posted their game to the popular torrent site after adding pirate hats to all the game characters. A lot of people laughed and ended up buying the game. As tinyBuild told TorrentFreak:

We thought it’d be funny to leak a pirate version ourselves which is literally all about pirates and pirate hats. I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it.
We saw very positive WTF REALLY feedback from users, and saw reactions that people bought it simply because they liked the joke. So we don’t see it hurting sales in any way.

While such a move might not work for everyone, it does show that if a developer is willing to connect with fans, they can garner a lot of good will and possibly some extra sales. Even if that connection happens on one of those dirty pirate websites.

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As eMusic Embraces Major Labels, Its Indie Core Is Leaving

Mike Masnick — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 05:13:38 PST

eMusic built itself up on a reputation for being a great way to get access to all sorts of indie music. The service, which has been around for ages, and pioneered offering authorized DRM-free MP3s, worked by letting you pay a certain subscription fee per month, which allowed you to download a specific number of songs. Over the years, the price went up, which upset some users, but things really took a turn last year when the company suddenly decided that it absolutely needed the major record labels in its collection. It started with the disastrous idea of adding Sony Music tracks at the same time as a big price increase... and then quietly trying to remove features (and then more features) without telling people. It also appeared that eMusic was deleting comments from critics. While the company denied this, there was a lot of evidence to support the claim.

Since then, the company has also added music from Warner Music and (just recently) Universal Music... but it hasn't really helped. Its userbase has remained about the same, so if the new music is enticing new subscribers, they're being offset by defections. But, more importantly, it looks like some of the bigger name indie labels are pulling their music off the site, as they can't come to a reasonable agreement with eMusic.

So, if I'm reading all this correctly, it sure looks like the company did quite a deal: it signed up major labels to get music that most of its subscriber base didn't want in the first place. In doing so it took away lots of popular features and jacked up prices. Now, the service is losing the content of some of the biggest indie bands.

This seems like a case study in not knowing your own audience.

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Reminder: Big Concerts Are Not All Of The Live Music Business

Mike Masnick — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:44:19 PDT

Whenever we discuss examples of successful bands who utilize live shows as part of their business model, or when we point to data about how live revenue is growing, people often focus just on the data available for "big concerts" in arenas and amphitheaters. For example, last year, we wrote about a research paper claiming that live revenue couldn't replace recorded music sales revenue. While an interesting bit of research, there were a few problems with it. First, we certainly have never claimed that live alone is the business model for musicians. Live is one component that seems to work well for many, but most of the business models we talk about involve a variety of revenue streams. Second, as we've shown recently, the "recorded music" revenue tends to go almost entirely to the record label, not the artist. So, from an artist's perspective, they're usually not "replacing" very much. But, most importantly, the data itself seemed to only focus on giant concerts: the kind that plays at arenas and amphitheaters. This sort of data is out there, but it's not everything. Yet, with various reports of financial problems at Live Nation, some critics are rushing around to claim that all the folks who said "live" would "replace" recorded music revenue were clearly wrong. In fact, we've had one critic submit about 30 such stories.

But, of course, while Live Nation has something of a death grip on arenas and amphitheaters, that's not how most musicians play live. Ian Rogers points us to a wide-ranging, but quite interesting, interview with indie band booking king Tom Windish, where he notes that in the realm he's working in, things are fantastic. It's in the middle of the interview, where he's asked about whether the business is "hurting":

Are promoters hurting this year?

We're not. It seems that Live Nation is. I don't really pay attention to the side of the business that is arena or amphitheatre driven. People are excited about seeing a lot of our bands. I hope more of them get popular. That would be great.

What's hurting the live business overall?

It's a combination of things. The price (of shows), and the surcharges; I think that's what is souring people the most. They are ridiculous.

Most of your roster works with cheaper ticket prices.

Yeah, I would say that most work in the $15 to $20 range before service charges are applied which are very high.

There are two key points in there concerning live music. The first is that his business -- which represents a ton of top independent acts, isn't hurting. We've spoken to a bunch of musicians who fit into that same category, and keep hearing basically the same story. If you're in the range where you're performing clubs and small theaters at $15/$20 a head, and have a decent fanbase, you can do quite well.

The second point, of course, is the sheer inefficiency of the ticketing process that has allowed middlemen to add all sorts of annoying fees and surcharges. It still seems like that's an area ripe for change.

Later in the interview, Windish makes another point that we've discussed in the past as well. "Live" doesn't necessarily mean having to go all the way around the country. It can really mean building up a really strong local audience, and gradually expanding it. That was a key part of Corey Smith's successful strategy, in that he kept touring locally, and kept slowly expanding his geographic footprint. Even today, his (massive) success is still located mostly in the southern US, and he's admitted that the next step is to slowly start to expand into the northeast. In the interview here, Windish makes a similar suggestion for bands. After talking about how many bands mistakenly just focus on playing big "festivals," the interviewer and Windish point out that building up a local audience (i.e., the old fashioned way of doing things) still works:

If a band doesn't land a festival, it can work within a region and explore opportunities.

That's a good way to do it, too. That's kind of an old school way of doing it. We have a lot of bands, especially foreign bands, that will come here and focus on New York for a week. Then, they go home to France or the U.K. and keep playing where they live. Then they come back here, play New York more, add in L.A. and, maybe, add in Toronto. Then they will go back and work in Europe again. The buzz that is generated in Europe will trickle over here pretty much immediately.

The point is, there are lots of interesting strategies that various acts can use to be successful well playing live shows -- and simply assuming that "live doesn't work" because Live Nation is having a down year sort of misses the point.

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Swedish Indie Band Release Only One Copy Of Their Latest Song Via eBay Art Project

Mike Masnick — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:03:00 PDT

Sweden is home, of course, to the folks who run The Pirate Bay, but it's also the home of numerous indie bands and indie labels that are doing some really interesting experiments that focus on embracing the opportunities and possibilities presented by technology, rather than fighting against it all. Dan Sellberg writes in to alert us to an amusing experiment by the band Bob Hund, who is releasing a new song, called Fantastiskt, but they're doing so by selling the only copy in existence of the song on eBay as an art project:

"Fantastiskt" will be sold and delivered as an art piece comprising; the original master dubplate vinyl (the only existing copy) mounted on a real working turntable with cover art, song lyrics and monogram etched onto the lid by the artist Martin Kann.

The publisher insists that this will be the only release of this single. Talk about taking "scarcity" to a different level... Obviously, this is something of a publicity stunt, but it's not a bad one.

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