A Pay-What-You-Can Music Model By ALLAN KOZINN Published: August 21, 2013 Even before the record business imploded, musicians regularly brainstormed about ways to get their work to potential listeners. But Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi were feeling more than the usual sense of urgency when they came up with a novel plan, a subscription Web site, Rabbit Rabbit Radio, to distribute new music by their latest band, Rabbit Rabbit. “Every other conversation you had with a musician, the gist of it was: ‘The business is falling apart. What are we going to do?’ ” Ms. Kihlstedt said by phone. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked really hard on a CD, for however many months or years, and then you hope the label does its job and gets it out, and that the stars align. But at a certain point, we got tired of complaining and began saying, ‘O.K., what are we going to do?’ ” With some help from George Hurd, a composer and music administrator, they produced a blueprint for Rabbit Rabbit Radio and started the Web page in February 2012. The plan was to release a new song for subscribers on the first of every month. Along with the song, Ms. Kihlstedt and Mr. Bossi, who are married to each other, began posting video clips, slide shows and photo albums; information about the making of the track; essays on various subjects; and lists that might include links to clips by other musicians whose work they admire or notes about restaurants they have discovered on tour. Past releases can be explored in their online archives. Subscribers pay $2 to $5 a month. (There is no difference in access; it’s a matter of paying what you can.) “In order to work,” Mr. Bossi said, “we get so involved in preparing the material surrounding the song that it feels like we’re putting together a magazine issue every month.” So far, 18 months into the project, Rabbit Rabbit Radio has nearly 900 subscribers. Ms. Kihlstedt, 41, and Mr. Bossi, 34, who live in Dennis, Mass., said they would be happy if their subscription list grew by 500 listeners a year. “Our goal is to be able to count on Rabbit Rabbit Radio as part of our monthly income,” she said, noting that if you factor in Web hosting fees, site management costs and other incidentals — to say nothing of the time they put into recording the music and preparing other materials — they are barely making a profit. “But we’re taking the long view and giving it three years.” The first subscribers were drawn from followers of Mr. Bossi and Ms. Kihlstedt’s other bands — the art-rock group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Causing a Tiger, an improvisatory ensemble — as well as fans of Ms. Kihlstedt’s various ensembles, which include Tin Hat and 2 Foot Yard. (Ms. Kihlstedt also has a career as a classical composer; she performed her recent song cycle, “At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire,” with the International Contemporary Ensemble at Mostly Mozart on Saturday evening.) “We spread the initial word about the site in a very grass-roots kind of way,” said Mr. Hurd, who manages the site. “We reached out to Carla and Matthias’s fan base that they’d been amassing over the past couple of decades. We also created a series of original video commercials to promote each month’s content, and asked our fans to share them far and wide.” Rabbit Rabbit’s material is varied — often lighter in spirit and more pop than Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s music, but sometimes driven and experimental as well. Sometimes a song reflects what they’re up to during the month they recorded it. “Merci Vielmal,” which they recorded while they were touring Europe as part of the guitarist Fred Frith’s band Cosa Brava, is about crossing linguistic and geographical boundaries, and was recorded in trains and backstage at clubs in France and Switzerland. Their most recent offering, the laconic “Before the Sun,” is a collaboration with the Chicago band Cheer-Accident. Thymme Jones, a member of Cheer-Accident, said that his group planned to adopt the Rabbit Rabbit Radio subscription model, starting in September. “The instant I saw what they were doing,” said Mr. Jones, who was a subscriber from the start, “the light bulb went off, and I thought, ‘We’re going to rip off this idea.’ For us, it will be an interesting way of doing things differently after 25 years of releasing physical discs. And if my math is right, we have tons of people on our mailing list.” John Schaefer, the host of several radio shows on WNYC that focus on new music, said the subscription model struck him as a plausible way for some musicians to supplement their performing income. “If Radiohead did this,” Mr. Schaefer wrote in an e-mail, “it would go through the roof. If a local indie band did it, it might still be terrific, but I’m not sure how successful it would be. What makes it work, I think, for Carla and Matthias is that they have enough of a following to get them started and then the resulting word of mouth will hopefully sustain it.” Ms. Kihlstedt and Mr. Bossi have looked at other models as well, including those like Kickstarter and ArtistShare, which encourage fans to provide money for musicians’ projects. Ms. Kilhstedt used Kickstarter to raise money for a song cycle, “Necessary Monsters,” and found the experience valuable, even though, she said, she went overboard with the gifts she sent to fans who contributed. (Contributors to that project, she said, were also given free subscriptions to Rabbit Rabbit Radio.) They are currently working with Fractured Atlas, an organization that helps independent artists raise money and organize their business affairs. “We’re about to release our 20th issue,” Mr. Bossi said, pursuing his magazine analogy. “And we’ve gotten better at working fast and meeting our deadlines. This fall we’re going to spend some time getting the word out in a bigger way, and pushing it to the next level.”
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 04:33:58 +0000
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