The long…. road to fame and fortune
I’ve been looking at myspace the last couple of days to look for bands to play shows with and I’ve discovered that the number of local acts is staggering. For example, doing a search for ‘alternative’ bands in a 50-mile radius of my home gives about 10,000 search results. It’s interesting to look at these in terms of how influential bands are. One measure of this is the number of times a song has been played on myspace. Let’s have a look at some of these bands:
#1555: Simsalabim - 1.4k plays, 1k views, 61 fans, ~100 days.
This means we generated less than 1 fan per day, much less since many of our ‘fans’ are simply other bands. We’ve had about 10 visits to the site each day. Also only about 40% of the visits to the site result in multiple plays.
#600: The number fox 5k plays, 4k views, 161 fans
We’re playing the OSF festival with these guys in a couple of weeks. Mostly in the high-school/jc scene. Seems like their fans are fairly real, but most visitors didn’t listen to many songs.
#55: Picture Atlantic: 71k plays, 38k views, 4k fans, on for 500 days.
High school band with high-school friends and a bunch of random myspace tramps. They need to be getting about 80 hits per day, but they are playing 3 shows a week and their EP has been out for almost a year, so sounds like it could be real.
#11 Strata - 600k plays, 400k views, 43k fans, 3.5 years online.
Nationally touring act with radio play on live 105. They are also getting about 1.5 plays per view, and about 10 views per fan over the lifetime of their site.
#1 Counting Crows -5M plays, 2.3M views, 64k fans.
Nationally known artists, with a higher number of plays per visit to the site. Their site has only been up a little while and their number of fans isn’t that large - they are supposedly getting 100 plays per fan! I wondering if they are hacking the myspace stats…
Even more importantly, I need to ask where on this continuum I want to be. Being a nationally touring act is out for me, and even the number of shows that Picture Atlantic is playing seems like kind of a drag. Maybe if we got to be in the top 100 most influential alternative bands in the bay area that would be enough to give us steady gigs. We’d probably need about 500-1000 die hard fans to get us enough of a following to gig steadily in any given area. If we get 10 people to like us at each show, we’d need to play 50-100 shows to create this kind of a base.