Does the 1/10/90 rule apply to music?
Jan|14|2008
I’ve been fascinated by Radioheads selling of In Rainbows on the internet. People have been heralding it as the end of record labels etc etc.
Now, Justice, one of my favourite DJ/producer acts, are teaming up with the rest of the Ed Banger crew to play at Madison Square Gardens. That’s a capacity of 20,000 people. It’s ENORMOUS! Bands like U2 play there.
This is quite strange though, generally, you would only do this if you had millions of record sales and you were assured of a sell-out gig. Imagine 5,000 people (still a massive number) in such a huge space as MSG. Now… the problem is that Justice have only sold 40,000 albums in the US. still a lot, but not nearly enough to warrant the 20,000 people in MSG
We all know about the 1/10/90 rule, where it means that if you have 100 people visiting your site, 1 percent will be active contributers, 10% will contribute sometimes and 90% will just lurk. Can you apply this to music?
Justice has seen close to 4.3 Million hits on their Myspace page, and their top video D.A.N.C.E. has hit 5.6 million views on Youtube. Can we start saying that 1% of your listeners will actually buy your album, 10% will attend your party and 90% will download your music and love your music? It must be another kind of metric, but it’s something I can see.
Take a listen to a Justice set here
Leave a reply