Recently, WIRED founding editor Kevin Kelley posted an excellent article arguing that an artist needs only 1,000 true fans to start building a viable economy. I’d like to expand on his piece a bit…

This is an extremely important idea in this day and age, when connecting with fans - no matter how dispersed and remote they be - can happen efficiently and creatively via the web. In fact, this is basically the idea behind 76fanclubs.

Consider how the web changes things. Previously, having 1,000 dedicated fans was not actually enough to make a living, especially if those fans were spread over a wide area (10 fans in St. John’s, 10 in Vancouver, 10 in 98 places in between). There could be no economic benefit to touring to reach that fan base, (costs are far higher than revenues), nor to releasing a CD via standard commercial route (no label will pick up an artist with such a small fan base, and if they do, the likelihood of those 1,000 fans finding that CD in their local CD store is remote, and of course only a small fraction reaches the artist from a CD sale anyway). Radio play isn’t likely either, further reducing potential revenues.

Supposedly the web was going to change this. But has it? Not really. Not yet. Sure, bands have websites and fans can visit them, but few artists can stay on top of their ecommerce biz, assuming they have one, which most don’t. Besides, with the proliferation of file-sharing and the decline of CD sales, selling CDs off a website appears a dead-end street anyway. So where is the solution?

Our approach is somewhat radical. We’ve tried to rethink the whole notion of the economic relationship between a band and its fans. We say: first, conslidate your dispersed fans into a database so you can manage them as a community. Second, nurture your relationships with them by sharing music, pictures, thoughts, etc. with them on a regular basis. Thirdly, and most importantly, give them a simple way to share cash with you, in exchange for all that stuff, via an online payment tool. Not on a per-song or per-CD basis, but as an annual renewable membership in your musical world.

And 76fanclubs is just a simple platform for enabling that exchange without any muss or fuss.

There are plenty of other advantages to this system as well (economic simplicity, autonomy, sustainability, etc.) We’re not saying our model is perfect, or that it is 100% developed. On the contrary, it’s a work in progress. But we believe it can help musicians significantly increase their revenues immediately, simply by doing what they already love to do: making music for their fans on their own terms.

In the current musical economy, those 1,000 distributed fans create next to no revenue for an artist. Using 76fanclubs those 1,000 fans would typically generate about $15-20,000 annually directly to an artist. Or course, if you can build a fanbase of 2 or 5 or 10,000 then your revenues will rise accordingly.

All we’re saying is, compare the our economic model with others and draw your own conclusions.