Music by donation: Some data
I’ve been looking around the Jamendo site that I mentioned in my previous post. It’s a website that facilitates musicians to sell their music by donation, as Radiohead have recently done with much publicity. As well as finding a lot of cool music, I found that they publish the data on the donations that people have made to musicians on the site. Naturally, as a nerdy economist, I was much more excited by the presence of this data than the music itself.
With a little Excel trickery I cleaned up the data and did some basic analysis. The donations through the site are made to artists, and are not necessarily linked to specific albums or songs. On the page with the donations data, the name of the musician or group that each donation was made to is given. However, a few quick searches revealed that almost all musicians received very few donations. Because of this observation and since it would have been a lot more work, I didn’t attempt to cross-tabulate the donations with artists. I just analysed total donations per month. These can be made in US dollars or euro. I converted all euro donations to US dollars using the average euro/USD exchange rate for each month. I used the data from January 2006 to October 2007.
First some high-level statistics: Total donations were small. Jamendo currently claims about 69,000 songs are available for download (some other statistics are available on this page). Over the 22 months there were 1,454 donations made, for a total value of US$21,150. So each artist is receiving very little money, if anything. Here’s the number and value of donations each month:
Looking at the raw data, people generally make donations of round numbers, mostly multiples of 5 dollars or 5 euros. There were a few odd donations though, like 5.99 or 6.49. The largest donation was about $204. The smallest was $5, which is the default minimum donation that the website suggests. Across all donations the average was $14.55. This graph shows the average and standard deviation of monthly donations across time:
There’s a slight trend upwards over time in the average monthly donation, but a linear trend is not statistically significant. As you might expect, the distribution of donations (across all months) is skewed. Most donations cluster around relatively low values, but there are a number of higher donations. There were 12 donations of $100 or more. Here’s the histogram of all donations:
Finally, the raw data is reported in US dollars and euro by donation, so assuming that Americans would choose to donate in US dollars and Europeans would donate in euros, we can test whether there’s a significant difference in altruism between these two groups. One thing that might bias this result is that Jamendo appears to be a Europe-based website, and many of the artists are European. There were also no US dollar donations before December 2006 (I don’t know the reason for that). And there are many fewer US dollar donations than euro donations (167 versus 1287). With these things in mind, the average for donations originally made in US dollars is $10.70, while the average for donations originally made in euro is $15.04. This difference is highly statistically significant. So it would seem that Europeans are more altruistic than Americans (at least towards the artists on this website).
Click here to download my Excel file of the data, if you are interested.
14 Comments
Hi !
I’m Laurent from Jamendo.
You spent a lot of time on our figures ! It’s impressive and useful.
Jamendo is a mix of gift economy (this donation flow) and of advertising revenue sharing (we do 50/50 on ad revenue per pages).
Today, the gift economy part is very tiny. For two reasons, the “support this artist” button is a bit hidden on the web site, and second, it’s paypal which is not always popular in Europe.
And yes, we’re European, based in Luxembourg !
Thanks for your outstanding review of our project !
–
Laurent
Laurent: Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t realise that Jamendo shares advertising revenue too — that will increase the revenues per artist obviously. Total donations might be small at this stage, but the average donation ($14.55 I calculated) seems to be quite high, so that’s encouraging.
Hi aaron,
Sylvain from Jamendo speaking ;-)
There was no donation in dollars before december 06 simply because we weren’t using paypal back then and our previous payment center had only an Euro option.
Your statistics are very useful. Thank you very much! The donation per artist figure is indeed small but all the artists don’t accept donations and they don’t rely on donations too much anyway. The goal is often to buy some new gear with that money.
Also, you may be interested in this :
http://www.jamendo.com/fr/get/donation/list/donation/data/plain/?dni=info_common&n=all
http://www.jamendo.com/fr/get/donation/list/donation/data/json/?dni=info_common&n=all
Should be easier to use for analysis :)
cheers!
Sylvain: Thanks for the explanations and links to the raw data, it’ll be useful for further analysis.
Very cool. Radiohead’s move to a donation system for their album “In Rainbows” has triggered a lot of media fuss, the dominant tone being ‘the business is obsolete.’ Your analysis seems to both confirm and debunk this idea. In any case, this is the kind of thinking people should pay attention to, not the hype.
Radiohead’s revenue numbers will not be, I suspect, the norm. They have a worldwide base of rabid fans (such as myself) who feel honor bound to give them a fair price. The music critic Sasha-Frere Jones wrote in his blog that the average donation was in the $5-$10 range.
We’ll see!
Very interesting.
I’m against giving away music for free and relying on donations as it is a very small percentage of people who will actually pay for the music (as seen in your article), and also the music itself is devalued. It costs alot of time/money/sweat/tears to create a song/album…. why shouldn’t the artist get some reward.
Alot has been said about Radiohead, but the main point with them is that they are already very well established with a huge fanbase who would buy their sweaty jocks if they could. For the normal artist or a new artist it’s impossible to survive by giving your music away. The best model I’ve seen is http://www.sellaband.com where artists/fans/label are in business together and split any profits equally. They have free mp3’s for download too, but offer the complete album or other songs for sale. I think that is the model that makes the most sense at the moment, for everyone.
The Canadian artist, Jane Siberry, started experimenting with self-determined pricing back in November 2005, way before Radiohead. Current data on payments can be found here:
http://www.sheeba.ca/store/letterSDP.php
Since then she’s changed her name to Issa and is now toying with the idea of some sort of radical pricing for her concerts too (according to her latest newsletter).
Hi Aaron,
Congratulations for this analysis. But I’m wondering if the first diagram isn’t a bit misleading: doesn’t the upward trend (at least in recent months) reflect the drop of the USD compared to the euro?
Also, it would be interesting to plot the evolution of the average donation amount in time. I think two opposite forces are in action here: one (that should push towards a decrease) is the growing acceptance that “music is free”, the other (pushing up) being the growing desire of music listeners to find other ways to support artists than buying their records. I have no clue how to distinguish these two, but I think it will be interesting to watch how the numbers evolve in coming months/years.
Cheers,
François
François: Thanks for the feedback. I did use monthly average exchange rates to convert the euro values to USD, so yes changes in the exchange rate will be reflected in the result. On the other hand although there appears to be a trend in the average donation, it’s not statistically significant, so we can’t really say that it exists.
Is the average European vs US donation comparison based on nominal value?
I imagine it’s obvious that Europeans donate a lot more in USD because simply the EUR is much more worth than the USD. If I donate 10€ that would be more than $14 already, yet from a personal standpoint I’ve probably not given more than an American who had donated $10.
The introductory price for 1 EUR was 1 USD and if both economies developed about equally then the nominal value of the donation in the respective currency would give a much better picture.
the average donation is U$14.5 across the online ? Well that is great! I attach value (and price) to the experience of music not to the f..ng packaging material and the “opportunity” to buy CD in a store at opening hours…
Hi there:
I liked the post, because you clearly set out your assumptions and the derivation of your conclusions, and then provided good graphics to show what you determined.
I like very much also that the folks in Jamendo took an open constructive approach in response, adding to your ideas rather than being defensive or less than candid.
I’d like to talk about what I see as a false dichotomy between a “more open source” release system and a “pay the old fashioned way” release system.
As a co-owner of a netlabel, Negative Sound Institute, it’s important to us that our music be available for entirely free download–no charges, no donationware, and no advertising. I see our work as an outgrowth of earlier trends in a “sharing culture”, a descendant of mail art and the tape exchange and the open source softwae movements, regularized under satisfying Creative Commons licensing.
Yet I become concerned that donationware and free releaes and self-determined pricing become “debate points” about what artists should or should not do. I see these debates points as in the main beside the point.
If someone wishes not to release product on a free or non-commercial license basis, then I’m perfectly happy for them to choose to do so. I am not trying to insist that my way of releasing music–for free–is the “only right way” or “the quickest way to make money”. I believe that the traditional record company way of funding, releasing and controlling intellectual property is pretty much over–a casualty of improved recording technology and the internet’s advantage over traditional hegemonies over product distribution. I am not sure that traditional music sales, as opposed to licensing and ad-revenue-based models, will work any longer. But time will tell us that–it’s not really a debate point.
It would, to me, be unfortunate to argue that all intellectual property “must” be open source and public domain. I don’t mean to use the freedoms provided by new technology and listener-friendly licensing to take away the notion that a reasonable copyright term to protect an artist’s interest for a finite time period is an acceptable way to encourage artistic creation. I opposed the copyright extensions in the US because to me the social contract of copyright is that work must eventually reach the public domain.
Yet the idea of copyright does not trouble me, and I have little sympathy with those who feel a moral right to download copyrighted material.
Still, many of us in netlabel culture, and some days I feel as though it’s actually “almost all of us in netlabel culture”, release music without any plan for profit, licensing or donations. We do it because we believe in creating a vast body of music which may be obtained for non-commercial purposes on a free basis. A lot of us post to jamendo or archive.org. When we do so, getting any donations is the furthest thing from our mind.
I’d love to post an album at jamendo, but my goal would not be to make money or become an ad-revenue-receiving mogul. My goal would be to be heard by the wonderful jamendo community, who download, review, rate and spread the word about the popular artists there. I plan to post a jamendo album this year, and I may activate the donation buttons. But in the unlikely event that my weirdbient music got me a small check in the mail, I’d donate it to animal adoption. To me, the music is about sharing.
Still, I support folks like Issa (’nee jane siberry), Radiohead and Kristin Hersh. I’d like to note that Kristin Hersh is taking the concept further into a Creative Commons read/write approach with her CASH music, which uses not only self-determined pricing, but also makes available the original files for free download for easy remxing (she’s even posted her a capellas of her two most recent songs on ccmixter).
A Kristin Hersh or an Issa could not get a conventional record deal, and even if they could, would be unlikely given industry accounting to get much more than a smallish advance and few royalties barring a major hit. Issa’s self-determined pricing, coupled with touring, has supported her for some years now. Is this a model for everyone? I’m not sure. But I suspect that Kristin Hersh and Issa will make this model work, because they share a small, devoted fan base that will pay to keep the artist recording.
Thank you for such a great post, and for the points you make here. My intention is not to take away from the display you provide, but to instead point out that jamendo artists I enjoy hearing (such as the wonderful Henri Petterson) have been releasing music for free for years in the netlabel scene. My belief is that they don’t see jamendo as a piggy bank, but as a way to share in a community. But it’s okay, too, for those who want to sell outside Jamendo, to do so. It’s user’s choice, and that’s a good thing.
Robert Nunnally,
who records as gurdonark
I have started offering a similar thing from our website, only here there is no “middleman”. Some of my productions are free to download, and it is coming directly from the artist, not via a music community portal. I think its a good thing to do this, because it will allow people to check in on the material I am developing, and fetch it, even though some of it are early unmastered or lofi versions or remix’es, of what will later be published on the albums and played live.
Cheers
Michael
–
You find it here: http://www.micknye.com
thanks you