1,000 True Fans

Kevin Kelley, who is more than Internet famous in his own right, developed the idea of 1,000 true fans. The idea is practically a toss-off from the bigger concept he helps propagate, the long tail.

In brief, the 1kTF idea is that if 1,000 devoted fans of an artists will pay $100 a year for that artist's output, then that artist can make a decent living, cut out a lot of middlemen, and cater very specifically to those 1,000 fans.

People have criticized the idea for reasons fair and unfair. What I haven't seen in the whole discussion are more realistic permutations of the idea.

The idea I'm more interested in investigating is something like 5,000 fair weather fans willing to pay $20 a year. It's actually a lot of effort to cultivate 1,000 people. But it's less difficult to attract the magpie interests of 5,000 people.

What you'd really want is a mix of say, three different tiers which I will call, off the top of my head: true fans ($100+ a year), casual fans ($50 a year), and fair weather fans ($20 a year). For monetization purposes, I might even add a fourth tier of rat's ass fans, who don't give a rat's ass about the artist or the work, but will spend $5 for a clever little doodad on impulse. Which might well bring us back around to a micro-long tail within a single artist's realm.

Cultivating fans at these three different tiers is probably the more doable way to pull this scheme off.