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Scott wrote a thought-provoking post (although I guess it hasn't provoked any specific thoughts that I'm ready to share) about how many fans you need to make a living:

5000 Fans Theory was first floated by Brian Austin Whitney, founder of Just Plain Folks, in one of his monthly newsletters. Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.

Scott continues doing the math from there. The most interesting figure, I think, is:

In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans. As Hobbit sez, there are a lot of people working for minimum wage doing stuff they hate.

700 is still a lot of people to get $20 from, but it is, to use Scott's word, "attainable."

Comments

1000 Fans

[rutemple.livejournal.com]

Now there's something of Genius to that.

Add in an artist's perspective: here's Reva who carves amber, antler, and the occasional piece of fossil walrus tusk. really wonderful stuff, in the $40 to $300 range when I first met her lo about 12 years ago. She got together with a silver and bronze caster, and started having pieces that were $5 to $90 in metal: lots of them under $20, several lovely bits for $5; that magical pocket-change place for folks who love to look at the more expensive pretties but can't afford them (yet). folks buy little tidbits and string together necklaces that grow from year to year, that sort of thing. Then a few years later, she carved the first of a short handful of multi-thou-$$ works. I got to see the first $5000 piece, a blue amber toroidal sculpture of two mermaids and a merman, sell on the final day of the '98 Northern CA Renaissance Faire, to a matron who'd been eyeing it for weeks. Suddenly with one sale, the weekend's "take" doubled. Having a really WOW piece, and spreading the range of how-much-does-the-piece-cost offerings as wide as possible, including lots of the little bread-and-butter items, is really powerful for does it pay the rent and butter the beans.
The years I did a detailed analysis (grin) of my dearling ex's woodcut prints on cloth sales at that same multi-week ren-faire, it turned out that 40% of revenue came from sales of the little $5 hanks with a single motif on 'em. Sure, it takes folks a while to build up to the fancy silks with the hand-painted detail, but really that many of the little sideline pieces made up that much of the income stream. It was true to our neighbors as well, and it was true in typesetting in a busy environment with the resume crowd, a decade earlier.

I'm not sure how well ro completely this possibly maps to the experience of making music, doing concerts and putting out an album a year if you can to sell, but it's definitely worth adding to the stew of good thoughts.

Work those sidelines.