1000 True Fans Revisited

Juan Zelada gives us his take on Gerd Leonhard’s blog 1000 Ture Fans.

1000 reasons to quit
by Juan Zelada

So I was reading Gerd Leonhard’s blog the other day and one of his posts led to to Kevin Kelly’s raved-about 1000 True Fans article. The article is genius and it’s a very interesting concept, but I think there are some problems in there. If you Google “1000 True Fans” (with the inverted commas to get the exact phrase), you get 98,200 results. If you do the same search but just Blogs, you get 232 reactions and if you narrow it down to one week, you get 21 blog results. What does that tell us? Well, for one it shows that the article hit a chord and Kevin Kelly knows what he’s talking about, but it also shows how quickly information flows through the web.

What does that mean? That everyone is talking about this concept, millions of artists are eager to start their own 1000 true fan base and companies around the world are gonna come up with “The 1000 True Fan” model just for you. Like Calabash, which “is a simple formula to allow fans to microfund working musicians. Calabash is changing the way the world finances music by applying the principles of microfinancing to the music industry”. However, they need cash too so they’re asking fans to fund their project! Which is a great idea but I think that with increased competition, the concept might loose freshness and fans will be increasingly reluctant to fund projects.

In this sense, I see a lot of the problems in this model mentioned by John Scalzi, for example:

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