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Seth Godin
Seventy-two Pearl Jam Albums
The music business is all about interrupting jaundiced
strangers with news about ever more similar acts, all trying
to break into the Top 40. Ninety-seven percent of all
records lose money because this model is fundamentally
broken.
Of course, in 1962 this was a brilliant strategy. People
were starved for great new music. Retailers wanted more
titles to stock, radio stations wanted more acts, and consumers
wanted bigger collections. Advertising (in the
form of radio payola or retail spiffs) was quite effective.
No longer.
Virtually all breakthrough acts in the music business
now are the result of blind luck (and a little talent). A
band (brand) captures the interest of a small group of
sneezers, who tell their friends, and suddenly they’ve got a
hit. Rather than accepting this, though, the music industry
tries to manufacture hits the old way.
Except for Pearl Jam. They seem to get it. They broke
through. They worked hard (and got lucky), recorded
some hits, and became headliners. Then, instead of
insisting that they could do it again and again and again,
they rallied their core audience and built a very different
system.
If you’re a Pearl Jam fan, you know that from 2001
through 2002, the band released seventy-two live albums,
all available on their Web site. They’re not trying to interrupt
strangers; they’re selling to the converted. Pearl Jam
knows that once they have permission to talk to someone,
it’s much easier to make a sale. They know that the cost of
selling an album to this audience is relatively minuscule,
and they’ve turned a profit on all seventy-two albums. The
big win on top of this income stream occurs when some of
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