Now that even serious fans consider actually paying for their music optional, what other tactics might work to turn love into money? I wondered about this at length in last week’s column, “You Can’t Eat a Tweet.” But since then current events have provided an answer that hadn’t occurred to me: build up a devoted fan base, give them an Internet forum to play in, wait years until it evolves into a substantial online and offline community, and see if its members spontaneously decide to give you a huge pile of money.
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The Electrical Audio boards are basically a place where music lovers brought together by an affinity for Albini’s bands or recording style trade technical tips and personal advice and shit-talk about other musicians (not to mention music critics). But many regulars have a depth of loyalty to this community that could make college football jealous, and it’s only in light of that loyalty that Midgett’s scheme seems anything but bonkers. “It’s a place where a bunch of like-minded people from all over the world can go to jabber at each other about stuff they all like,” he says. “Give each other advice and so on. I’m sure there are other places like that, but that is the one I’m fond of. It’s morphed from an online thing into real people meeting each other and doing all the stuff real people do in the real world. It’s neat.”
Even considering that impressive effort, though, Midgett’s fund-raising project is easily the most ambitious thing to come out of the Electrical forums. And it did come from the forums, in more ways than one: ThePoint.com was founded by former Electrical intern Andrew Mason, who would go on to launch Groupon.
Electrical does have a leg up in that it’s helmed by a celebrity engineer, but in many ways Albini has declined to take advantage of that. His rate at Electrical is $700 a day, which is a bit steep for a struggling local band but peanuts compared to the kind of fee he can command—for his two weeks of work on Nirvana’s In Utero, for instance, he got $100,000. He also refuses to take “points,” or percentage royalties, on his projects. “It has always been a point of pride that a studio like ours can have reasonable rates and high technical standards while treating people decently and still pay its bills,” he says. “I think a lot of poor behavior has historically been excused by business pressures, and I’m proud that we’ve proven those excuses phony.”
