Web Monetization for the Arts — Grant Report #1

Artists Respond to Web Monetization

Project Update

Our team is closing the artist survey we created and moving on to the education and outreach phase of our project. Web Monetization for the Arts has been met with interest by those in the media concerned with the intersection of arts and tech.

As for the survey, although we have a large enough sample to understand our audience and move the project forward, the response rate has not been as robust as we think it could have been were our organization more familiar to our community.

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Our key activities are:

1. Creating and distributing a survey that asks classical musicians and small performing arts groups about their digital content strategies and
2. Using the results of that survey to write educational materials about Web Monetization for our target audience.

In March we built our survey and began distributing it by email. We created a forwardable email and a survey cover letter.

We spent took a lot of care with the language for these documents. Web Monetization is not a familiar term to our audience. We wanted to make sure that our appeal explained our long-term mission -- to help artists build economically sustainable online content practices -- and didn't come across as "spammy."

Similarly, the survey required a lot of brainstorming. How best to approach artists and arts organizations about an unfamiliar topic? We needed to collect information that would be helpful to us in building the educational materials. We have always sought to meet our audience where they are. The survey has been an opportunity to listen to musicians and performing arts groups.

We decided to craft the survey in three parts.

1. The first collected demographic and organizational information that could help us understand respondents' resources and missions.
2. The second section concerned digital content strategies. We asked how, what, where and why about their current content in order to learn what respondents' goals, concerns, and optimization strategies.
3. The final section asked about familiarity with Web Monetization and technical know-how so that we might best understand where the challenges might be.

The survey we developed was emailed to over 2,000 persons working in the nonprofit arts. We emailed contacts at music organizations across the United States. Many of them were members of the League of American Orchestras.

Some early results:

• 69% of respondents identify as freelance artists.
• Most respondents had less than $25,000 annual income from their artistic work.
• 80% create original digital content.
• Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the primary ways respondents are currently distributing digital content.
• 65% of respondents have not received revenue from their digital content in the past two years.
• 81% of respondents are familiar with the term 'streaming payment.'
• Only 7% of our respondents has ever installed a web browser extension.

We have received over a hundred responses and we're very happy with that number. It is, however, lower than what we anticipated. We suspect that we would have received more responses if our organization were more established and/or familiar to our audience.

Interestingly, Jacob had a lot of success engaging with artists in person. During the daily course of his work in New York City, he showed musicians the survey on his phone. This direct, in-person engagement was the most effective way of getting people talking about Web Monetization and its uses. We see potential for more education outreach with in-person sessions.

Communications and marketing

We created a press release announcing our project. It was shared with and by several arts publications and advocacy groups.

Broadway World picked up the story. So did Musical America.

The Texas Music Office shared our survey on their social channels. They also shared with us their list of Texas concert halls and arts organizations.

Contacts at King FM in Seattle connected us with the Live Music Project. Live Music Project shared our survey via their social channels.

Our team's affiliated publication, Raft Magazine, published a story about the project along with a link to the survey.

We were in touch with reporters at WNYC and National Public Radio. They expressed interest in our project and stated that we were too early in the process for them to do a feature.

What’s next?

In the coming days we will close the survey and run the survey results report. We will be analyzing the data in the coming weeks, as our project now turns to its education and outreach phases. We will be writing a series of articles that cover Web Monetization and its application for our audience.

Natalie will write a series of ten articles, with editorial support from Matt. We will deliver these articles via email to our survey respondents who requested them. We will publish the articles at Raft Magazine and to Medium.

Additionally, we will hold virtual office hours to answer any questions our readers have.

What community support would benefit your project?

We'd love to hear from any performing artists who have implemented Web Monetization, and how it has worked for them. Adding your story to our educational materials would put a human face on what is for many of our audience a tedious conversation about technical matters they don't understand or trust.

Web Monetization for the Arts would also like help distributing our articles. Sharing them via social media channels would be appreciated.

Additional comments

One of the challenges of working within the nonprofit arts is that, historically, the arts and artists have not wanted to talk about money. This sentiment was captured nicely by one of our survey respondents:

One of the major reasons for the dearth of money in the arts is the lack of public funding NOT a lack of resources, knowledge, experience, workshops, surveys, web based monetization schemes or any other individually based money making scheme. Promoting this kind of idea is antithetical to the future of the arts and causing harm in our artistic communities. We are not businesses. We do not make a profit. We do not "monetize" anything. Get off your high horse, start demanding public funding, and fold up this business.

The idea that art is labor and that labor should be paid opens a conversation within the nonprofit arts for artists. Advocacy groups are raising awareness about the impossible economics that creatives face. Artists want help. That sentiment was expressed well by another survey respondent:

Please encourage artists to STOP putting their music on streaming services. Only Apple, Amazon, et al make the money. Even Beyonce has a side hustle because streaming revenue is not the same as old skool album sales. Make it stop.

We think that a big part of getting artists and arts organizations to adopt Web Monetization will include educating their supporters about it. This means educating arts consumers about the economics of online content. It means explaining why people post content for free and what the long-term costs of doing that are.

We see educating the arts audience as reducing the friction inherent in adopting Web Monetization for our artists.

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