Fandoodle Pays You Money To Support Your Favorite Artists

Posted on December 10, 2008 by WaltRibeiro

Update: Fandoodle is now known as Fan Distro

OK – so we all know you LOVE your favorite musicians, and that you tell all your friends about them. Well, now you can get paid every time you spread the word! Enter Fandoodle.

Essentially, its an affiliate deal, where the fans get paid to do what they already do for free – spread the word. So will this work out? Well, Fandoodle is in beta – and the site looks pretty bad. But according to their site, you get a 20 % commission on CD/DVD sales. No mention of mp3′s, merchandise etc. though.

In this world of viral marketing, mailing lists, Twitter, Digg, etc. people’s word of mouth is larger than ever. In 1 hour, I can get in touch with my network of over 3,000 people.

Most podcasters/bloggers who are part of the Podsafe Music Network usually affiliate with CD Baby artist’s to get a portion of sales in order to support their hard work and effort in promoting the artists. But that generally only works for direct purchases for those who are at the site while listening to the podcast. Fandoogle, on the other hand, puts the power into the fans – as well as the podcasters.

I wonder how successful a service like this could be. Money is usually the #1 motivator for doing things. So I wonder if this would create a serious powerhouse between bands and their fans. But fans spread the word because of their passion for the artist, not money.

I remember Jonathan Coulton discussing in this blog post of his thoughts about this idea back in June, 2007. I agreed with him, because affiliate marketing is big business. Everybody wins in this case – The artists, the merchants, and the fans. That said, I think that as the internet becomes more mainstream, it’ll open up the doors for more business models like this. Imagine being at the mall, and telling someone about a band, and having them purchase their music on the spot via their cell phone, or laptop :)

So what do you think? Will business models like this allow bands to have full time staff with no overhead? Could you see yourself using this service?

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  • http://www.fandoodle.com Michael Penfield

    Hi Walt -

    FanDoodle lets Artists/labels distribute 3 ways:

    1. Physical CD’s (as you point out),
    2. mp3 downloads, and
    3. 16-bit wav file downloads (true cd quality).

    “But fans spread the word because of their passion for the artist, not money.”…I agree and hope this never changes. But we think that if you arm the fan with financial incentive and a delivery mechanism, that this passion for the music will open a new channel for Artists to distribute their works…michael penfield, Founder, FanDoodle.com

  • http://thejetsetcast.com Jason Z

    When I first read this I was skeptical about this service. Then I went to their website and re-read your post and thought about it some more.

    The conclusion I came to is that this can turn out to be beneficial for the artists because essentially they are hiring their fans to sell their music. And if you are a passionate fan of a band and they want to pay you a commission to sell their music you’d probably do it because A) you get to make money and B) You feel important because you are helping a band you love to succeed.

    I think in theory this could be promising. I want to keep my eye on it.