Remember attending your first gig ever?
T-7 days: you’d be going through their discography, and their previous live concerts, so you don’t blurt out “Wonderwall” to “what’s your favorite song.”
T-3 days: the latest album is on repeat, and you’re annoying your family and close friends — except the ones attending too, who are joyfully singing along with you.
T-1 hour: you’re at the venue, bantering with other fans, and hanging out with your mates.
And of course, right before the opening act, you’d buy merch.
Merch and band tees: the time-honored way of supporting your favorite band. Selling merch lets musicians focus on making music, writing songs, and giving you amazing performances (whether they sit on a Tiny Desk, or thrash it out at Wembley Stadium).
However, merch takes effort for musicians. It often ends up as the lion’s share of support for touring artists, who make between 10-35% of their revenue through merch sales.
However, depending on the middlemen involved, musicians can end up receiving only 30% of the value on their merch sales. So… for some, one t-shirt is more like 15,000 streams on Spotify.
Enter Greenruhm
Greenruhm seeks to level up that merch experience for the digital world, empowering fans to support their favorite music makers.
Greenruhm is a music social network, where every post is a digital item that fans can buy, sell, and share with their communities.
Digital Merch
On Greenruhm, musicians can share art, video, music, digital fashion, avatars, memberships, concert tickets, as posts — digital merch.
These posts can be owned by fans.
Yes: fans can like, amp (the equivalent of ‘sharing’ a post) and own these posts, which can grant access to exclusive features such as meet and greets, live performances, and more.
In essence, Greenruhm is a platform co-owned by the music community, that helps artists build more connected fan communities, and rewards fans for doing things that fans already love to do.
Who’s Greenruhm for?
Again, musicians earn just a few thousand dollars per million streams. Furthermore, most professional musicians earn most of their money from touring (75-80% in previous years), but many musicians can’t tour.
Supporting artists through digital merch gives them the possibility to choose the lifestyle they want. If they want to spend less time on touring and more time in the studio making music, they can do so. They won’t have to choose between staying with friends and family, and making their living.
And as for the fans: digital merch gives fans the chance to share in the success of their favorite artists, and the opportunity to earn money doing something they love – collecting, curating, and amping amazing music, art, music videos, tickets, flyers, memberships, avatars & digital fashion.
They’ll have a home to share, and showcase their love for music: Greenruhm.
Rewarding Curation
Fans are rewarded for their curation of digital merch with a share of the upside — when a post is purchased through a fan’s amp, part of the revenue goes to the fan.
Over time, fans build a history of their support for musicians, and they’ll be able to build their own personal brand as fans, too.
There’s another group of music curators that have achieved massive success: DJs. They make a living off curating, remixing and performing.
Now, that ability to earn from your excellent music taste, and your passion for music, can be accessible to anyone.
For all its innovative features, at bottom, Greenruhm is all about allowing creators to connect with their fans, and allowing creators to continue doing the things they love.
Can the Musicians Speak?
Don’t just hear it from me. Hear it from the artists who’ve interacted with Greenruhm:
“Greenruhm is a great way to support artists like me and give us the freedom to explore, experiment and create the content we want to see come to life. It helps us to connect with fans as well as other creatives and make it all come together.” – Thomas Jarrett, Music Video Animator/Director
“I’m excited for the power of digital merch to disrupt the world of art and music, and for the future of digital assets intertwined with traditional physical collectables in a future of AR & VR. Digital items are the obvious next generation of art merchandise, a vision I believe Greenruhm understands and nurtures. I’m excited to see how they influence the landscape of this next generation of digital collectables.” ~ Julian Gray
You will have the chance to hear (even) more about Greenruhm, and how they’re innovating in the music industry, from the CEO of Greenruhm, Eric Elliott, on Wednesday.
Greenruhm CEO, Eric Elliott has been building mainstream apps for musicians and creatives for years. He helped build BandPage (now YouTube Artist Pages), built a Spotify integration that introduced them to millions of people during the US launch, and helped build Adobe Creative Cloud, a $9b/year business.
Eric will talk more about how technology is changing the music industry on the Future of Music Production panel at Mondo NYC.
Wed Oct 13, 1 pm PT.