Ever heard of it? It stands for Software as a Service, and it's a little sector of the software/tech business that everyone is keeping an eye on right now. One of the leading vendors of this service right now is a company called SalesForce.com. My brother in law is actually their director of recruiting for the midwest region. What SaaS does is remove the need to buy software for your business. It moves the important stuff to the “cloud”, which is another name for the internet, and charges a monthly fee for the service. It's the same concept as Gmail, except that enterprise software is big, big business. Software companies don't just make a bundle when they sell it, they make a bigger bundle from selling the support contracts that every business inevitably needs to keep their company moving along.

So, SaaS removes the expense of buying, and instead rents you the software, along with the support, for however long you want it. I'm not in the market right now, so I don't know how long the contracts last, but the point is that companies probably won't continue to buy enterprise software if this model works out like SalesForce.com hopes it will. So far it's working like gangbusters. They're projecting about $1.3B in revenue for 2010.

The correlating service in the music business would be something like Napster, I guess. You pay a monthly fee and you get access to their whole database of music. Services like these haven't taken off for crap, mostly because iTunes already owns the market and it's still just too easy to rip music off for free. iTunes has proven such a success because they really do make it super easy to get what you want, the prices are reasonable, and they don't even insist on that DRM crap anymore (which was only there in the first place because the majors insisted on it).

What if a band with a pre-established fanbase wanted to try this out on their own? What if there were very regularly updated music, video, whatever on a site dedicated to the band, and the only place you could get that stuff was from that website? What if it were super simple for anyone to use, and super affordable for anyone to join? In other words, what if it were worth it?

Would people try it?

Would bands try it?

If the other option is to put out another CD that you can only buy at the merch table, or maybe online somewhere and even then only if you're already looking for it, I think this could be a way forward for a really motivated band.

#theidea

Okay, so this blog is gonna be really boring if I do it in chronological order. I want to make sure that my two readers so far have something to look forward to besides cleaning out my mental closet.

I had an idea for a business that would be really cool if someone started.

I'm in a band that gets virtually no love from the mainstream media, the major record labels, the world at large...Yet, we've been together for 8 years now. I've been in the band for 6. When I first joined the band we were buying a van from a liquor store parking lot so that we could get around the country more comfortably and reliably. That van turned 300,ooo miles last weekend. We played Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In February. “This is ridiculous” we thought to ourselves. Yet, we sold out the little place we played in ME, and the huge place we played in VT. Turns out cabin fever is a good thing for your band. But we do this all the time.

You take your average artist that's on a major label, that's on the radio or MTV, and we draw more people to any given show in any given town than probably 90% of them. That there's something going on here is plain for anyone to see. That we're impossible to “market” in the traditional sense, in the traditional way is equally plain, to me at least. I don't even know how to answer the question “What kind of music do you guys play?” and I've been looking for a straight reply for 6 years. So I don't get frustrated when we put out a new record and it doesn't sell, or get the media response that I'm sure it'll get, or when the good radio play we're actually getting for the first time doesn't actualy translate into any hard numbers. Okay, so I do, but does it really matter? If you're a fan of RRE, how did you find RRE? Was it seeing an article in the paper, or a magazine? Was it by hearing us on XM/Sirius?

It may have been, but I'd say chances are pretty strong that either one of your friends turned you on to us, or that you stumbled across us on the internet. That tells me something.

#theidea