JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Friday, June 15th, 2007

Ben,

Our friends in the industry half the time think I am nuts for doing things the way I do it. But there are inherant risks in changing our model that could put 10 years of hard work and passion into harms way. Some say become a non profit and then you'll get all sorts of grants and funding. That's fine, except it requires me to give up actual ownership of JPF and any future financial payoff for the 10 years of investment I've put into it. It also means creating a board which can cause all sorts of nightmares. (Any doubt about that, watch what has happened recently with Folk Alliance who has had a nightmare year of the board battling the president with people taking sides, lots of ill will etc.) Sure, I could appoint a bunch of insider friends, but the integrity issue would eat at me if I did that. It's like cheating the system to get grants and I am not about that. It's sad that people who give arts grants are so close minded most of the time to anything but non-profits, even when many non profits are poorly run with high paid execs without a fraction of the passion or integrity we have. And often they barely touch the lives of a fraction of the people we do (or better, COULD do with a little financial support). So being a non profit is not very appealing to me.

The other options are charging a member fee.. but I saw Indie-Music nearly ruin all their hard work by trying it and failing. I've seen several other sites that were free who tried to convert members to paying that failed badly. Tonos did that. Of course they had a LOT of other problems, but their list of 130,000 people shrunk to 1200 when they started charging and the entire thing imploded. Even if we converted twice the rate they did, we'd find outselves with about 700 members and be instantly irrelevent in the industry.

We could also charge for the music awards. But then it just becomes another contest in most people's eyes and I fear it would lose it's own integrity as we were forced to make decisions based on that, rather than right and wrong. Money always corrupts things. If you can pick and choose how to carefully bring money into something like JPF, you have a chance to keep the ship in the right direction. If we charged, then we'd need lawyers and accountants and various managers to keep it all in line and decisions on timing and expenses etc. would get tricky. Right now we take whatever time we need based on the number of entries, which we never know until we get them. We'd likely lose 80-90% of more of the entries by having a fee, and though we'd make some money off the remaining 10-20% we'd fail to have the diversity we do now or the depth of quality. We do the awards truly to find excellent music. We were successful in 65 of 67 genres in finding a LOT of excellent music. The two that were a bit weak will be fantastic this year because it sometimes takes 2 awards cycles to develop new genres into powerhouses. (In one case, we've already received more fantastic music than we had last time and the awards cycle hasn't even officially started yet). I really want to reach out more across the world and get some depth in all 130 countries where we have members rather than just a handful here and there. I want the JPF awards to also expand into movies and other arts. In fact, I've considered in creating a breakout org. just for the awards and simplify it to the JPF Awards rather than the JPF Music Awards. I really enjoy shining the light of attention on great creative works. Our awards can do that across all fields, not just music. I am also a published creative and non fiction writer, a playwright, a fledgling screenwriter, an amateur photographer and a great appreciator of painters and scupltures and other creative artists. JPF can serve all those things in my vision. Music is just the starting point.

So what does that leave me? Probably incorporating and finding external ways to make money from the free work we do with the group. Sponsors are rare and far between in the music industry and always have been. We need some type of partner that can benefit from the association without corrupting what we do. TAXI And Disc Makers and CD Baby and others do that. But they're small companies with only a limited budget and reach.

What you say is right in that I am pretty much irreplacable as things stand. I need to solve that, but right now, I don't have the answer if I want to maintain control of the vision.

Brian