In 1988, three young guys in New York City — an acting student, a magazine researcher, and a software producer — were so happy to see the end of the 1980s, they held a funeral for the decade. They painted their faces blue and led a procession through Central Park; they burned a Rambo doll and a piece of the Berlin Wall. Although they couldn’t have known it, Chris Wink, Phil Stanton, and Matt Goldman had launched what would grow into an entertainment juggernaut. Since opening in New York City’s Astor Place Theatre in 1991, the Blue Man Group has played in 12 cities across the globe. More than 17 million people have seen its shows, and today, tickets go for $43 to $132. Goldman, the onetime computer geek turned impresario, tells the Blue Man Group’s unlikely story.

The Blue Man character is about universal human truths. When we got bald and blue for the first time, we knew instantly that we were on to something really special. It’s not like we sat down and came up with a business plan and followed it from Point A to Point B to Point C.

We played P.S. 122, La MaMa, all these hip, arty venues before we opened at the Astor Place Theatre. So some in the downtown art crowd thought we were selling out. But the work didn’t change. In the beginning, the house was half empty, and we were undercapitalized. We’d show up at the theater expecting a padlock on the door. I set up my office — a telephone, pen, and pad — directly opposite the box office. When I saw someone leave the box office without a ticket, I’d run out and start chatting him or her up. I wasn’t going to let him or her walk away without buying a ticket.

We made all the props ourselves. We found PVC pipe on Canal Street and turned it into musical instruments. But the Jell-O in the show cost $880 a show to make. So our producers said, “Lose the Jell-O.” Phil and Chris were working at the time for Jean-Claude Nédélec, who co-owns Glorious Food, the catering company. We told him our sad story, and he said, “We’ll make the Jell-O.” For three years, Chris and I would take a cab to the Upper East Side to pick up giant Jell-O molds and never paid a cent for it.

We went from six to eight shows a week and did 1,285 consecutive shows. We were sold out eight weeks in advance, but our producer got panicky at the thought of one of us getting sick, so we had one understudy. We never canceled a show. But then Phil cut his hand, and Chris Bowen, our extra, got bald and blue for the first time. It was fine. He’s now our senior performing director.

We realized that if we wanted to grow, we’d have to replicate ourselves. We cast three Blue Men, opened in Boston, and assumed it would go well. But there was no script, no musical score. It was a case study of the wrong way to grow. We realized we had to articulate our vision, so we locked ourselves in a room and spent several days writing the Blue Man manual.

The Blue Man is part innocent, hero, scientist, shaman, group member, and trickster. He doesn’t speak, but he communicates with vaudevillian slapstick humor. He drums and catches gumballs in his mouth that are filled with paint, which he spits onto a canvas to make art. It’s interactive, with music, lights, and lots of colorful liquids that get sprayed on the stage and into the audience.

The whole show is about connecting with the audience — to get to that heightened gestalt when someone scores a goal at a soccer game. That “AHHH!” There’s no intellect involved at all, just chemical secretions through one’s brain and body.

Three is the smallest unit where you can have an outsider; two guys win the third over, or the third guy wins the two guys in. It can go either way, and that tension makes for good theater. It also makes for good business partners — it takes the ego out of it. To this day, we’ve never made a decision based on the majority. All decisions are consensus. It takes longer, but we find if you keep talking things through, you reach a better choice.

We decided to open in Chicago. Before the show, we realized we had no idea how much money we needed. We called the general manager of the Boston show, who is now our CFO, and she did the numbers. To make payroll, we had to open three days early and do two shows a day. We figured, no one is going to know that the whole set could fall apart. They’ll just think, Oh, the Blue Men; they’re crazy. From Chicago we moved on to Las Vegas and later Orlando.

Vegas was a gamble. The theater had twelve hundred seats. We did 10 shows a week, but for the first six months, the theater was half empty. Lots of companies had come to us, wanting to do Blue Man ads. We turned them all down. But when Intel asked for the fourth time, we said, “Let’s talk.”

They said, “We want to get across that Intel is innovative, intelligent, and fun.” We liked that but said, “The ad agency is going to do lame storyboards.” So they gave us signing-off approval. Then we said, “The music is going to be really bad,” and they said, “You can make the music!”

That was in 2000. It was one of the biggest ad buys at the time: The ads were shown at the Grammy Awards, the basketball playoffs, the World Series. Every month, a new one aired. We went from 10 shows a week at 50 percent capacity to 14 shows at 100 percent.

Then we went international. Germany is the second-biggest entertainment market in the world for theater, so we started there. It felt appropriate, because when we did the funeral for the ’80s, we burned the Berlin Wall, and then it actually came down. So we felt personally responsible. We’ve had shows in Amsterdam and London. Today, we’re in Stuttgart and Tokyo.

We have about 70 Blue Men on the payroll. They’re hard to find. A lot of them trained in theater or are good drummers. We have a casting director and hold national auditions. Our Blue Men train in New York before we ship them out to our shows in other cities.

If you invent your own instrument, you’re automatically one of the top three musicians in the world on that instrument. We have made up more than 30 instruments, like the tubulum, the drumulum, and the piano smasher. I can barely hold my own musically, and yet I get to be a rock star. We made several albums; one was nominated for a Grammy.

We created a school in New York with an arts-based curriculum. It’s called the Blue Man Creativity Center. We have 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds. Next year is our first kindergarten. We’re growing a grade a year. This year, we had 200 applications for 30 spaces.

Some people think that when we get bald and blue that we’re just hiding behind a mask. But we think it’s the opposite. When you get blue, you’re left with just the purest, most vulnerable humanity. And so, about halfway through the show, people start to go, “Whoa, I’m the Blue Man.” And once you get there, you wonder, Are there actually three different characters, or is it three aspects of one personality, so together they’re one character? Those are exactly the questions we want people to be asking.

[via Inc Magainze] by Matt Goldman

In late 2006, Justin Vernon, a musician in Eau Claire, Wis., recorded nine songs while staying at his parents’ hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin after a breakup with a girlfriend and his long-time band. He used just a desktop computer with recording software, a three-piece drum set and a guitar.

A few months later, Mr. Vernon posted the songs on his MySpace page, hoping to get some listeners and feedback. He also printed 500 copies of a CD with those songs to sell to friends and fans and send to music bloggers for review.

He got that and much more.

Chelsea Sanders

Justin Vernon of Bon Iver performing at WIUX radio station at Indiana University at Bloomington.

Thanks to the buzz his online tracks generated on music blogs and social-networking sites, Mr. Vernon has played at numerous venues and appeared on the “Late Show With David Letterman.” He signed a record deal in October 2007, and his first album, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” sold about 87,000 copies through mid-December, with about half of those downloaded online. With a band he formed early this year, called Bon Iver, Mr. Vernon is now playing sold-out concerts across the U.S. and abroad.

“The Internet played a significant role in feeding people the music…. It’s like wildfire [how it] spreads,” Mr. Vernon, 27, said before a show earlier this year in Philadelphia, where the band performed to a boisterous crowd of about 500 in a church basement. “That propelled us right into being able to choose what kind of record label we wanted to work with.”

Mr. Vernon’s rapid success shows how small, relatively unknown artists can gain fame via the Web without the large marketing budgets and backing of a major record label. The exposure on blogs, YouTube, social-networking, marketing and other sites can allow them to nurture a following quickly and cheaply.

“It’s about consumers talking to each other and to the artist through the Web and at concerts, where the emphasis on top 40 hits” has disappeared, says marketing expert and author Seth Godin. “Now, it’s about niches.” Record labels, once responsible for making music artists famous, are being replaced by music bloggers who review albums and post YouTube videos of their favorite bands, he adds.

One of the first people to spread the word about Mr. Vernon’s songs was popular music blogger Craig “Dodge” Lile of myoldkyhome.blogspot.com. He was scanning MySpace for music and stumbled across Mr. Vernon’s profile page. Liking what he heard, he posted about it in June 2007 on his blog: “Vernon sings in a perfect falsetto over sparse folk backgrounds on a lot of tracks, but opens it a bit more naturally on this one,” referring to a song called “Skinny Love.”

In the following weeks, other music blogs and sites, including BrooklynVegan.com and Pitchforkmedia.com, gave the songs glowing reviews.

“Big pacemakers out there gave it a good review, and people sort of latched onto it,” says Kyle Frenette, Bon Iver’s manager, in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

And once artists gather a large online following, record labels often start chasing them. Indeed, by the fall of 2007, a number of record labels had reached out to Mr. Vernon. He ultimately signed up with Jagjaguwar of Bloomington, Ind., in late October.

After signing the deal, Mr. Vernon put together a band. Jagjaguwar officially released “For Emma, Forever Ago,” in February 2008, and Bon Iver has been touring almost continuously since.

A big part of Mr. Vernon’s success in the blogosphere and beyond, Mr. Frenette says, was crafting a compelling story to help fans connect to the music even more. Bon Iver’s MySpace page, Web site and CD all include the same story: a paragraph telling how Mr. Vernon wrote the songs while hibernating in the remote cabin in the woods. It outlined why Mr. Vernon’s story was different, what the name Bon Iver means (it’s a misspelling of the French term for “good winter”) and how the songs were made (using microphones and aged recording equipment).

While much of Mr. Vernon’s acclaim has come through buzz on blogs, other musicians are finding outlets and Web tools to help their music get exposure. Artists can use TuneCore.com to distribute their songs to music-retail sites, including iTunes and Amazon. Artists pay a one-time fee of 99 cents a song, plus maintenance and storage fees. At online record store CDBaby.com, owned by Disc Makers of Pennsauken, N.J., musicians can upload their music, which can then be digitized, stored and sold on the site. CDBaby keeps $4 for every CD sale and 9% for every download.

Sonicbids Corp.’s site is an online marketplace that connects musicians with promoters, booking agents and industry professionals. Using the tools on the site, bands can find live gigs and licensing opportunities by submitting a bid — including an online press kit with audio and video tracks, photos and a biography — to concert promoters and event planners who also are members of the community site. Musicians pay $5.95 to $10.95 a month or $50 to $100 a year in membership fees.

One U.K. site, Slicethepie Ltd.’s Slicethepie.com, allows artists to raise money to create albums, directly from fans and investors. Music fans are paid by the site to review and rate tracks uploaded by artists. The highest-rated artists are then placed in a “showcase” where people can listen to the music and invest in artists they like. When the investments reach a certain level, the artists receive the money, minus a 10% cut for Slicethepie. Artists also pay Slicethepie a royalty on the sale of every album or single for a two-year period.

“The Internet has been like the French Revolution for the music business,” says Panos Panay, founder and CEO of Sonicbids. The aristocracy “has faded” as the “cost of distribution, production and even getting connected has come down.” Now, he adds, anyone with “a niche and devoted fans can make a living.”

[via WSJ Small Business] by Shelly Banjo and Kelly K. Spors

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones. But ISPs, which are increasingly cutting content deals of their own with entertainment companies, may have more incentive to work with the music labels now than in previous years.

The new approach dispenses with one of the most contentious parts of the lawsuit strategy, which involved filing lawsuits requiring ISPs to disclose the identities of file sharers. Under the new strategy, the RIAA would forward its emails to the ISPs without demanding to know the customers’ identity.

Though the industry group is reserving the right to sue people who are particularly heavy file sharers, or who ignore repeated warnings, it expects its lawsuits to decline to a trickle. The group stopped filing mass lawsuits early this fall.

It isn’t clear that the new strategy will work or how effective the collaboration with the ISPs will be. “There isn’t any silver-bullet anti-piracy solution,” said Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne LLC, a piracy consulting company.

Mr. Garland said he likes the idea of a solution that works more with consumers. In the years since the RIAA began its mass legal action, “It has become abundantly clear that the carrot is far more important than the stick.” Indeed, many in the music industry felt the lawsuits had outlived their usefulness.

“I’d give them credit for stopping what they’ve already been doing because it’s been so destructive,” said Brian Toder, who represents a Minnesota mother involved in a high-profile file-sharing case. But his client isn’t off the hook. The RIAA said it plans to continue with outstanding lawsuits.

Over the summer, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began brokering an agreement between the recording industry and the ISPs that would address both sides’ piracy concerns. “We wanted to end the litigation,” said Steven Cohen, Mr. Cuomo’s chief of staff. “It’s not helpful.”

As the RIAA worked to cut deals with individual ISPs, Mr. Cuomo’s office started working on a broader plan under which major ISPs would agree to work to prevent illegal file-sharing.

The RIAA believes the new strategy will reach more people, which itself is a deterrent. “Part of the issue with infringement is for people to be aware that their actions are not anonymous,” said Mitch Bainwol, the group’s chairman.

Mr. Bainwol said that while he thought the litigation had been effective in some regards, new methods were now available to the industry. “Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed,” he said in an interview. Litigation, he said, was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal, but now he wants to try a strategy he thinks could prove more successful.

The RIAA says piracy would have been even worse without the lawsuits. Citing data from consulting firm NPD Group Inc., the industry says the percentage of Internet users who download music over the Internet has remained fairly constant, hovering around 19% over the past few years. However, the volume of music files shared over the Internet has grown steadily.

Meanwhile, music sales continue to fall. In 2003, the industry sold 656 million albums. In 2007, the number fell to 500 million CDs and digital albums, plus 844 million paid individual song downloads — hardly enough to make up the decline in album sales.

—Amol Sharma contributed to this article.

[via WSJ Online] by Sarah McBride and Ethan Smith