editorials COMMENTARY 1 LETTERS
Give It Away
What The Co-Founder Of Elevation Learned From The Jam Scene
BY ROGER McNAMEE

In 1980, I was in a band that was poised to go for it when one of the core members chickened out. With my dream on hold, I took a day job in venture capital that worked out better than I could have imagined: During the past 27 years, I have been an early-stage investor in some of the greatest technology companies, including Google, Facebook and Palm. I'm also a co-founder of Elevation Partners, where my partners include Bono.

But I've kept performing in bands, and I've served as an adviser to the Grateful Dead and Pearl Jam. Along with Bono, I spent nearly five years trying to figure out how to fix the music business before I accepted that it doesn't want to be fined. So I decided to lead by example.

My band, Moonalice, isn't a traditional act, so we don't use a traditional approach. We try to spend less money and get better results.

Moonalice exists because T Bone Burnett offered to produce an album for us if we disbanded our previous group, the Flying Other Brothers, and started over. So in 2007, me and my bandmates - GE Smith; Pete Sears; John Molo; Barry Sless; my wife, Ann McNamee; and sometimes Jack Casady - became entrepreneurs. We decided to create a business plan that would allow us to build a successful touring band in four or five years, without the assistance of the traditional music business.

When we started out, we thought that releasing a Burnett-produced album a month after he won the Grammy Award for album of the year -- and using Burnett's CODE technology to enhance the fidelity of our recording -- would get us attention. We were wrong.

Then we gained some insight: All that matters is building a core audience of 100,000 fans. The traditional way to do this is to spend a fortune making an album, then another fortune promoting it. But that strategy only works some of the time, almost exclusively for young bands. And we realized we could not afford to outsource management, publicity, Web marketing and the other functions served by labels.
We devised a strategy that focuses on finding new fans by trying to replicate the live music experience we enjoyed so much as kids. Moonalice plays the kind of shows we would want to attend and uses the Internet to make that experience available to fans who can't be there. Since we dis