I arrived a few minutes early to Open Kitchen, a cafeteria-style hangout in New York's Financial District, to meet Ryan Leslie. Leslie is a Grammy-nominated R&B/hip-hop producer and performer who's collaborated with Beyonce, Britney Spears, and Kanye West, to name a few. In fact, West once said that, along with himself, Leslie was among the only celebrities qualified to serve as a creative director for a tech company. (Kanye likening somebody else to Kanye is the highest praise the noted egomaniac could possibly give).
Unable to connect to the Wi-Fi, I decided to pass the time by texting Leslie to let him know that I was here, and that I had grabbed a seat near the back. The text I got back nine minutes later was a little strange:
As you might have guessed, Leslie didn't really need my email address. He wanted to show me one of many technological gambits he uses to accomplish what every performing artist, from Taylor Swift to the Thursday night house-band at a local dive bar, needs to do in 2014 to survive: Talk directly to fans. That link led to a landing page to purchase a "Renegades Club Membership" which can be redeemed for a digital copy of Leslie's latest album, last year's "Black Mozart." It was Leslie's fourth record, but the first to be produced and released entirely through his own distribution channel, selling directly to fans and bypassing iTunes and other major online stores and streaming services.
And the monetary windfall from that decision was, quite frankly, staggering.
Check this out: Leslie's first album released on Motown in 2008 sold 180,000 copies, but the royalties Leslie received from those sales did not cover the $100,000 advance he received to produce it. His new self-distributed album, however, has only sold 12,000 copies -- less than one-tenth the sales of his Motown debut -- and yet Leslie has received around $160,000 in revenue off album sales alone. When merchandise sales and concert tickets purchased through his site are taken into account, Leslie has made over $400,000 since going independent.
This is hardly the first success story of an established artist shedding ties to major distributors and seeing a massive financial boon. Amanda Palmer is perhaps the most famous example in the music space, raising over a million dollars on Kickstarter directly from fans. And Louis CK made headlines after he earned $1 million in 12 days from direct-to-consumer sales of his stand-up special "Live at the Beacon," plus another $4.5 million in ticket sales.
But no one has yet proved a consistently repeatable model for direct-to-consumer sales. More importantly, these success stories are usually limited to artists who have already built sizable audiences through traditional channels.
But Leslie wants to change all that. And with the help of supporters like superstar investor Ben Horowitz, his plan might just be crazy enough to work.