Calling all market researchers ... Is there anyone here who has ever made an effort to quantify Prince's fan base? Or conversely, is there anyone with experience in market research who would be willing to give it a shot?

Background: Alex Hahn and I are working on a book, and one of the challenges we're facing is how to demonstrate to publishers the potential size of the market for the book. Let's face it, most editors at publishing houses aren't necessarily aware of the Org and the hardcore fan base that followed Prince over the years, so any efforts we can make to quantify the fan base would be hugely helpful in getting books about Prince published.

We have already shared with publishers figures such as the number of Twitter followers that Prince had, tickets sold at concerts in the past decade, etc. but we are searching for more data to make our case that there is a sizable market of engaged fans for this book.

Any advice welcomed!

Purple Rain sold over 22 million copies worldwide. That's a start!

Twitter is free, so it's not a very good indicator of Prince's fanbase if the desired result is sales-related. A lot of social media "followers" are not necessarily the ones buying his products.

You're better off using late-career album sales, Tidal downloads, and concert ticket sales as a base.

You might even try to tap into the Paisley Park attendance - and potentially try to manage a deal where your book is in the gift shop.

HerecomethePurpleYoda said:

Purple Rain sold over 22 million copies worldwide. That's a start!

That wasn't anywhere near the question ask. This also isn't 1984, and 2/3 of those people who were on a Prince craze in 1984 forgot about him in 5 years. She's trying to find the other 1/3.

Se7en said:

Twitter is free, so it's not a very good indicator of Prince's fanbase if the desired result is sales-related. A lot of social media "followers" are not necessarily the ones buying his products.

You're better off using late-career album sales, Tidal downloads, and concert ticket sales as a base.

You might even try to tap into the Paisley Park attendance - and potentially try to manage a deal where your book is in the gift shop.

PP is expecting 600,000 visitors annually, so that's a data point. So far there are no books in the gift shop, which I guess is not surprising because Prince was likely not a fan of much of what was written about him.

Yes, will look into late-career album sales, downloads and concert tix -- thanks, that is helpful.

sonshine said:

What about his record sales that sky rocketed after apr 21st? Prince had five albums in the top 10, and the week following Apr 21 his catalog of albums and songs sold a staggering 4.4 million copies in the US according to Billboard.

Yes - these are good points and we've included them. Thanks!!

What about his concerts? The dude staying selling out. He also was able to sell out some of his concerts with last minute announcements.

And Muscology tour was one of the best selling tours in 2004.

Mainstream and bandwagons did move on, yes, but Prince was still high demand and still was selling out many shows he did.

I would try to get sales figures for some of the books that have been published about him in the last couple of years. That would seem to be relevant here.

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My observation is that his casual fan base was gigantic - he did 15 concerts at the LA Forum in a two month period in 2011 and had 10,000 to 15,000 a night showing up. But the number of people actively buying his stuff is a lot smaller.

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From what I have noticed on the org, being a statistician of sorts. This is guessing and generalisation, but proper surveys would probably reveal a trend close to these guesses. After all how many musical artists have ahd official census like surveys done on them. To me this stuff is fun, but too many others, they would see it as prying.

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Various surveys on age on the org show the average fan of Prince is in their early to mid 40s, with a range of 15 to 72. There are also large groups in their early 20s, mid to late 30s, mid 40s and early mid 50s.

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Main entry points are later 1999/ Purple Rain era (Many of these people are mid 40s, having been 11 - 15 during Purple Rain), Batman to Diamonds and Pearls era (37 - 42, people like me) and a devoted group of people who became fans during the For You to Controversy era, these people are usually close to or over 50. There is a group of younger people who also joined the purple bandwagon through albums like the Gold Experience and even the Musicology/3121 era. Prince's death attracted some fairweather fans, but my guess is most of these younger fans have not really acted on their fanship, but some have. Prince's music is always attracting fans at least in limited volumes, and no doubt every album has picked up new listeners for life.

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My guess is gender would be 40/60 with more women favouring Prince. Most people would be heterosexual (With a contingent of females sexually attracted to Prince as well) and a small (5 - 10%) contingent of homosexual males. This leaves also about 30% of his fan base who are heterosexual men, who mainly admire his musical skill and "coolness" factor. Gays like this too, but also see him as quite fabulous and daring in the early days at least.

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No one has really analysed race or class, but I would wager that 50% of his fans at least are White (Either American or European and Australasian), about 1/3 are African American and the other 16% cover a panopholy of races - Asian, Hispanic, African, Japanese and Chinese and even a few Pacific Islander and mixed like myself.

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Geographically, mosts erious fans would live in The USA, with significant communities in the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and all the Scandinavian countries except Iceland and Finland. Canada and Australia would have large communities too, along with Japan. New Zealand also has a small but devoted community and I would even say he is quite well known in the Latin world, particularly Mexico, but because of Masculinity protocols, his effeminate image would not go down well there. Politicially most fans would be let wing and liberal in their outlook, although Prince covers the spectrum, same with religion, large group of atheists, but also large group of hardcore Christians and lesser groups of Jews and Muslims (Mostly Black Muslims).

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Class is hard, but my guess is given the volume of music Prince has released, the hardcore fans are most likely to Middle and upper working class rather than the urban and poor demographic of most rap and r and b fans. Most Prince fans work and many have families

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Another good source is a survey done by Nightchild Ethereal (Jayspud) on Youtube in which 1000 or so people replied and it gave a good snapshot of the fan community.

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Finally my last point would be that the body of hardcore fans is decreasing slightly each year and my guess is maybe there are 50 - 100k serious fans of Prince world wide and maybe 1 million or so who are at least fans of him.

[Edited 11/1/16 14:54pm]

LauraTiebert said:

Calling all market researchers ... Is there anyone here who has ever made an effort to quantify Prince's fan base? Or conversely, is there anyone with experience in market research who would be willing to give it a shot?

Background: Alex Hahn and I are working on a book, and one of the challenges we're facing is how to demonstrate to publishers the potential size of the market for the book. Let's face it, most editors at publishing houses aren't necessarily aware of the Org and the hardcore fan base that followed Prince over the years, so any efforts we can make to quantify the fan base would be hugely helpful in getting books about Prince published.

We have already shared with publishers figures such as the number of Twitter followers that Prince had, tickets sold at concerts in the past decade, etc. but we are searching for more data to make our case that there is a sizable market of engaged fans for this book.

Any advice welcomed!

He sold a few million albums in the week after he passed away.

Using Princevault you could in theory work out how many dates he played on a tour find the capacity for these venues and you'd have the number of people who went to see Prince live on any given tour.

"Musician Prince" on google returns almost 40 million pages. Google analytics will show how many people searched.

Can be used to find some interesting/funny stats in the UK/US & Germany (top left). Although the data-set is quite small so it's hard to get anything definitive.

Noodled24 said:

LauraTiebert said:

Calling all market researchers ... Is there anyone here who has ever made an effort to quantify Prince's fan base? Or conversely, is there anyone with experience in market research who would be willing to give it a shot?

Background: Alex Hahn and I are working on a book, and one of the challenges we're facing is how to demonstrate to publishers the potential size of the market for the book. Let's face it, most editors at publishing houses aren't necessarily aware of the Org and the hardcore fan base that followed Prince over the years, so any efforts we can make to quantify the fan base would be hugely helpful in getting books about Prince published.

We have already shared with publishers figures such as the number of Twitter followers that Prince had, tickets sold at concerts in the past decade, etc. but we are searching for more data to make our case that there is a sizable market of engaged fans for this book.

Any advice welcomed!

He sold a few million albums in the week after he passed away.

Using Princevault you could in theory work out how many dates he played on a tour find the capacity for these venues and you'd have the number of people who went to see Prince live on any given tour.

"Musician Prince" on google returns almost 40 million pages. Google analytics will show how many people searched.

In the UK there is an organization called YouGov. They collect data and generate profiles. So that brands/businesses can identify how to best target their customers. https://yougov.co.uk/profileslite#/Prince/demographics

Can be used to find some interesting/funny stats in the UK/US & Germany (top left). Although the data-set is quite small so it's hard to get anything definitive.

Let's hope at least some of these few millions will turn up for the UK XMAS campaign.

Se7en said:

On 'Letitgo' he sang he had an army "three million strong". I've always took that as his thoughts on his fanbase in 1993. Back then it was based on sales i guess. It's hard to gauge. His album sales wildly fluctuated, as did his audience. He had fans that came and went. Still fans.

Marrk said:

On 'Letitgo' he sang he had an army "three million strong". I've always took that as his thoughts on his fanbase in 1993. Back then it was based on sales i guess. It's hard to gauge. His album sales wildly fluctuated, as did his audience. He had fans that came and went. Still fans.

Interesting. Although in one of the Good Life remixs he says "We just got back from Glasgow / 100 thousand nightly still we aint happy oh no /... Celtic Park is Scotlands biggest stadium, with a capacity of 60,000...

None of his work has been that publicized lately so I think you may get a sense from the next couple of musical releases if they are properly marketed. This would especially be true for the Purple Rain Deluxe, as it will offer something familiar and something new (to most fans - especially the masses), which I imagine your book would aspire to as well. It here is a lot of interest in the Purple Rain Deluxe beyond the core fans this may be a sign that there might be a good market for a publicized book that captured some aspects of Prince that the previous books haven't.

LonelyStarfish said:

Marrk said:

On 'Letitgo' he sang he had an army "three million strong". I've always took that as his thoughts on his fanbase in 1993. Back then it was based on sales i guess.

It was the accepted theory among fans at the time, and I think it was correct. 3M was the minimum Prince would sell for any album up to 1993, so the figure was a logical assumption if you were to number his fanbase back then (fan not necessarily meaning hardcore, but one who would most likely buy the yearly album).

LauraTiebert said:

Calling all market researchers ... Is there anyone here who has ever made an effort to quantify Prince's fan base? Or conversely, is there anyone with experience in market research who would be willing to give it a shot?

Background: Alex Hahn and I are working on a book, and one of the challenges we're facing is how to demonstrate to publishers the potential size of the market for the book. Let's face it, most editors at publishing houses aren't necessarily aware of the Org and the hardcore fan base that followed Prince over the years, so any efforts we can make to quantify the fan base would be hugely helpful in getting books about Prince published.

We have already shared with publishers figures such as the number of Twitter followers that Prince had, tickets sold at concerts in the past decade, etc. but we are searching for more data to make our case that there is a sizable market of engaged fans for this book.

Any advice welcomed!

Probably get Leanpub to proofread their outsourced photcopiers for greyscale

[Edited 11/3/16 21:17pm]

AlgeriaTouchshreek said:

LauraTiebert said:

Calling all market researchers ... Is there anyone here who has ever made an effort to quantify Prince's fan base? Or conversely, is there anyone with experience in market research who would be willing to give it a shot?

Background: Alex Hahn and I are working on a book, and one of the challenges we're facing is how to demonstrate to publishers the potential size of the market for the book. Let's face it, most editors at publishing houses aren't necessarily aware of the Org and the hardcore fan base that followed Prince over the years, so any efforts we can make to quantify the fan base would be hugely helpful in getting books about Prince published.

We have already shared with publishers figures such as the number of Twitter followers that Prince had, tickets sold at concerts in the past decade, etc. but we are searching for more data to make our case that there is a sizable market of engaged fans for this book.

Any advice welcomed!

Probably get Leanpub to proofread their outsourced photcopiers for greyscale

[Edited 11/3/16 21:17pm]

Not only are they shit, they're the cunts that sold my CVC2 data so fuck them