« Bjork | Main | Weekly MP3 (5/20/07): Live at the 55 Bar, NYC - "The Trend is Your Friend" »

This pretty amazing article recently appeared in the NY Times Magazine which outlines the new paradigm for the indie musician: How to make a living on the music by leveraging the power of the internet.

The story outlines the life and times of one musician, Jonathan Coulton, who quit his day job to try to make a go as a singer/songwriter. It started out as a test to see whether he could write a song a week and post it to his blog, and since then it has taken on a life of its own:

By the middle of last year, his project had attracted a sizable audience. More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as "a reasonable middle-class living" - between $3,000 and $5,000 a month - by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.

Ah...but it doesn't stop there:

Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send email messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the "you rock!" variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton's love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he's now feeling guilty about being rude.

It's a remarkable article that details the life and times of the struggling indie musician in the early 21st century, where all the same issues are in play (creating the music, managing time, learning business chops) except that now the audience is worldwide and only a few computer clicks away. It leads to all kinds of new possibilities:

Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he'd be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

Now that is cool! Read on...

Name (required)
Email
Website
Remember personal info? Yes   No
Comments

home | music | democracy | earth | money | projects | about | contact

Site design by Matthew Fries | © 2003-23 Consilience Productions. All Rights Reserved.
Consilience Productions, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
All contributions are fully tax deductible.