The New York Times on Jonathan Coulton

You probably haven't heard of Jonathan Coulton - I hadn't, til I read about him in The New York Times - they ran a long profile, called 'Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog', in their Sunday Magazine in May last year. It was written by Clive Thompson, who's a great writer - I've recommended his stuff to you before - his blog's excellent. (BTW you need to register with the NY Times to read the piece but it's worth it).

Anyway, I was thinking about the OK Go video which Tom reviewed on his blog and I remembered asking in class whether it was made by the band or the record company. Then I remembered that Thompson talks about OK Go briefly in his Coulton piece. Here's the relevant quote:

"When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, he discoursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation theory, talking at one point about “rhizomatic networks.” (You can Google it.)

Kulash has put his networking expertise to good use: last year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade video that showed the band members dancing on treadmills to their song “Here It Goes Again.” The video quickly became one of the site’s all-time biggest hits. It led to the band’s live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best video."

Thompson sees this as another example of the phenomenon he's investigating in the piece as a whole - the way the net changes the relationship between low level musicians and their fans, creating a more intimate relationship between them and creating a new sort of economics for the music business.

So via the net Jonathan Coulton has been able to find an audience for his quirky/geeky acoustic songs that's big enough to let him quit the day job and make a reasonable living. And, via the net, he's made his fans active participants in his success - they promote his music, help make videos and graphics and even get involved in organising gigs.

Thompson points out that there are opportunities and costs in all this. Coulton now spends a lot of time updating their blogs, responding to email, checking out fan videos on YouTube. Then again, without the net and the relationship it enables with his fans, he perhaps wouldn't have been able to develop a musical career. Another key quote from the piece:

"This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous corporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for any artist to even pretend intimacy with.

No, this is a trend that is catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always built their success fan by fan. Across the country, the CD business is in a spectacular free fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone. People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not they’re paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what the new economics of the music business will be."

With artists and fans building new relationships (business and personal), it's interesting to think about how music journalists fit into this picture  and what their role will be in the future.

(The pic above was by Jennifer Karady and comes from the NYT).