Sex, Drugs and Blog Posts!! How to be an Artist 2.0

[Tune Your World]

The New York Times recently ran a great story on Singer/Song writer Jonathan Coultan that highlights best practices for how a single artist can earn a living from music these days. Coultan set a goal to write a song a week for a year and then posted a song a week on his blog. The project attracted a fair amount of attention - with around 3,000 people a day checking in to his site and earning Coulton between $3,000 - $5,000 per month in CD and download sales.

But what he discovered was that his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. From the NY Times article: "They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail 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."

Most significantly, Coulton's fans act as his promotion department. Because his gives a lot of his music away and/or sells via the Creative Commons license, there have been over 50 fan videos posted on youtube using his music. The NY Times reporter says that over half of the audience members that he spoke to at a recent gig had learned of Coultan's music via one of these videos.


Fan Video of Jonathan Coultan's song 'Code Monkey'.


Normally, an emerging Brooklyn-based artist like him would tour the Northeast region, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for small audiences the first time, like 10 or so, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and put on a show in 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 jumps into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

In a kind of reversal of the traditional music business model, 41% of Coulton’s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29% of his income is from CD sales; 18% is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11% comes from T-shirts, often bought online.

When Jonathan Coulton first began writing his weekly songs, he carefully tracked how many people listened to each one on his Web site. His listenership rose steadily, from around 1,000 a week at first to 50,000 by the end of his yearlong song-a-week experiment. But there were exceptions to this gradual rise: five songs that became breakout “hits,” receiving almost 10 times as many listeners as the songs that preceded and followed them. The first hit was an improbable cover song: Coulton’s deadpan version of the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot rap song “Baby Got Back,” performed like a hippie folk ballad. Another was “Code Monkey,” his pop song about a disaffected cubicle worker.



The questions remains however as to whether an Internet-built fan base like Coulton's inevitably hits a plateau. While many of Coulton's potential fans are fanatical users of MySpace and YouTube many more aren’t, and the only way for him to reach them is via traditional advertising, which he can’t afford, or courting media attention, which is a wearying and decidedly old-school task. Coulton’s single biggest spike in traffic to his Web site took place last December, when he appeared on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday,” a fact that, he notes, proves how powerful old-fashioned media still are.

Is there still no way to use the Internet to vault from the B-list to the A-list? Are the only bands that sell millions of copies backed by a well-financed major-label promotion campaign? The NY Times writer, Clive Thompson suggests, "It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight."