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People talk a lot of "new paradigm"s, but they don't really mean it. They usally just mean a different way of doin something, which is useful, but it's not the same thing.
Many people (and certainly HR firms) have proclaimed how much the internet has changed things. I don't a lot of that is hyperbolic; a lot of what the internet has done has smoothed out barriers of informatoin and access and completed what was started by the industrial revolution.
Information and searching really is starting to have a major influence on the process of artists getting recognition. With search engines and digital music distribution, many artists are becoming independent of the system of a record lable taking all the financial risk, supplying all the advertising, but presumably taking a lot of the profit.
I'm not trying to introduce this topic; lots have written about it. I'm just commenting on it, and getting to some fun and interesting interactions with some artists that I've had because of that. It's neat that bands have enough fan base to put out limited editions of albums that core fans will buy. It give the band a way to generate revenue for the album right out of the gate, and it makes a neat limited-edition thing for the fan to have. A few years ago, Nine Inch Nails put out a special album package, which included a vinyl record of some of the songs along with some other stuff. While their story is good, they already had many years under a record label to gain a fan base.
It's been fun to interact with some other artists that are building
their own fan base independently of any record company. The
singer/songwriter Jonathan
Coulton became reasonably famous a few years ago when he did "a
thing a week" which, in his case, was to perform and record a youtube
song. Last year, he released his new album "Artificial Heart", and
like NIN above, sold a special limited-edition collectors package (I
bought one). It contained a device with ALL of his former songs on
it, plus the ones from the album. PLUS a record, and some other
stuff. Absolutley hilariously, when you took off the outer cover,
there's a pair of white archival gloves inside:
(I presume for openin the rest of the package without scuffing it.)
If you haven't heard Jonathan's music, look him up. He's smart, and
hilarious, and nerdy. There are TONs of videos on YouTube made from
his songs. I encourage everyone to buy his songs and his stuff. He's
awesome and must be supported.
Which brings me to the real point of this post. One of the artists that I've followed is over the last couple of years is Molly Lewis, who's an extremely accomplished musician and songwriter. She primarily plays the Ukelele, but also plays guitar and lots of other stuff. She's done covers of things, but she's also composed some really great songs, like a really funny one about Lincoln being assasinated (trust me). I love her stuff (with just one exception) but just about my favorite bit I've seen her do was her song "It all makes sense at the end" that she did for w00tstock with Jason Finn. Here's their performance of it in Seattle.
Molly is just finishing her senior year of college, and then she's going to try to do music for a living. A couple of years ago, she did a lot of blogging, but she's been pretty busy this year. To get back into the swing of things, she's doing a "Video per day" for the month of April. So far, as of yesterday (the 4th) she's kept a steady pace. I myself have fallen off the blogging wagon, which makes me sad, so I'm going make her vlogging a challenge to myself to the month of April to blog every day. I'm already behind, but I'm going try to catch up quickly. I want to have at least one photo in every post, because I think that's cool. Although some posts may split because of size, I won't split posts just to be lazy. And I won't just have lame posts that are just links to other posts.
I won't do a seconary blog about music (or blogging) either, excpet perhaps if I do indeed end up blogging for the whole month, I'll talk about this again in the last post of the month and do a wrap-up.