One final turn on today’s theme. This time, I reference Andrew Chen’s post - Is blogging worth it? What’s the ROI? Money quote:

The blogging ROI
These days, I mostly think of having a blog as the same as having a giant mailing list or CC: line on an e-mail that I might send out. In that way, 2000 people is actually a really big number. In addition, it’s useful for a bunch of other random things, like:

Helping me organize my own thoughts and ideas
Keeping in touch with a large group of professional acquaintances and friends
Meeting a small # of high-quality people
All of these things, especially when really interesting folks e-mail me, make blogging worthwhile. But sometimes, I still wonder

Seth Godin argues that a few (10,000 to be specific) passionate fans is all you need. I argue, citing Cory Doctorow, that connection end-to-end with your audience is the opportunity presented by the internet. Now, Andrew Chen simply adds that it just makes sense, and that you’ll wonder if in fact it makes sense. Which makes sense if you think about it.

A New Year. A great new article - Music Lessons - from Seth Godin. Match this article with the one from Cory referenced below and then think about the need to build connections to an audience. Letting someone else pursue this endeavor is to put yourself at a disadvantage to the others who are more strongly bonded to their audience.

Bond baby bond. Or blonde. I forget which.

According to Seth, this internet thing is the Alice Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement. Seth’s money quote:

7. Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it’s not just a record, it’s a movement.
Bob and his handlers have a long track record of finding movements. Anti-war movements, sure, but also rock movies, the Grateful Dead, SACDs, Christian rock and Apple fanboys. What Bob has done (and I think he’s done it sincerely, not as a calculated maneuver) is seek out groups that want to be connected and he works to become the connecting the point.

Actually, there were lots of money quotes. I hope he reprises many of his rules into more thorough discussions. I will take one on here: #3) interactivity cannot be copied.

Some bands have web sites with forums. The band members blog, and respond to comments and posts in the forums. They recommend other music. They recommend movies. The would recommend books, but most can’t read.

These repeated connections build a very loyal fan base. And the fan base doesn’t need to be large, just loyal for the band to be successful.

One final quote from Seth:

Many musicians have understood that all they need to make a (very good) living is to have 10,000 fans. 10,000 people who look forward to the next record, who are willing to trek out to the next concert. Add 7 fans a day and you’re done in 5 years. Set for life. A life making music for your fans, not finding fans for your music.

He exaggerates for effect. But I think you get the point. If you can read.

Cory Doctorow wrote Artist Rights for Locus Magazine. He first talked about the essence of the internet is end-to-end communication without intermediaries.

My belief is that the artist need to be one end. Too many artists have let the intermediaries (record labels, publishers, etc.) usurp one of the ends.

Their audience is the other end. They are the only consumers after all. Indifference leads to abdication. Artists, as always, need to make their audience care. The internet is the ideal tool, perhaps the only true tool, that allows end-to-end communication between artist and audience.

Artists need to learn how to use it, and few do it well. Those that do - and Cory Doctorow is a prime example - displace other, perhaps better, artists, and frankly make a better livelihood and create more passion.

The intermediaries only consume value created by this end-to-end relationship. That value consumption is measured by the 85% of the revenue they retain. There efforts to monetize might also work against the artist’s interest.

With my preamble aside, the money quote from Cory’s article:

We live in an age in which more people can express themselves in more ways to more audiences than ever before. The majority of this expression is intimate, personal maunderings — the half-spelled, quarter-grammatical newspeak adorning MySpace and Facebook pages. These are often intensely personal, with none of the self-conscious artifice that we’ve traditionally associated with “published work.” By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being — and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever.

Try intimate, personal maunderings. Blog them somewhere. Get into a creative debate with another musician or writer. Hell, say they suck. That’s sure to create passion.

Turn personal into the public. Do it frequently. Watch you audience build rapidly, and care far more passionately. How? That’s the fun part.

The main theme of Cory’s article is the impossibility of policing copyrights on the internet. Then he concludes with an observation on the changing relationship between artist and intermediary:

But look at what’s happening in the record industry: indie music isn’t just for a guy with a guitar you’ve never heard of anymore. Now you’ve got industry leaders like Madonna and Radiohead walking out on their labels, striking out on their own, stepping neatly into a niche in the online ecosystem that was enabled by all this cheap publication, itself enabled by the absence of liability for web-hosting companies.

This is the leverage that artists need. Today, every recording artist negotiating a deal walks in with this implicit threat: “You know, there’s another way. You’re not the only game in town.”

So yes, let’s stand up for artist’s rights — starting with the right to speak freely, without being filtered by a lawyer, and with the right to walk out of the traditional publishing channels and into a better deal in the new world.

Vacation was nice.

While I was gone, they closed the highway. Cars everywhere this morning. It was awful.

Someone on the radio said that there are three things you can do to improve your happiness.

1) Avoid chronic sources of noise, such as living near a busy street.
2) Avoid long commutes.
3) I forget what the third was.

Closing highways violates #1 and #2. Plastic surgery was on the list somewhere. Maybe it was longer than 3 items, but I was too busy yelling at the other cars.