brettcooperNov-06-2008 12:59pm
Under Our Roof: A Profile of Jonathon Coulton
The Art Of Tearing Down Your Walled Garden
Jonathon Coulton is an Internet musician, personality, and entrepreneur who has found great success over the past three years with his personal web musical experiment, www.jonathancoulton.com, a website he founded after quitting his day job as a VB programmer (Thanks to MitchO for the correction -BC). He has managed to make his music sustain him full time in today’s turbulent music industry, based on a fan base almost exclusively composed of the same technologically savvy “geek” set of which he is a part and that he wrote for in his previous job. His music is aimed straight at people who are just like him, with its subject matter covering everything from the impending zombie apocalypse to the Mandelbrot set.
Coulton’s success demonstrates the benefits of tearing down your walled garden using two very basic strategies. The first is licensing your music with Creative Commons. The second is building a simple, functional website.
Lesson 1: The Benefits Of Using Creative Commons:
In 2005 Coulton embarked on a project that he creatively titled “Thing A Week.” The initial objective was to put him in the mindset of having a “forced march” approach to writing and recording, as well as testing his ability to work to deadlines. It eventually turned into a fascinating case study of the viability of using a Creative Commons license to support an artist financially. At the project’s culmination all of the music was collected onto four “seasonal” CDs which could be bought as a set or mixed and match as the buyer wanted. This generated enough income to consider the project a minor financial success, but the most important lesson learned was that giving music away under a CC license is an excellent marketing and promotion decision.
“I give away music because I want to make music, and I can’t make music unless I make money, and I won’t make any money unless I get heard, and I won’t get heard unless I give away music.”
This makes total sense in light of the positive side effects of giving music away under a Creative Commons license:
- increased traffic to your site
- having your music used/manipulated for other media applications and reaching new audiences
- tons of good buzz from your fans who like getting stuff for free
All of this contributes to the Jonathan Coulton name being built up to a much greater extent than it would be otherwise. Thanks to the strong connection he has with his tech-savvy fan base, the music is disseminated across the internet, which has brought him numerous new opportunities, from interviews with Leo Laporte on TWiT, live gigs at PAX, and even writing and recording a song for Valve’s critically acclaimed PORTAL videogame.
Lesson 2: The Art of a Simple, Functional Website
Coulton’s website is a few things:
- clean
- conversational
- straightforward
It isn’t some things as well:
- ham handed
- voiceless
- pushy
The beauty of what Jonathan has created over at JonathanCoulton.com is how unassuming it is. The self-deprecating, relatable voice which he employs in his compositions has been carried over to the website explicitly, and that is very important for giving new visitors a sense of who he is before they even listen to his music. Remember, the website may well be the first thing a new fan sees, so it should convey what an artist represents in the same manner that their music does. One of the particular features every musician should borrow from Coulton’s web presence is the excellent “primer” section, in which he gives out suggestions for songs to check out first, a brief rundown of who he is and what he does, answers some frequently asked questions, and gives out his contact information. It is also important to note that at no point is the user bludgeoned with advertising from third parties and at no point does Coulton require people to sign up for something in exchange for getting what they are looking for. Everything is left up to the user.
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If there is one over-arching lesson fledgling artists can take away from Coulton’ success, it’s that putting yourself on a pedestal above your audience will cut you off from a lot of positive reaction that can lead to new opportunities. He has embraced his fan base directly and used the Internet as a way to give them more of what they like about what he does more easily, and he is open and honest about how he does it. He has torn down the walls around his garden, and if you hope to succeed you should do the same.
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Links To Interviews + Additional Information On This Artist:
Use The Web: Webmonkey.com
Ordinarily, I won’t be dropping one of these columns two days running, as I wouldn’t want you folks to get too overwhelmed, but I Tweeted about this site earlier and after looking into it a little deeper I decided it was well worth a bigger explanation.
Not all of us have what it takes to code/build websites. Much like mastering a language, it really comes down to whether or not you have an affinity for it. However, that is no excuse for not at least attempting to understand the mechanics of how the back end of a website work. You might find it much easier to conquer than you think.
Webmonkey.com is a great place to start coming to grips with the mechanics of web coding. They offer a wide variety of comprehensive tutorials on a range of topics, including the basics of HTML, the complexities of AJAX coding, how to optimize your site for Google’s webcrawlers, advice on how market yourself around the web, and even how to build an iPhone/Android optimized version of your website. In addition they provide a well stocked open-source code library for you to utilize as a part of your own explorations on the topic. If you are wondering how well all of this information is presented, let me reassure you that it is without a doubt the most clear and concise website dedicated to this topic that I have ever seen, which is hardly a surprise given that it is a property of WIRED online.
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As always, feel free to drop some feedback on me via Facebook or the comments section below.
Use The Web: Redbubble.com
Hello readers -
This is the first installment of what I am going to be calling the “Use The Web” series. My aim is to point you in the direction of sites/services/ideas that you might not know about but could easily put to use in your own musical and artistic endeavors.
Redbubble is an easy to use web portal and manufacturing company for artists who are looking to profit from their artwork by selling directly to their fans. Artists upload their work and fit it to one of the pre-formated templates that Redbubble provides for the types of products they distribute, which include t-shirts and posters, and begin selling right away. Each artist is given a profile page on the site, which is essentially a visual portfolio for their work. Artists are searchable based on their unique usernames or by tags associated with their merchandise and can be “subscribed” to so that customers can be notified when any new products are made available.
Earnings are deposited on the 7th of each month either through direct payment into a bank account or Paypal account, or by check via snail mail, providing you have earned at least $20 US in that month. Pricing of products is determined by adding a fixed manufacturing price that Redbubble sets depending on the type of product you are selling to the percentage markup that you as the artist wish to charge. You keep the percentage, and they keep the base price. The customer pays shipping and handling.
Signing up for a Redbubble profile is quick and painless, as you can see in the video below:
If you looking to make your first foray into distributing t-shirts, posters, and odds and ends online but have no idea where to start, Redbubble certainly seems to be a great place to begin. The way that Redbubble handles its pricing means that roughly $5 to $7 per t-shirt (depending on your markup) goes directly into your pocket. Not a stellar amount, but considering that the messy details of manufacturing, distribution, and payment processing are handled for you, its not a bad deal, especially if you are just getting started. The clean aesthetic of the site, its ease of use, and its simplicity to navigate all serve as an asset to helping you look a bit more professional for a much lower barrier to entry in terms of the time and expertise required to handle on your own.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
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If you have any suggestions for something I should be covering on Use The Web, feel free to contact me via a message on the Facebook group.
Weekly Wrap-up
Here is a run down of some of the best stuff on the blog this week (in case you missed it):
Will Labels Control The Music You Store Online?
http://artistshousemusic.tumblr.com/post/56617512/will-record-labels-control-the-music-you-store
Take The Extra Step In Promoting Your Art
http://artistshousemusic.tumblr.com/post/56787351/take-the-extra-step-in-promoting-your-art
Lessons To Learn From Digg
http://artistshousemusic.tumblr.com/post/57006203/lessons-to-learn-from-digg
An Argument For MTV Music
http://artistshousemusic.tumblr.com/post/57127738/an-argument-for-mtv-music
Kevin Coogan On When To Get A Manager
http://artistshousemusic.tumblr.com/post/57326641/when-to-get-a-manager-kevin-coogan-of-stella
And thats the week. Please hit the wall of the Facebook group or post right here to let us know what you think. That includes your questions too.
Lessons To Learn From Digg
Kevin Rose is on the cover of this month’s INC. magazine, discussing the phenomena of Digg (aka the anti-Google) and why he is a poster child for the new kind of media mogul. Besides making me wonder whether or not killing Rose will let me become him (a la Tom Waits), the article described four easy steps to becoming an Internet mogul:
1) Get a platform
2) Own a platform
3) Leverage the masses
4) Stay independent
There is a lot to be gleaned here for those of us who are looking to build the next great American b(r)and.
The first step, or get a platform:
Rose started out as a host on Tech TV, where he honed his image as a nerd who had managed to find a life outside of his basement. Simply put, he found his idiosyncratic niche and made it palatable for a larger audience. It used to be that being a tech geek was for those who existed in some untouchable stratosphere or for those who couldn’t get dates. Rose and others like him have altered that perception. Bands can employ the same trick, focusing on what makes them different and turning that into the focus of what makes them appealing.
Step two, own a platform:
Rose took a leap and started something that he could own in its entirety, investing everything he had into the project at the startup. Digg now commands 30 million unique hits a month, and there is one fact about those 30 million uniques that bears repeating: almost all of them are 20 to 30 something males, just like Rose himself. The lesson here, for bands anyway, is to focus on your core audience and stick with what you know. If your true believers like songs that run into sixteen-minute jams, then do that. If your fans love the fact that your bass player has a massive handle bar mustache and your lead singer refuses to come out of the shadows, then don’t force those things to change in order to make yourself more appealing to the mainstream. The people who love you for what you do are the ones who will make you great, not the ones who might love you for what you could do if you get GQ’d or fire the lead singer.
Step three, leverage the masses:
Or, to put it another way, give the masses ACCESS to what they want. Kevin has wisely taken his fan base and stayed actively engaged with them while at the same time creating businesses and properties that will help and be helped by his popularity. As an example, he hosts Diggnation, which is distributed over the web by Revision3, a web-based tv company which he is a part owner of. The core audience of Digg users tunes in every week and subscribes to the feed through iTunes, which increases his new startup’s visibility while at the same time giving the core audience more of what they want. This direct line of communication feels like charity for the fanbase, when really it is another clever way of parlaying their fascination into revenue streams. Does a band have to start its own web-media company? Absolutely not. But they can contact their fan base directly via personally written emails, start a Twitter feed that gives their fans a direct connection to their daily activities, or poll fans to see what the setlist should be at their next gig before they get there. You want proof that this works in the music industry? Trent Reznor says hello.
Step four, stay independent:
The logic in this one is easy to see. Digg remains what it is today because Kevin and his co-founders have refused to ‘sell out’ to more powerful interests and compromise what makes Digg special (the fact that it is a direct reflection of the people who started it). We talk about mission, vision, and values all the time as they relate to business, and this is a perfect example of how sticking with your principles can pay off handsomely. If you are doing something right, then the offers will come, and that is the best time to ignore anything that tries to take what you’ve built away from you, because as soon as your guiding influence is gone it will fail. Bands in today’s music business would do well to heed that lesson, because building something true often begets building something powerful, not the other way around.
In reality, step four is a summing up of the mentality that will cause you to be successful in the preceding three steps, even if it is the most cliché sounding. Remember, however, that there is a reason these things become cliché. Generally, it’s because they are, in some sense, true.
Friendonomics
WIRED contributor Scott Brown has written an interesting editorial about the implications of the current state of what he terms “friendonomics” in the Facebook era. While the article is intended as a tongue in cheek observation on the absurd tendency of people to hoard their social contacts until they lose all meaning, there are some serious lessons to be learned from it for those of us who are currently trying to garner a following for our various endeavors, be they bands, blogs, or personal.
We are all well aware of the MySpace “friending” scams that bands employ to artificially make themselves seem more popular than they actually are, and the Facebook was meant to be antithetical to this, presenting the user with highly structured and scalable social circles which could be expanded and contracted however the user chose. This was supposed to create an environment where meaningful relationships that had some basis in the real world were the rule rather than the exception, and, for a while at least, this was certainly the case.
But now that Facebook has expanded to include anybody and their favorite company, I would suggest that this environment of genuine social connection has been violated and that we as individuals have become no different from the bands I previously mentioned. How many of us accept friend requests from people we barely know? What percentage of our friend group do we interact with on even a monthly basis? What is the real meaning of the majority of these friend connections in terms of our real lives? For the vast majority, myself included, the differentiating factor between the Facebook and Myspace has been largely rendered meaningless by our focus on quantity over quality.
Those of us who are looking to use Facebook as a marketing tool should seriously consider this question of meaning and explore options for how to make our brands relevant. There is little point of building a group of followers on this platform (or any other for that matter) who will only pay enough attention to our band/blog/business’s friend requests long enough to hit the ‘accept’ button. It is better to maintain one active connection than hoard a dozen meaningless ones for the sake of having an impressive list. To pretend anything else will be to the detriment of what you are trying to achieve in the long run.
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