Geeky DIY Brooklyn musician Jonathan Coulton got huge play this weekend with an excellent profile by Clive Thompson in The New York Times magazine that chronicles the changing nature of online fan-artist interaction.
Coulton quit his boring programmer job a year ago, committing to publishing a free, creative commons licensed song a week on his web site. Songs like “Code Monkey” and “Tom Cruise Crazy” took off, some being downloaded 500,000 times, allowing him to make a “reasonable middle-class living.” Before he knew it, fans were lining up in true fansourcing style to submit artwork and make videos for his witty songs. (See: “Someone Is Crazy,” above, for an example of an anime video a fan submitted to YouTube)
Building audiences and forging deep emotional attachments online, sans label, will inevitably produce what Thompson calls Artist 2.0. He also checks in with Tad Kubler from Hold Steady, Kulash from OK Go and Andrew de Torres from Scene Aesthetic.
