Jonathan Coulton, took his dream and did it…
I read most of this article on Jonathan Coulton. Who is that you say? It’s someone that is living his dream thanks to the internet and how easy it has make the independent artist really make a living. I know what he means by
It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.
It’s really that easy these days online. With the tools available to musicians, it’s become a necessity to be web savvy. In fact some bands only survive because of the web.
Case in point is a friend I met via a long story, which I won’t go into here. Without the internet, Cessation of Life probably would have ceased to exist. With the internet, they have replaced both a bassist and a guitarist, and are going on 10 years strong. They are also heading into the studio again to write a new CD for their fans.
Cool side note to that story, Chris and I still chit chat to this very day. He is the master promotion man of his band. He grasped the internet a long time before others did. The really interesting thing is his band COL and my old band at the time (Solar Trance) only were on one bill together. Yes, I have only met Chris and COL (at the time) only once in person. The only show his band and my old band shared the same stage was on a hot summer day back in the year 2000 in Rapid City, SD at the Monsters Of Mosh festival. Remember that one Chris?
Getting back to Coulton now
More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.
I’d say he is making a decent living, and all it takes is staying in touch with his fan base, and writing more songs. A song a week is quite a rough task. I had my last creative song writing outburst back in 2003. I think I busted out like 17 songs over about 20 days time. None of them ever went beyond the demo stage.
Technically Speaking, hindsight is 20/20. I wish I would have worked those 17 into full finished works. I might be writing about myself here if I had. Well someone else might have been writing about me, as I write about myself enough already as it is.
Sphere: Related Content
RSS Feed
Recent Comments