The Music Industry and the Blogosphere: Two Revolutions Unite

This week I came across a few strikingly similar success stories about independent songwriters.  Each is so incredibly inspiring that I believe this trend is actually the blueprint for the new music industry.

It all started when I found this New York Times article about Jonathan Coulton.  He’s a songwriter from Brooklyn (my home turf!), who quit his day-job as a computer programmer and began a project called “Thing a Week”, where he writes and produces one song per week and posts it to his blog.

The part that really grabbed me was when he talked about how he goes about setting up live performances.  It’s all about demand.  Through his blog, Coulton interacts directly with his fans quite intimately (something I discussed before on this blog: here and here).  When there is enough demand in a specific city, he travels out there and rocks his hungry audience.  Certainly beats slogging through the motions at your local scene, playing to a couple happy hour drinkers who don’t care to listen to your songs or even remember your name the next day – let alone visit your Myspace page.

It turns out there are quite a few other songwriters out there who also rely on their web presence almost exclusively to spread their music and name.  Coincidentally, this week a friend told me about Joe Wilson, who also found lots of success through his PureVolume.com page alone.

This article at Blogging Muses also just happened to pop in my RSS reader this morning.  Talking about resolutions for songwriters in 2009, the idea of giving your writing routine an energy boost by setting strict guidelines for song turnaround time comes up along with several links to other songwriters doing the same thing.

Needless to say, my mind is racing with ideas for the upcoming year.

What does it all mean?

The downfall of the traditional record industry as we know it is not breaking news.  The mp3, iTunes, ipods, file sharing, new media outlets for music, and a general liberating of the artists have all contributed to this.  Radiohead and others have paved the way for the big names to turn away from their labels and serve up their music directly to their fans.  Great.  I’m all for it.

But what about the small guys?  The unknowns?  How should they go about spreading their music and advancing their careers in the new wilderness that is the online music industry?

The answer is blogging.  Sure, blogging has been around for quite a while, and yes, many artists and bands have a blog on their website or Myspace page, but I’m talking about REAL blogging.  And I’m talking about using your blog as the primary means for distributing and promoting your music.

Successful blogging requires continuous updates and posts almost every single day.  As songwriters, this means we need to be churning out music releases at a faster pace, keeping our audience and readership hungry for more.  Try doing a song a week, or an EP per month, maybe something a little less rigid but keeping the frequency up.

In the world of independent, lesser-known artists and bands, the full-length album as a medium has lost much of the value it once had (which does sadden me a bit).  The reality is that mid-sized releases, EPs, consisting of 4 to 6 songs along with single-song downloads have taken over.

Just as subscribing readers of popular blogs demand new content on a semi-daily basis, fans of emerging bands want new music to click into their playlists, spread to their Facebook friends, and brag about their discovery out there in the real physical world.

Where do we go from here?

Forget about dreams of a major record deal.  Or dreams of any record contract for that matter.  Be your own promoter, and distributor by cultivating an organic following through blogging.  That means spending just as much time writing, interacting, and promoting your blog website as you do strumming and scribbling down new songs.

Use the improvements in home-recording technology to turn out new songs faster and fire them up on your blog as soon as you do.  Follow up these releases by posting youtube videos of your performances, along with more commentary and content about you, your songs, your inspiration, and your experiences.

Learn as much as you can about the techniques of blogging, or hook up with a skilled web guru to set you up.  Things like search engine optimization, social bookmarking and social networking sites, Twitter, and writing interesting and entertaining content all play major roles in your success as a blogger – and in turn, your success as a Songwriter.

We are now at a unique crossroads where the momentum of the blogging revolution meets the evolution of the new music industry.  It’s time to get up on this new and exciting development as we enter 2009.

UPDATE (1/09): I just want to announce that I have officially launched my personal music blog, where I am embarking on a project called The Twelve EPs.  I’ll be releasing an EP each month of 2009.  Check it out : ) www.briancasel.com

Related posts:

1. Industry Panel: How Musicians Make Money Online [video]

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