Today I watched a really great video on the TED site. It's by Amanda Palmer of Dresden Dolls and Grand Theft Orchestra.
This talk was fascinating to me in 2 ways:
First, I myself have bought music from artists because they made it available on their website to preview or even download. Some recent examples are Abney Park and Metric. Both of these are not mainstream artists by any stretch. In the case of Abney Park, most of the music I bought was directly from their site (cutting out almost all middlemen). However I have bought music via iTunes. In any case, I'm a big believer in this approach, and hearing Amanda Palmer's talk just further reinforced that.
Now I'm not going to say that I only buy music from non-mainstream artists. I own some music by the big names, but I pick and choose based on what I actually like. However I do a lot of searching for music I'm willing to actually buy because it inspires me.
The second thing about this talk that I really liked was the whole concept of asking and trusting. Amanda does some pretty remarkable things in terms of putting herself out there, and she gets rewarded for that. But the whole idea of it just being "begging" is ludicrous to me. I believe people want to reward artists that treat their art seriously. I believe people want to help fund them. But I also believe that in our climate of legal contracts and expectations, people are afraid to throw money at faceless record labels where there's an expectation of unnatural control taking place. But more than that, I believe people want to trust each other and make real connections. To put oneself out there to do that takes real courage.
Thank you Amanda and TED for this talk.
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