Sharpe's Opinion
Wednesday, 25th Mar, 2009
Jonathan Coulton writes fantastic music and releases it all under a Creative Commons licence, relying on his fans to buy his music and merchandise even when they could download it for free. He’s just written a blog post with a few details about how well it works for him.
I used to track stats like crazy back when I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make a living this way. And it was often depressing – songs like Baby Got Back or Code Monkey would get huge traffic and few sales, and the performance of less successful songs like Drive or Resolutions are best left undiscussed. But somewhere along the way the bottom line started improving, and I became less obsessed with tracking every little thing. Now I sort of think of the whole engine as a special genetically engineered cow who eats music and poops money – I have no idea what’s going on in its gut, and I have the luxury of not really caring that much about the particulars.
I think gradually we’ll see more and more artists making their own business models as the demise of the record companies continues.
Of course, there are those who would describe his ‘money cow’ analogy as bulls**t12…
- No pun intended. [↩]
- Nobody else seems to be getting this. Cow that poops money: Bullsh**t! No? Ah well. I suppose if it needs explaining… [↩]