* Linkin Park's Mysterious Cyberstalker [some strong language]: This Wired article today talks about the cyberstalking of Chester Bennington, frontman for Nu Metal rock band Linkin Park.
It's an interesting story, involving a former Secret Service agent, the Departments of Defense and Energy, and a 27-year old single mom who worked for Sandia National Labs.
Oh, and if there's any moral to the story, it's pick a strong password.
[I will try to talk more about good passwords soon -- there was a story last week about some legacy password problems faced by AOL and others.]
(And I'm sure it's only a coincidence of timing that their new album is out today.)
* Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog: This long-ish NYT Sunday Magazine article profiles Jonathan Colton, a computer programmer turned full-time singer-songwriter. It takes a look at his and other artists' experiences in a world where just about every musician has a MySpace profile, Web page and blog, and how this has changed people's expectations of musicians:
"...Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online."It goes into some of the downsides -- how updating profiles and replying to e-mails and comments can turn into hours of administrative grinding behind a keyboard (the kind of stuff that they went into music to avoid), or how they try to stay artistically pure when they can see instantly what songs people are reacting to, and resist the temptation to tailor their output (just like how any good cubicle worker will review performance metrics).
Plus, there's some wondering if easy access to the musician causes rock to lose some of its allure, or at the very least, cuts down on some of the wild partying, since words or photos taken in a drunken moment might just end up on a fan's blog.
However, the economic upsides are pretty compelling -- with social media, artists like Colton can really engage their fans, encouraging people to record their own versions of his songs, or create their own music videos; or even target areas where he might have 100 fans come together for a gig (a concert tour "smart bomb"), instead of going through weeks of touring empty venues.
Using the Web also allows smaller artists to cut out the middleman and get a higher cut, by selling MP3s off their own sites (another example is artist Jane Siberry -- now known as Issa -- and how she uses a pay-what-you-want model for downloads, using a little bit of social pressure by showing what other people paid), or selling CDs at shows or online via CD Baby, a CD publishing service for independent artists.
If there's a lesson here, it's that if musicians want to get the benefit of social media and online fandom, they have to put the work in and make themselves available to fans, to help generate all that favorable word-of-mouth stuff.
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Your Turn: Do you read the blogs, tour diaries, or profiles of any musicians? Do you think it adds genuine value to what they offer, or is it a kind of artificial "relationship" they're participating in just to sell CDs? Leave a comment with your thoughts.
Thanks -- Joe
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