13th
Artist 3.0 - The New Minstrels
Clive Thompson has outed the Internet minstrel in Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog in today’s NY Times Magazine. If his interviewees are indicative of the trend, the path to stardom is littered with MySpace friend requests, and the price of fame is having to answer a virtual ton of email with every blog post.
The article is a great primer on the application of network effects to the creative process: musicians know in advance who will come to their shows, online audiences provide instant feedback on creative output, and fans embrace and extend the music with videos and other free promotion. Can fan fiction be far behind?
Thompson is justified, imho, in applying the Artist 2.0 label—except that it should probably be Artist 3.0, a nearly feature-complete improvement over the bloated, mass-marketed, broadcast pop of the last century (Artist 2.0), which was a radical reinvention of the age-old traveling minstrel or troubadour.
The Internet has made possible the return of vaudeville, of micro-scale artists who cultivate entertain niche communities of intimate fans/sponsors. Rock on!