Backstage Basics – Make art. Make money.

There’s a war happening as I type this, and it’s happening all over the world. It’s a war of words. I learned about it in a 757.

Actually, it was a series of 757s. Some of which were DC-10s. I should probably start at the beginning.

Once upon a time, there were journalists, like Robert Downey Jr. in Zodiac. These journalists roamed the earth, doing research, expensing lunches, occasionally changing the world.

Then came the internet, and Google, and suddenly “content” was king. Great articles by great journalists were getting buried in the search results, while barely readable, ad-choked monstrosities were stealing click after click, and generally making the internet (with a few notable exceptions) an awful place to look for readable, reliable writing.

I’m simplifying wildly here, but you get the idea.

As indie musicians, we’ve mostly sat back and chuckled as the record industry keeps swallowing its own tongue, vis à vis this New Digital Age we’re all living in. Corporate dinosaurs are dying, indie mammals are breeding, iTunes is generally becoming a better place to get lost in.

Journalism, however, is a lot less fun to watch die. Whether it’s from clueless old men making terrible decisions about fair use or people just not really buying newspapers anymore, the endgame here seems a lot darker: a world without good primary sources, where everybody’s copying their answers from the dumbest kid in the class.

To continue with the dinosaur thing, the content mills of the world are like Jurassic Park’s tiny compsognathuses: not much of a threat individually, but when you find yourself surrounded by them, suddenly you’ve been bit, like, a hundred thousand times, and you’re dead.

Why do we suddenly care about this? Because we’re highly suggestible. While flying around the country for Thanksgiving, I saw the following in my in-flight magazines:

• An article in Wired, describing exactly how Demand Media is taking over the world;
• An ad in Harpers, effectively declaring war on “content”, which was immediately followed by:
• An article about the death of the American newspaper (which is actually a pretty good read).

I should also note that my brother writes for CNET, and I’ll be damned if I want him losing his entire industry and having to move in with me.

So, to recap: there’s a silent war being waged between content providers and journalists, and if we’re not careful the former could overrun the latter. Which ultimately leads to stuff like this.

And that’s basically what we’re trying to do here: stake out a tiny piece of the long tail and fill it with quality reporting that entercates while it edutains. Throughout the coming months, my bandmate Misha and I will be writing about the one thing we’ve come to know well, after 8+ years of trial and error: making art that pays for itself. It’s a heartwarming message of sustainability, self-actualization, etc., but it still seems a little too corporate for the main band website, so we’re doing it here instead. We’re hoping to divide our time evenly between tutorials for do-it-yourselfers, interviews with people who already seem to know what they’re doing, and our own editorials on whatever.

Are we journalists? Hell no. But we’re definitely not compsognathuses. Inasmuch as we can, we’d like to leave the internet a slightly better place than we found it. If this brings the masses to our door, huzzah. We mostly just like writing, and this seems as fun & productive an avenue for that as any.

So. Thanks for reading all that. Subscribe to our RSS feed if you want to hear more.

In the meantime, looking for that MP3? Here’s a demo of “Seasonal Hire” from the new (as yet untitled) CD. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Cheers,
Dave

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 8:37 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.