We’re over a decade into the digital music revolution, and there’s a million ideas of how to compensate artists in a post-label world, but no sure bet. Big-name artists like Radiohead and Trent Reznor have successfully distributed albums directly to the people using pay-what-you-want schemes. Other artists with smaller-yet-passionate fan bases such as Kristin Hersh and Amanda Palmer (link possibly NSFW) have also enjoyed some success with a donation model. But as pleas for donations increasingly dominate my social network news feeds, I’m curious whether this new donation-driven creative economy is sustainable–particularly since the donor pool trends toward the creative professionals’ starving-artist peers.

Read the rest at Shareable

I’ve been previewing a lot of literary and arts events for the SF Weekly, including authors David Mitchell and Tony O’Neill, and street artist David Choe. Over at Shareable, I’m working on a series of posts about social news sites, and have posts up about the iPad app Flipboard and Google Reader’s new social features. I’ve also written recently about the intersections between crypto-forestry and guerrilla gardening.

Many of us share a creeping sense that our gadgets fund atrocities and injustices on the other side of the world. We read about suicides at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, or about the conflict minerals in our devices that have funded genocide in the Congo, register a brief sense of disgust, and move on. Every major technology company uses the same supply chain, sourcing conflict materials that are hewn into hot gadgets by people working in conditions that would be familiar to Upton Sinclair. The market solution would be to vote with our dollars, but that’s difficult when there isn’t really a choice.

Read the rest here

Significant Objects: The Secret History of Products: Can an unwanted, discarded item of consumer kitsch be imbued with new value by the simple act of telling its story? And what if that story was completely fabricated? This is the question that Significant Objects poses.

Crowdsourcing Disaster Response: As oil continues to pour into the gulf, many of us feel overwhelmed, unable to respond usefully in the face of such devastation. Much has been made of the power of social media and mobile phones to organize people and spur fundraising efforts during times of crisis, but SMS donations only go so far.

Community Solutions to Food Deserts: One of the most confounding issues confronting urban planners, activists, and health food advocates in recent years is the Food Desert phenomenon: low-income urban areas in a city where fresh food is difficult to obtain.

Gadget Lust vs. Good Enough: When last year’s blazing tech becomes today’s e-waste, rendered obsolete by an ever-shortening hype cycle, when will we ever have enough?

Open Cities, Open Data: How do we get closer to a more shareable future? One promising route is the Open Data movement, initiatives to leverage the sheer bulk of data collected from city institutions and services and make them available to citizens who will leverage that data in innovative ways.

Is American Exceptionalism A Myth? Conventional wisdom states that individualism is coded within the very DNA of the American people. Since Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exceptionalism manifesto "Self-Reliance," the American character has defined itself by its iconoclasm. But are Americans actually uniquely individualistic in practice?

Can Diaspora* Take Down Facebook? With over 500 million users, Facebook isn’t merely ubiquitous–it’s the connective tissue that binds you to your friends, family, professional contacts and once-forgotten acquaintances. It’ll take a compelling challenger to take down Facebook. Four NYU students are stepping up, announcing Diaspora*, a fully open-source, privacy-minded alternative.

The Ecological Footprint of eBooks: As the iPad and Kindle become a growing concern, the debate over the environmental effects of print versus digital are again coming to the fore. The argument in favor of digital books makes intuitive sense: compared to a stack of dead trees printed upon using toxic chemicals, e-books must be greener. But in truth, things are a bit more complicated.

48 Hour Magazine: A Shareable Publication: A group of online media mavens resurrect the all-hours crunch of print publishing, while re-imagining the process for a shareable digital age.

Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, Spring 2010: iPad eBook Preview from Paul M Davis on Vimeo.

I bought an ipad this weekend, and I adore it. This usually-reflexive-cynic is blown away. It makes reading digitally–be the source the Internet, an eBook, or Instapaper–a totally tactile, pleasant, satisfying reading experience. Unlike reading on a browser at a desktop, which I’ve always found vaguely dissatisfying and frustrating.

Totally pumped, I began work on an ebook anthology of work from Is Greater Than. This is a preview of the first Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, an eBook designed for the iPad and other ePub-compatible eReaders. This is a very rough draft of what I hope to have submitted to the iBooks store and other eBook outlets by the end of the week. It will include features, art, comics, creative nonfiction, humor writing and fiction by myself, Brigid J. Barry, Jeff Severns Guntzel, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Carrie Sieh, Megan Stielstra and more.

I didn’t know a single thing about authoring epub ebooks before this weekend; it is ridiculously simple. Here’s a post I just wrote for Shareable.net about how you can make your own epub books (which, for the record Cory Doctorow et al, are as easy to drag and drop into iTunes and sync with the iPad, DRM-free, as mp3′s have been with every iteration of the iPod and iPhone since version one.) Read it here.

The new zinemaking is how I see it. Fuck yeah.

This post written on my iPad.

Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.

It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.

Performing a ten-minute short story, alone on a stage with a spotlight on you, there’s none of that contract that separates band from audience; instead, you’re having an intimate experience with an audience that demands you respect the give and take of the room. You need to be agile and comfortable enough with to riff off the audience and the unexpected, to feel the ebbs and flows of the room in the moment. A band has to consider this, but is far less agile: once you’re locked into a song, you’re committed to finishing that song, and there’s little course-correction to be made.

If they’re not going your way, you steamroll your way through it. In a reading, it’s a much more delicate give and take with the audience. This is terrifying. From the writing standpoint, it’s also challenging: I’m still finding my voice for narrative nonfiction, a far different form from feature articles or half-baked culture punditry or satirical riffs or fantastic/satirical short fiction, all forms I’m a lot more familiar and comfortable with. Certain skills can be transposed, but there are a whole load of new ones to develop. Particularly, writing for a live audience, not readers.

It’s tough and scary and frustrating, but worthwhile. I also suspect that a lot of what I’m getting from this can be used to inform my other writing. Seems like in the current new media/publishing climate, honing your writing so it can hold the attention of a groups of drunks in bars, well, that’s a skill that would serve me well to consider when writing for the web audience.

Anyway, this is already TL;DR, but a few notes from today’s meeting about writing with performing in mind, that I found particularly useful:

Have an hypothetical, ideal audience member in your mind that you are specifically speaking to—I know this is a writing trick—to have a hypothetical reader you’re writing for. It’s one that I’ve deployed in the past. I hadn’t thought about doing something similar when performing for an audience.

Not every response to an unexpected audience action needs to be a witty zinger. A genuine response is just as valid and effective.

Live in the scene – create eye contact with the character you’re speaking to, when speaking those lines – have first scene and last scene memorized – memorize first sentence of each paragraph

Trust your instinctual reaction to the stimuli around you. Unless of course, your immediate instinctual reaction is, as it is for me: “FLEE!”

Crossposted from my Tumblr, Eventual Ghost

I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website.

The headline zooming around the blogs right now is correct on one thing: the album is dying*. But the statement should be more along these lines: the album is dead, long live the playlist. Or long live Random Shuffle. Or iTunes Genius. Trying to create a new product that locks users into one app, particularly given the iPhone’s unscalable app interface and Apple’s insistence on not allowing third-party apps to run in the background, is just another in a long line of failed attempts by the music industry to create a new bundled product that only a handful of obsessives would want.

* And yes, I realize that such a statement sounds contradictory coming a few days after I announced that I’m working on a new album, and to that I say: the album isn’t quite dead yet. The writing’s on the wall, but as long as there are olds who still have some emotional connection to the concept of the album, there will remain a continually shrinking market for it. In addition, the infrastructure just isn’t there to sell and promote single songs or short EP’s for an independent, unsigned artist–to get your music on iTunes, Amazon mp3, CDBaby, etc, it still has to be delivered in album form. This will no doubt change in the next few years, as the emotional attachment to the album continues to fade (I can’t remember the last time I had the desire to listen to a full album, and I’m 33, not 19,), but it’s certainly not going to change in six months or a year.

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

Really? Everyone’s doing OK other than the labels? Anderson is making a common mistake here (like most people who have opinions on the future of the music business, but know absolutely nothing about it.) First off, the claim that everyone is doing “OK” no doubt extrapolates from the cases of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Matthews Band etc, who, of course, are doing OK. They’ve got money in the bank, they’ve got a healthy number of fans (and cross-promotional marketing opportunities) to ensure that they will continue to do “OK”. Like many a tech evangelist before him, Anderson is assuming that these rare instances represent the bulk of the music industry, ignoring the huge majority of bands out there that are operating on a working-class income level. To generalize how these bands are doing—again, the majority of working bands—by using Radiohead as a model is like trying to extrapolate how independent books stores are doing by looking at Amazon’s sales figures. The difference in scale is immense.

To determine how most of these working bands are doing would be very difficult. Collecting metrics on this would demand getting actually profit/loss sheets from working professional bands, a difficult proposition since 1) many of them don’t track that shit very well and 2) the ones that do are loath to talk about the economics of being in a band and guard their bands’ financial information with a Steve Jobs-esque level of secrecy. This is complicated all the more because it’s always been difficult for working bands. As record sales decline, gas prices rise and ticket sales soften due to the economy, are these bands really doing “OK”? It’s hard to say conclusively. Many of them would probably say that it’s always been hard to be a professional musician, and it’s getting continually tougher with each year. Unless Anderson wants to pull out some actual numbers demonstrating how the economic situation has improved in the past decade for 90% of the working bands out there on the road, he might want to think twice about using the music industry as a model for his free new world.

via the Daily Swarm

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It’s almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.