Author promotion

Jamseed is the first official “coolest thing I’ve seen all year” for 2009.

I found out about it via this short essay on the Harvard Business blog by Soft Skull’s Richard Nash.

For most of human existence the output of art could never keep up with the demand. I believe that is now changing, and that’s why we’re seeing the great intermediaries in this process–record labels, movies studios, book publishing companies Borders, etc.–start to shrink, or even fail. They relied on demand being so pent-up they didn’t really need ot work very hard ot match tastes, to connect artist and audience. But now that demand can in fact be sated, their lack of connection to either artist or audience may doom them.

So given that the great intermediaries can’t match-make, what’s an artist to do? For the last decade, many artists have used the web, and subsets of the web like MySpace, to connect with their fans. But the more intimate a connection, the more powerful a connection can be forged. Intimacy is a quality that was lost in the drive towards ever lower marginal costs of reproduction and distribution, but now that the price reductions are close to over, since the marginal costs are reaching zero, reaching back to the past for the personalized, individually-crafted art object is what can distinguish one artists from another, or rather one artist-fan relationship from another.

Oh hell yes!

So then I trundled over to Jamseed. What is it? An easy and effective web platform to help musicians reward fans with personalised stuff.  Now my brain is busting out with ideas for how this could assist authors. Hooyah.

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