Via one of the beat bloggers, Listening Post
I have been thinking increasingly about the business model of journalism. In the past – it’s been something I’ve gratefully avoided. But I recognize that my young atypical career, as pointed out in an IdeaLab post, is not sustainable.
I think crowdfunding, although a paradigm shift of the business model for journalism, has potential. Read the post below and imagine that instead of a musician that had just been dropped from a label – this blog post was about a reporter recently let go from the San Jose Mercury News.
What do you do if your band gets dropped by Interscope Records (under
the Universal Music Group umbrella) after your first album and you
can’t afford to record the second one, even though the first one
sounded pretty good by a lot of people’s reckoning?If you’re Annie Hardy, the lead singer and only permanent member of Giant Drag, you put a Paypal button on your MySpace page asking fans to donate so that you can make your next album a reality “and eat the occasional turkey sandwich if [she’s] lucky.”
Unlike fan-funded music operations SlicethePie and Sellaband,
Hardy’s system doesn’t necessarily get you a free copy of the album,
but you probably know where to get that anyway — assuming it
eventually gets made.