Clive Thompson wrote a great piece in this week’s Sunday NYTimes magazine entitled Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog. It’s an examination of the new business model that many independent musicians are following these days where they completely forgo the traditional route of signing with a label, indie or otherwise, and handle all promotion online. Advertising is done on a one-on-one basis through the Website and replying to emails. The Brooklyn-based (I think?) band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were one of the first real success stories handling everything on their own, but the focus of Thompson’s article was Jonathan Coulton who, in his own words, makes a “reasonable middle-class living” as a musician. And it sounds like that’s exactly where he wants to be.

It seemed like a big undercurrent of the article was the Death of the Rock Star, as being available for all your fans all the time will necessarily result in a loss of any kind of dangerous aura. To me, that’s the only negative I could see, and is small price to pay for opening up the playing field for talented, but perhaps not easily marketable, musicians. There’s also the danger that with “fans peering over your shoulder” as you work, you’ll fall into the trap of trying to please everyone all the time. Thompson ends the article by pointing out that for “Artist 2.0,” being a musician is “rather like being a business manager, memoirist, and group therapist rolled into one.” That’s a huge paradigm shift from the days of The Stones and Led Zeppelin, and it seems like the musicians who benefit most from this new business model are the least like those textbook Rock Stars from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The point of the article that really jumped out at me, and the part that I’m going to try to apply to The Periodic Label, was the fact that since Coulton makes most of his songs available for free on his site, “when people buy his songs, it’s because they want to give him money.” The musician Jane Siberry has taken that one step further and instituted a pay-what-you-can policy. Even though you can download the songs for free, this has resulted in a “community-standard” average price of almost $1.20/song, with 80% of customers paying the suggested amount. To me, this means that contrary to what the major labels are saying, people are not at all interested in stealing from musicians. They just want to feel like their money is being earned, and that it’s not lining the pockets of the already-wealthy. In a sense, it’s always been the musician’s job to make people want to give them money, but now they have more ways than just making allowance-worthy music to convince us.

Another observation I had was that this new relationship between musician and fan places a high value on honesty over image. Musicians who display a confident vulnerability are more likely to connect with would-be fans. If you think about it, this is actually true in most meaningful relationships in your life already. Nobody wants to be friends with a self-obsessed asshole, and now we apparently don’t want to buy music from them, either (I’m looking at you, Pete Doherty). This shift has made it clear that the musician/fan relationship is just that—a real relationship. And it’s the musician’s job to show they’re prepared for a long-term commitment.