October 29th, 2007Pop Geek Jonathan Coulton Succeeds by Giving Music Away
NORTHAMPTON, Massachusetts — Early in geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton’s set, with the audience singing along with every song, one advantage of giving away your music becomes readily apparent: The fans know all the words.
Coulton, who played the Iron Horse Music Hall in this New England college town in late September, is making a comfortable living as a recording and touring musician, thanks to a business plan that — if conventional music industry wisdom held — should have amounted to career suicide.
For starters, he’s given away lots of his music. But, much like Radiohead, he also offers it for sale on his site and through “pick your price” music service SongSlide. Coulton is part of a growing trend in which artists — like recent headline-grabbers Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Oasis and Jamiroquai — sidestep major labels’ traditional marketing and distribution methods to get their music into fans’ hands over the internet.
“I think Jonathan Coulton’s approach to distributing his music and building his fan base has been ingenious,” said John Hurd, SongSlide’s chief operating officer, in an e-mail interview. Coconut Records, actor Jason Schwartzman’s band, is also a big seller on SongSlide, Hurd said.
“In my mind, Coulton’s story points to a new way that musicians can make a decent living and leave the old feast-or-famine, megastar-versus-starving-artist model of the major labels behind,” said Hurd. “When fans are given the choice to support their favorite artists by paying more for their music, they will pay more.”
Coulton’s saga is like a geek-poweredsuccess story (this time with actual talent): Innovative singer-songwriter podcasts one new song a week from September 2005 through September 2006, under a Creative Commons license. Using a winning combination of moxie, clever songs, unexpected covers and nerd-friendly material, his internet fan base mushrooms.
“Before I’d done that (podcast), when I’d do a show — and it was almost always a New York show — it’d be four friends who’d come out and a couple people who had seen me from other work that I’d done and maybe a couple strangers,” Coulton said. “But never big crowds. And certainly it would have been impossible for me to go to another city and draw an audience.”
But for the past year he’s been playing all around the country, thanks in part to Eventful, a website that allows fans to follow an artist’s live shows and even demand one in their city. When in Seattle recently, for instance, he posted a note on his blog that he had an empty slot on his calendar.
“I said on my blog, if you guys can find a venue that’s got a free night on Saturday, I will happily play a show,” he recounted. “Within 24 hours, people had e-mailed me a couple spots they’d found. I called one of them, and I booked this little black-box theater and did a show. And 75 people showed up. I’d never played in Seattle before.”
It helps, of course, that Coulton’s songwriting is as powerful as it is creatively marketed and distributed. Often compared to übergeek popsters They Might Be Giants, Coulton shares his fellow Brooklynites’ panache for mining bizarre and surreal topics for subject matter.
But his pop sensibilities — part Jason Falkner, part Fountains of Wayne — are even more irrepressible. They lead to flavorful combinations of hook-laden tunes backing humorous and crafty stories with the requisite Fountains’ twist:
- In “Code Monkey,” a troglodyte computer programmer with a heart of gold has an-like crush on his very own Jenna Fischer.
- In “Shop Vac,” the shop vacuum in the basement of a suburban McMansion conceals conversations — and screams.
- In “Chiron Beta Prime,” robot overlords enslave humans to mine an asteroid, but the family still sends out its annual Christmas card/desperate plea for help.
With “Code Monkey” serving as the theme song for G4’s similarly named show, Coulton wants to expand the “JoCo” enterprise, as it were.
Valve’s The Orange Box, released Wednesday, contains an original song Coulton wrote and performed to enhance the package of PC and Xbox 360 videogames. And, because of his Creative Commons-licensed songs, independent artists (such as those with The Jonathan Coulton Project) produce and distribute music videos online for many of Coulton’s songs.
Coulton, who jokingly refers to knee-jerk revulsion against all forms of internet song swapping as “lizard brain” thinking, says artists need to think and act for themselves in a music industry that is financially flagging.
“I think, more and more, the music is sort of a loss leader,” he said. In JoCo’s world, the thing the major labels fear the most becomes the secret of Coulton’s success.
