Words    Words    Words

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

21st Century Artistic Business Models, or What’s In It For Me?

by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell

with Ken Brown, Steven Brust, and Deborah Ibarra

When exploring the ideas of 21st century storytelling, one of the most frequent questions asked is “where is the money?” Many writers, visual artists, performance artists, game designers, and other creative people are dissatisfied with the traditional publishing and money-making models currently ruling the market. Indeed, as we integrate more art with the tools and technology of the 21st century, the traditional models become less and less viable as long-term profitable ventures. When we began to research this topic, we found that even industry professionals are no more sure of how to adapt our current models to the changing times than the amateurs are. Such a transitional time is ripe for innovation, exploration, and vibrant new ideas for anyone willing to rise to the challenge and do the work.

However, ask most people involved in creative pursuits about their business model and you will receive an almost panicked response. Most artists seem to avoid or fear acquiring business knowledge, even such information as is directly related to their own work. Some fear that to consider such thoughts will somehow ruin their talent or devalue their work. And yet in recent years even traditional book publishers, for example, are encouraging more participatory advertising from their artists–not just book signings or tours, but internet blogging, tracking online sales, soliciting reviews, podcast interviews and more. Retaining the illusion of an artist creating works in isolation from the rest of the distribution process is a luxury that will be less and less available to most as time progresses.

This series of posts collects in one paper as many different artistic business models which use some aspect of modern technology as we’ve found; there is much information available already from innovative forward-thinking artists that hasn’t previously been collected into a single accessible place. We also provide explanations (usable by artists of all kinds) on how to interpret the collated information and adapt it to individual projects. We hope to make business model concepts less daunting for artists while encouraging them to embrace the idea of earning income by spreading their art to new venues and audiences through new media.

Presuming the words “business model” haven’t already scared off our artistic readers, how do you start approaching this topic? Well, the same technology that provides new means of telling stories and sharing art provides new means of deriving income from the stories. You need a basic understanding of both the trends in modern storytelling, and the acceptance and use of at least some of the many integrations of modern technology with art (see our presentation on 21st century storytelling for more on this).

For the purposes of these posts, we are assuming that you (whether the individual or group “you”) have some sort of artistic endeavor in one or more format media that you are ready (or nearly so) to begin marketing your art to a larger audience. We are also presuming that since “computers are no longer science fiction, but science fact” (quote credit: Marissa Lingen), you have a rudimentary grasp of navigating your personal computer and the internet. Many of the suggestions we give will involve you having at least some sort of presence on the internet; we won’t require anyone to get a degree in web design, but a simple webpage or blog can be put up with no outside help and only minimal looking on the internet. Wordpress is one of many available services for creating blogs. And don’t forget the social networking options such as Livejournal, MySpace, and Facebook. Remember Google Search is your friend! There are simple website creation options as well, but remember that a poorly-constructed or downright ugly website will potentially impede your later growth and success. Quality matters, even–or especially–in the beginning stages. If you find you need some extra help in the basics of internet navigation, there are already many excellent resources out there for you, both online and offline; many cities and universities have places that offer 1-2 day basic classes on many areas of internet communications.

So at this point, you have a really` great idea for an artistic project; you’re willing to use modern tools in the generation, application, and distribution of your project; you’re even willing to develop a business model for your project. But how? Tune in tomorrow and we’ll dive in.

Starting October 15 and once a day until we’re done, I’ll be posting a series of blog entries taken from a paper I wrote with Kit O’Connell and the help of Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At 4th Street Fantasy Convention this year, everyone was curious about the possibilities for making money as more venues move toward the internet. We’re in a transitional time where many different ideas are being tried, scattered all across the ‘net, but in many cases it’s too new a trend to gauge long-term patterns and successes.

As Kit and I researched our paper and presentation on 21st century storytelling, we found that we wanted to answer the business models questions for ourselves as well as our friends. I also jumped at the chance to help a few of my more business-phobic acquaintances, excellent artists all, to have a more comfortable and solid understanding of business approaches as healthfully applied to art. Contrary to wide-spread and popular belief, the two do not have to be mutually exclusive, and knowing some basics about business process will not take away your artistic powers.

All of the blog entries in this series (as well as the ‘net and text versions) will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.  We want you to learn from and apply the information in these posts so that you can earn income with your own creative works.  We also approve of the various Creative Commons licenses and hope to encourage others to explore these options for distribution.

We’re really excited about this and our other related projects; it’s been very challenging and educational and best of all, tons of ongoing fun. We just had to share it with the rest of you! So stay tuned to this channel for the daily business models blog posts; we’ll have a web version updated with the latest entries here, and after it’s all done we’ll have an edited (and likely updated) text file that will be downloadable. We also welcome questions and comments throughout the series of posts. It’s nearly a sure thing that we’ve missed something in our research, and we can edit the final text file any time in the series. We’re hoping to have as comprehensive a list as possible, and we’d appreciate your help!

Tell your friends, and watch this space. See you tomorrow!

-Reesa

Our outgoing flight was delayed for 4 hours at the gate, which caused us to miss our connecting flight from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. The only available remaining flight for today was for 10:30 tonight (local time), and in our rush to hurry out the door (wish we’d known we didn’t have to!) we neglected to bring the contact liason information for the convention. Could someone please let the ICON folk know that we’re fine, just stuck here for the day? Thanks!

EDIT: found an email contact and sent them this message, but will leave it up here so the rest of you know at least the bare bones of the happenings. (And, in case the email doesn’t get through.  It took 4 tries to post this message!)

A few months ago we posted about looking for musicians and bands to help us with a project. I’ve been passing on your recommendations  to my friend Theo Drumsthemoon, who runs a concert venue called Lufton Runner, for his new Tellurian Music Series. I’m pleased to say the first concert in the series, featuring the artist Gfire, was a huge success. You can check it out on Lufton Runner’s new website (or follow this direct link to the concert page).

I’m already working with several of the artists who responded to the last post to arrange future performances. If I’ve contacted you and I’m waiting to hear back from you, please respond soon. If you haven’t heard from me, you will. We’re still looking for more bands, so feel free to mention yours or a friend’s here (or email them to kit at dreamcafe dot com or booking at luftonrunner dot com) if you missed the chance in the last post. The Luf is a very eclectic venue, so all types of music will be considered.

About 24 hours from now, I head off to Tel Aviv for Icon.  I should be back in about ten days.  Until then, I don’t think I’ll have access to email.

(reposted from personal journal by request)

When working on a big project and trying to come up with cool ways to draw people into your created world, it’s sometimes hard to guess which line to straddle in how much and how fast you disperse your information. You want to make sure any early adopter fans are in on it soon enough that they feel their specialness, but you don’t want to escalate so quickly that you run out of entertaining content too soon or overload yourself.

On the one hand, when you’ve been cooking a big project for a while and it’s time to start manifesting the results, it’s very easy to want to spill everything all at once. “And here’s this cool thing I did, and this one, and this too, and ooh shinyoverhere!” But while you might hook in some people with the elegance or intricacy of your scaffolding, for most people you’ll catch their interest with the thing itself first. Peeling back the draping comes later.

On the other hand, it’s also difficult to get an outside perspective on how subtle or obvious to be when scattering project references that you hope people will put together to find your baby. Something that looks incredibly obvious to you, the people working on a project for the last n months, might not have such readily apparent connections to those encountering the ideas for the first time.

Part of the fun of creating little tidbits for people to find and geek over is watching their reactions as they encounter and interact with your work. For the creators, it can diminish the fun slightly to make carefully balanced hints and clever approaches only to have to go back and slap a big neon blinking glowing pointing finger sign all over those efforts. The reaction enjoyed by someone watching someone else find an in-character email isn’t at all the same when the first person has to ask “so, didja get that email?” (And in that example, you might not even know whether there was a tech trip-up that caused the email in question to not be delivered, or whether it was caught by a diligent spam filter on alert for unrecognizable origins.)

However, if you’re trying something new, and especially in the early stages, sometimes you have to do a little more hand-holding than you might otherwise be inclined to do. This doesn’t mean swing the pendulum all the way into showing everything you’re doing all at once, but does mean that you have to be willing to launch with a simpler and more obvious approach if your well-crafted more devious plans fall short of your goals.

I’m not sure whether these will be of interest to anyone else, but they’re some of the thoughts flowing through my mind as I attempt to patiently wait for people to start noticing our little venture. It’d be nice if I did more posts like these; I should consider that thought.

Draft of Iorich sent off to Teresa.  Now to find out if she can read it.

Meanwhile, on to work on Super Sekrit Project.

The presentation Reesa and I gave at Arse Elektronika is now available with an accompanying slideshow. You can use the controls above — click the Play button to hear the audio, and use the left and right arrows to scroll through the slides. You can also visit the presentation’s homepage to find links to all the files and blog posts related to our visit (which we hope to add to soon). All files are available under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. As a reminder, this presentation contains the first public information about an upcoming online project involving all members of Dream Café, including Steve.

If anyone would like to take care of converting my .odp file into powerpoint let me know — I can save as powerpoint using OpenOffice, but have no way to compare the formatting between the two files to make sure it worked.

The slideshow widget is powered by Slideshare, a nifty website we learned about at AE.

James Cayne, through his management techniques, was one of the people who has caused the current financial crisis, and bears some responsibility for hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes.

G. Richard Wagoner, Jr. is a master of the art of the mass layoff; tens of thousands of auto workers are without jobs thanks to him.

David J. Lesar has done as much as anyone to see to it that Americans are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; not to mention the countless Iraqis and Afghans. How many hundreds of thousands of people are in mourning thanks to his work?

Lee Raymond also did as much as anyone to bring about the invasion of Iraq, using his economic clout for political influence.

Rupert Murdoch has probably done more than any other single individual to create and sustain this war, and is largely responsible for permitting G.W. Bush to steal the 2000 election, and to encourage the anti-democratic Patriot Act, and domestic wiretapping.

Isn’t it reassuring to know that each of these people has only one vote on election day?

It was wonderful seeing my kids, grandkids, sister, and friends.  Needed more time with my sister, though, and with various friends I never got to see.  But it was good, and I was able to enjoy what did happen, rather than letting myself be upset about what didn’t.  If I’d learned that skill thirty years ago…oh, never mind.

I heard a bit of the debate, and some of the discussion afterwards.  What I’d love to hear, is someone saying, “Well, I support candidate X, and intend to vote for him, but he lost the debate.”  I’ve never heard that.  From anyone.