The NY Times Sunday magazine had a great article called Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog.

The article talks about the new work ethic of today’s independent musicians and the way they keep in touch with fans via blogs, MySpace, etc. - even answering emails directly.

The author spends much time speaking with Jonathan Coulton, whom we have talked about before (Songwriters: A song a week. Could you do it?).

If you remember, Jonathan quit his day job and has made a decent living as a pretty successful singer-songwriter. The article goes into talking about how he doesn’t follow traditional methods at all - even when it comes to touring.

Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

There are some great tidbits sprinkled throughout the article. The greatest impression I got was that there are now so many avenues to market your music you need to think long and hard about who you are as a songwriter and use the tools that work best for you. You also need to be quick to adapt and change course if need be - especially if you find a rabid niche of fans somewhere along the way. Learn how to cater to them without compromising your vision.

Coolfer had some good thoughts on the article as well, bringing some perspective to the pie-in-the-sky dream, saying:

If I were to add something to the article, I would expand upon a statement by Coulton that perfectly describes the kind of fan — and therefore the type of musician that those fans enable: “My fans pretty geeky.” This sort of online support works better for super-literate, ironic singer-songwriters than, say, Norwegian death metal or something in the vein of MySpace star Tila Tequila (whose music career is the biggest flop of 2007). Author Clive Thompson really should have added this very important aspect to his article.

So I repeat. Know your audience.

NY Times Sunday: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog