Must Read: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog

This is a great piece by Clive Thompson in the New York Times that should interest musicians, media folks and geeks alike. Here are two quotes I like:

This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous corporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for any artist to even pretend intimacy with. No, this is a trend that is catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always built their success fan by fan.

"Carpet-bombed into popularity" indeed! I'm about to launch my radio campaign to 400 non-commercial stations. There's a plus to not competing in the pop arena: We can't possibly match the payola (I've read earnest descriptions of the types of suggested gifts record companies can send commercial stations, such as SUVs "wrapped" with the radio station's call letters and logo).

Here's how Clive's piece ends:

Which is perhaps the end result of the new online fan world: it allows a fresh route to creative success, assuming the artist has the correct emotional tools. De Torres, a decade or more younger than Coulton and the Hold Steady, is a natural Artist 2.0: he happily spends two hours a day or more parsing notes from teenagers who tell him “your work totally got me through some rough times.” He knows that to lure in listeners, he needs to post some of his work on MySpace, but since he wants people to eventually buy his album, he doesn’t want to give away all his goods. He has thus developed an ear for what he calls “the perfect MySpace song” — a tune that is immediately catchy, yet not necessarily the strongest from his forthcoming album. For him, being a musician is rather like being a business manager, memoirist and group therapist rolled into one, with a politician’s thick hide to boot.