Entries from November 2007 ↓

Phantom FM ended their news today with a report on Karmafan. They recorded an interview with Dave and used Karma Police as a backing track. I guess Radiohead really has brought the whole idea of trusting your fans into the mainstream. Listen to the MP3.

We were mentioned in Jim Carroll’s column in the Ticket today:

Sounds like he really gets the idea:

Instant Karma for new bands

David Barton and Kulpreet Singh believe that every struggling new band out there needs a Karmafan or two.

That’s the name of the new service from the Dublin-based duo aimed at bands interested in seeing if Radiohead’s tip-jar approach to getting fans to pay for music might also work for them.

Karmafan’s free-to-use service allows people to make voluntary payments to bands if they like their music.

Fans can set up accounts with the service, top it up with a credit card or Paypal payment, and then spread the love among acts they like, provided the band in question are sporting a Karmafan button on their website, MySpace or blog.

Barton and Singh won’t take a cent from these micro-payments, believing that the idea of tips also applies to them.

“If an artist believes that Karmafan has helped them, then they can give something back.”

More information from www.karmafan.com

There are two news items that if put together raise an interesting question about how artists should a) distribute their works and b) make money from their works. We suggest artists give away their works on the Internet and use the Internet to receive voluntary payments from their fans.

First the two news stories

1. The strike by the Writer’s Guild of America continues and AMPTP has agreed to resume talks with the the writer’s guild’s representatives on the 26th of November. How the dispute will be resolved is anybody’s guess.
2. Amazon released an ebook reader called Kindle. It apparently handles a whole lot of formats and I didn’t see a mention of DRM anywhere.

So if you are a writer and want to make a living from your work you have a choice. You can either write a book, get it published and hope it will reach enough book stores to provide enough sales so that you can make some kind of living. Or you can write a book, a short story, a poem and publish it via the Internet.

A lot of books these days are being sold as PDFs for a discounted price. Interestingly, the distribution of books is not being as tightly controlled by DRM - even the music industry will give up on such models soon. In fact, if we look at most of musicians on MySpace a lot of them are selling their music through CDBaby, PayPlay and other such sites.

A smart writer or a musician will instead give away his writing, music, programming code or anything they create freely on the Internet. This will result in more people reading or hearing your works than you can hope to reach with book stores or iTunes.

But How Will Authors and Musicians Make Money?

Before answering this question we’d like to point out the problem that musicians and writers have these days. Most musicians and writers struggle to get their works read. Utilising the distribution modes that the Internet offers can only be a smart move. Much smarter than trying to sell your poems on the streets.

So how does an artist make money? The answer is simple - patronage. Open as many channels as you can for your fans to show their appreciation, to give something back. That is exactly what we provide with Karmafan. So why aren’t you using it yet?