I wrote about synth pioneer Thomas Dolby here today. He is now blogging and excited about what the convergence of music and the Internet is offering for musicians and their fans.
He has some great insights he posted about how the Internet media can pick up news and run with it.
Here's one point he makes concerning a personal online experience he had:
"It’s curious the way news spreads over the Internet. One bona fide news site reports an event correctly. Nine more web sites quote the first site verbatim. But the tenth adds a little wrinkle of its own to the story, a white lie. The next twenty sites that report the story include the white lie. And all of a sudden, the white lie has become a fact.
"That’s what happened to me this week. MTV News published a story, ostensibly about a row between me and another musician. At the end they mentioned that I am about to go out on tour, which is true. At least a dozen web sites and blogs picked up on the MTV story, and quoted from it directly. So far so good.
"Then Steven D Levitt, brilliant author of the bestselling ‘Freakonomics’, mentioned in his widely-read blog that he had lunch with me in Oxford last summer. As a footnote he stated that I’m back with my first album in 15 years."
His response and the response of his agent are hilarious. First he responded with the question "Hold on–did someone say ‘album’?" He hadn't even heard of it until that moment. Then some journalists asked him if he was going to be doing any songs from the new album on the live show.
The next part is even funnier as his agent called him up and told him that he had two labels interested in distributing it. He added that he really was serious that it happened that way.
His final comments were: "All this has happened in the space of three days. I think I like this accelerated way of working! At this rate I’ll be able to skip the laborious part where you have to actually write and record the songs, and fast forward to the bit where I’m sitting on a white sand beach with a long drink, reading all the great reviews and admiring my fat royalty check."
There are two great points he actually makes here. First, there are those that seem to think that success will happen that way without the work aspect, I like how he pokes fun at that. And also the reality of how something can, if done right, really make things happen virally in the current interactive and community strengths that the Internet represents.
It's a great lesson in how things can be marketed and spread on the Internet, in spite of if you're not even trying.
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