El viejo nuevo modelo

[...] Albini's own idea of DIY draws from those that started proliferating around the late 1970s in the UK, and flowered during the 1980s in the U.S. The Buzzcocks and Rough Trade, Minor Threat and Dischord, and Albini's band Big Black and Touch and Go, among many others, started turning musical independence into populist polemics, creating their own networks of production, promotion, distribution, and performance. They sought an alternative to the waste of corporate connections, where a band is forced to capitulate its art to an ostensibly larger audience who probably doesn't care anyway.

Though bands have managed to translate this ideology to the 21st century, the concepts of independence and DIY are different beasts entirely when access is instant, audiences are global, corporations have gone guerrilla, and new recordings are forced to compete with freely circulated digital copies of themselves. The promotional affordances of the interactive web, and especially the culture created around and through them, highlight the core difference between Albini's and Palmer's perspectives on DIY musicianship. For Albini, it's fairly simple: Artists maintain a strong sense of creative autonomy, particularly when positioned against the hollowness of promotional culture.

Here is where Palmer departs: Her sense of DIY is much more rooted in the self-promotional celebrity paradigm-- if not the get-rich-quick gimmicks-- of the Web 2.0 world. Palmer's 2009 Twitter auction was so successful because it relied upon her celebrity status-- she raised $19,000 in 10 hours by selling Amanda Palmer-branded merchandise. By subsequently publicizing the auction's success, she only reaffirmed herself as an unparalleled brand manager. That blog post was titled "How an Indie Musician can Make $19,000 in 10 hours Using Twitter," but the reality is that only a privileged few are able to command her sort of fan loyalty. Web 2.0 has changed a lot of things, but its democratic potential is very easy to overstate. In this way, Palmer and Albini represent the complicated but vast difference between using new technologies and alliances to gain artistic self-sufficiency, and doing so to reaffirm and enlarge one's existing popularity.

[...] This makes Palmer an interesting subject for discussions of music and technology, but far from a workable model for up-and-coming artists. Appropriately, she ended her "trolls" blog post with a request that would seem self-evident for most musicians: "Do me a favor... keep talking about the music." If the music were the most noteworthy thing about Palmer's career to this point, that plea would be self-evident.

Eric Harvey: This Year's Model. Amanda Palmer and 21st-Century Digital DIY.

Vía @sirjaron