In the middle of this very interesting article about Jonathan Coulton, a musician making a living by selling his music on-line, is this paragraph about musician as entrepreneur and self-promoter:

Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It's possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight. In “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger wrote about how reading a good book makes you want to call up the author and chat with him, which neatly predicted the modern online urge; but Salinger, a committed recluse, wouldn't last a minute in this confessional new world. Neither would, say, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a singer who was initially so intimidated by a crowd that she would sit facing the back of the stage. What happens to art when people like that are chased away?

And yet, the Cowboy Junkies run their own website, message board, record label and book publishing arm. Margo spent so much time promoting all this stuff between songs that my wife said it got a little "tacky" - and she had a point: there was a lot of promotion from the stage; more than I'd ever heard before. But, that's understandable because they're doing it all themselves these days: no big record company. Near the end of the show Friday night, Margo even announced that she was going to meet people out in the lobby afterwards, and if anyone wanted to stop by and say Hi - we passed, because the lobby was totally jammed with people waiting to meet her, when we got there. She might have been shy back when they started out, but these days, she's out there selling it.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting article.

(via)