Find Your Voice: Writing for a Webzine (1999)

> The role of the audience is central in another context: MP3. MP3's explosive growth is fueled by the appeal of free stuff, of course, but at a more basic level it is fueled by musicians' fervent desire to circumvent record companies and their onerous contracts. Record companies do roughly three things: production, distribution, and promotion. Production can already be bought by the yard, and MP3 promises a new distribution system. That leaves the most complicated of a record company's functions, promoting records. [...] In order to circumvent record companies completely, it follows that bands must learn to use the Internet to promote themselves -- that is, to build an audience.

Interesting and prescient. A good reminder that the "copyright wars" are three-sided. The record companies like to pretend that they're protecting the musicians from the public, but who's protecting the musicians from the labels?

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The article talks about private, public, and commercial voices as if they're discrete things, but it seems more like a spectrum to me. For instance, my zine is ostensibly commercial (compellingsciencefiction.com) but I have specific goals about the kinds of stories I want to get people reading, which limits my audience pretty drastically. I think in most true commercial ventures businesses adapt their products to find a market (which makes money) rather than try to adapt the market to their product (which is harder and makes much less money). This is just one example of a point on the spectrum of private-to-commercial.

I have some experimental ideas of a not so serious underground zine format. Please contact me if you are interested.