Thursday, February 09, 2006

Arctic Monkeys lead the way?

Here in the sleepy old UK a band called Arctic Monkeys has been quietly proving that the music business has changed dramatically in the last few years. To be brief, they have got themselves a number-one hit record without benefit of a big record company behind them. Just free giveaways on the web, live gigs, and word of mouth. Or, to be more precise, word of web.

Val Landi sees this as a harbinger of publishing's future. So do I. But I don't think it's going to happen quite as fast or be quite as dramatic as some.

1 comment:

STML said...

There's hints of this already... Charles Stross, recent Arthur C. Clarke nominee, released his novel online, despite it being published by big boy Orion (see http://tinyurl.com/8gu2v), and fellow nominee Geoff Ryman got his internet novel 253 picked up by Flamingo...