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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If we want to sell our books without the backing of a solvent publisher then we have to give away free downloads to kick-start the word of mouth process.

I understand what the Arctic Monkeys are doing and I'm glad they are having sucess without the Big Boys.

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...