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This Week in Tech did a great interview with Jonathan Coulton. He talks at length about how he built a successful career as an independent musician by using the internet to serve a niche of dedicated fans.

Coulton also talks about his former life as a programmer and how he always longed to do music for a living but didn’t know how to pull it off. Having a child motivated him to pursue his dream, which is amazing since having kids usually prompts people to avoid creativity and risk.

There’s plenty of Merlin Mann humor, and the show ends with “I’m Still Alive”, the fantastic ending song from Portal that’s sung by the evil boss artificial intelligence. You can hear 24 other songs in their entirety at Jonathan’s website. I recommend “Code Monkey”, “Re: Your Brains”, “So Far So Good”, and “Mandelbrot Set”.

Here are the podcast highlights:

@ 23:00 minutes the interview starts: They start talking to about how his business model is built on a niche. He said the “niche found me.”

25:40 Merlin Mann: Big companies are legally obligated to bloat. A “micro-band” like JC can serve who he wants for low cost. Calls JC “patient zero” in the new creative economy.

30:15 JC: Geeks and techies are more willing to be crazy fans of something. (Also notice that geeks are able to help you go viral since they’re immersed in social software).

33:00 JC: Was a computer programmer, loved music, couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. Says he was afraid for a long time. Wrote software for 9 years. After his daughter was born he realized that he needed to get off his butt and do something. Quit the job and did a song a week for free in podcast form. Regularity was key. He got linked by key sites.

35:05 Meritocracy: Good stuff can float to the top. You have to be good consistently, not just once. (See also: my post on Steve Martin)

MM: He created an expectation of a new song a week for free, but his fans buy box sets of mp3s they already had for free.

The panel talks about how Baby Got Back was linked on BoingBoing and then passed around and went viral. Not everything good rises, but it has to be good to rise.

38:00 JC: Had a plan, a secret hope, that he could build his career this way. What he hoped for came true.

41:00 JC: 40% of his income last year was from digital downloads for stuff that was already free. The rest was merchandise, shows, and CDs at shows. Fans WANT to support artists. Be upfront about asking for money, don’t apologize for it. People feel bad about pirating from a niche independent artist.

42:54 MM: You can tell a lot about a company by what problems they can solve. There is a lot of opportunity for the smaller artist who “solves a problem” that big record companies are too bloated to deal with.

43:50 JC: Last year he made more money as a musician than he did as a programmer. The numbers keep on improving.

56:00 JC: Because he knows technology he can roll his own website, do his own marketing, build traffic, and relate to the people in his niche authentically. He’s interested enough to try tech things which is a huge advantage. The music industry in contrast fears technology and clings to a dead model.

1:00:00 MM gets all 43Folders on JC and Leo says MM has a proctologist’s morbid curiosity with people’s inboxes.

1:02:54 Merlin Mann’s Dr. Phil impression. (MM should have been a comedian)

1:16:00 Discussion of Zendrum and other music/recording equipment and software.

1:21:10 What would JC do if he could fix the record industry? Get rid of DRM, make the music as available as possible, purchasable in as many formats and channels as possible. File sharing benefits all artists. Saving the industry is not something we need to worry about. The industry won’t be able to command the same percentage. What used to be a record label would be a service provider that offers a spectrum of services. The old model is dead.

1:27:23 “Still Alive” kicks in.