Jonathon Coulton is the Indie Artist’s indie artist – a singer-songwriter who has built an enviable career with no label support at all.  Consequently when he speaks it pays for artists to listen.

by Mike King

It’s likely that you’ve heard of Jonathan Coulton. Profiled by NPR and the New York Times, Coulton has been a full time independent musician since he quit his computer programming gig in 2005.

After initiating an ambitious project of releasing a new song a week, Coulton started to gain momentum, making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on his own site and iTunes.

Coulton is prolific in his conversations with his fans online, spending time each day personally answering every email he receives. While his direct to fan approach to sales and marketing includes a partnership with CD Baby (who warehouse and ship his physical CD, as well as get his music to the online retailers like iTunes and Amazon), Coulton’s most lucrative source of income is selling online from his Website.

Read Mike’s full entry at Music Business & Trend-Mongering

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Music Business, Music Culture, Music Promotion, Wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.