Here are the apps and devices I used that made my life a lot easier during this process.

Practice, practice, practice

One of the nice things about being the person everyone points to and says, “pick some songs” is, well, the songs I picked I already pretty much knew. However, there’s a huge difference between kinda knowing the song, and knowing it enough for a rehearsal. The first thing I did was create an iTunes playlist with the tunes. When I was driving around, I played nothing but those songs to get them stuck in my head.

When it came to actually putting my fingers to the fretboard, I used AmpliTube on my iPad for 90 percent of my practice — the other 10 percent were with my live rig to get the sounds right. One nice thing with AmpliTube is it will load the songs from my Music.app playlists and let me play along to them, as well as speed up and slow down parts. If there was a part I found particularly tricky to learn, I used Riffstation on OS X to loop that segment while I used the AmpliTube Orange amps to play along. For the first set of rehearsals, I also didn’t worry too much about getting the solos note-for-note, and instead focused on catching the feeling of the solo. I used my Fender Squire USB guitar for most of my practicing since it easily plugs into my iPad and Mac.

For what I was doing, I didn’t really care about my overall guitar sound; I just wanted to balance the volumes so I could hear both the song and my guitar equally. Then, I practiced. A lot.

Charting

I was asked by the bass player to chart the songs for a cheat sheet during rehearsal. While there are plenty of programs that will let you chart songs, I found them to be too advanced for my needs. What I really just needed to do was have the lyrics and then put the chord changes over it.

So, I used Pages ($19.99).

I went to a lyric website, cut and pasted the lyrics into Pages, and then added the chords and beat markers over the lyrics. This worked fantastically. In addition to giving the bass player a cheat cheat, I also had something I could reference during rehearsals. If I couldn’t remember how the chorus went, I had my own little cheat sheet. I printed out charts for her and the drummer, and had my iPad ready for my reference.

Running the rehearsal

Generally, I frown upon singers who use cheat sheets live, but in practice, obviously they are fine. Plus, I’m just filling in until we get a real singer (hopefully soon, I really can’t sing). I needed cheat sheets where I could see them while standing up, and I didn’t have a music stand that went that high. Plus, I wanted them right in my face.

For my cheat sheets, I used the iKlip 2 ($39.99) from IK Multimedia. It’s a mic stand holder for your iPad 2, 3 or 4 in a fairly secure fashion. Note: it slides into the holder, so I’d be a cautious using it during gigs. Not because it’ll fall out, but it’d be easy for someone to just snag the iPad during breaks. So, if you use it, make sure you take the iPad off when you walk off stage.

I was able to position my iPad with the iKlip so I could read the lyrics while warbling. A minor pet peeve is that I can’t get the iKlip to hold my iPad in the portrait position on the boom portion of the stand. Instead, I had to clip it on the main stand just under the boom.

If a note about how we played something came up, I just edited the Pages document with the note. Usually, this is how long the solos were, or if we wanted to change how a bridge went.

Final thoughts

I’ve written before about how I continue to be amazed at the way technology continues to improve how I approach music. It’s been 20 years since I’ve run a rehearsal. Back then it involved a lot of cassette tapes, CDs and photocopies. While OS X continues to be a starting point for my music, I find now when it comes to rehearsals, everything I need is on my iPad. I also have all my music theory and chord books in the Kindle app, so if I need to learn a chord I’m not familiar with, it’s very, very easy.

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Built by Mobile Radicals, a group of researchers and developers at Lancaster University in the U.K., the little jukebox lets users input their music tastes by tapping their phones on the device. The combined tastes of the group determine the playlist, which is streamed from Spotify. The playlist is fluid depending on people’s participation, so no one user can hog the music with their own favorites. There is also a limit on how many times a user can check in, and the majority has to agree on a musical genre for it to get played.

CheckinDJ uses a capability that many smartphones already have – near field communication (NFC), similar to RFID and present for example in the Samsung Galaxy SIII (Samsung calls them TecTiles). Checking in involves tapping the phone to the CheckinDJ “jukebox,” which is built off a Raspberry Pi mini-PC. CheckinDJ can also be used with other NFC-tagged items like library or loyalty cards, and once a few musical genres are selected and a social network identity is input (this happens automatically when using smartphones), the user can enter the jukebox “system of influence,” where they will start to affect the playlist.

Playlist influence increases with each additional linked social networking account and each new connected friend that checks in. The system updates every 20 seconds to adapt to changing group composition and preferences. CheckinDJ sounds like the perfect app to help turn your neighborhood diner into a Harlem Shake flash mob.

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First, a word about my needs

Here’s a little bit about how I make music these days: most of my guitar playing is spent practicing, or doing some light recording. While I’m not in a formal band, I jam with a few regular folks. My live rig, so to speak, is a small Egnator Tweaker tube head, a Mesa cab, and my pedal board with the usual overdrive, distortion, wah and delay pedals. For the most part, I’m a classic rock/blues guy, but one band I jam with is more fusion-oriented.

I mention this because until I started playing with other musicians, I was perfectly content to use AmpliTube as my practice and demo recording setup. I didn’t really care that the sounds I’d put in a demo reel couldn’t be replicated on my live rig. Now that I might be required to reproduce my sounds live, I’ve had to take a little care that the demo can’t be played live. That means I now split my practice time more like 50/50 between my physical and software amps.

Recording, however, is a different story. For that I’m 100 percent digital. I do not mic my amp. For the most part, it’s to eliminate unwanted noise that tends to happen when recording in a non-soundproof environment. Call me crazy, but my neighbor’s chainsaw is not a proper complementary instrument.

AmpliTube Orange amps to the rescue

Orange amps are pretty much straight-ahead rock-n-roll amps. I’ve played through quite a few of them, and were it not for the immense price tag, I’d own one or more. Thankfully, now I can get something close to that great sound in an amp model.

The AmpliTube Orange suite contains the following amps: AD-30TC, AD-200, OR-50, OR 120, RockerVerb 50, ThunderVerb 200, Dual Terror and Tiny Terror. Sadly, the Dark Terror series is missing. I spent the most amount my review time with the Dual Terror and the RockerVerb and ThunderVerb models.

Man, I loved them.

In the middle of my blues/classic rock style is a love of roots rock. So, I love me some reverb. While nothing in my mind beats an old-fashioned spring reverb, I was quite happy with the sounds I got from the two ‘Verb amps. The ThunderVerb had a nice, deep tone while the RockerVerb had a lot of pop. I didn’t try adding any effects, wanting to keep the tones as pure as possible for testing, but the RockerVerb would sound excellent with a little slap-back echo.

What’s great about this combination is I can get a rock and roll sound that’s not all that hard to reproduce with my live rig. Some of the other AmpliTube amps I enjoy are modeled after high-gain amps my little rig isn’t equipped for.  I feel a lot more comfortable recording a groove to send out to my mates with the Orange amps.

The Dual Terror is an amp with a Fat Channel and  Tiny Terror channel. I found it gave me a slightly heavier tone, similar to the tone Jimmy Page got on the Led Zeppelin live CD, Celebration Day. I’m pretty particular about my distortion sound. I like my distortion dirty and with big man parts; not the over-processed ’80s hair metal distortion. With the Dual Terror on Fat, I got a nice heavy distortion sound perfect for my heavier rhythm needs.

For lead tones, I still found I needed to add an overdrive pedal to give it a little more boost. I like a ton of sustain on my lead tone, and I wasn’t able to get that solely with the Orange amps. As always, your needs may be different and you might get a lead tone you love without adding any in-app pedals.

Post-gig report

I’m very happy with the AmpliTube Orange amp package. The entire $99 package also includes nine Orange cabinet simulators. While I could tell a difference between the different cabs, I’m still not completely sold on the idea of cabinet simulators. I still like to judge my cabs on how they move air. Yes, I know it’s a little bit weird I’m on-board with amp simulators, but not cabinet simulators. I’m just weird that way. Therefore, if you aren’t sold on the cabinets themselves, you can just buy the amps you want via the Custom Shop store. IK Multimedia also has a generous demo period. You can demo each amp for two days before the demo times out.

While I don’t think the models are a substitute for a real Orange amp, I think for most guitarists doing home recording they are a good alternative to the stock AmpliTube amps. It’s so easy to record in GarageBand with these amps, there’s no shortage of good sounds you can record with in the comfort of your own home.

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The core of Riffstation is a component that lets you load an audio file, and have it scan for chords it finds in the song. Currently it’s limited to Major, Minor and 7th chords. You can then play the audio file within Riffstation and it will show you when the chord changes occur. It’s important to note that currently it only handles detecting chords, so if you want it to score an Yngwie Malmsteen solo, you’re out of luck.

Trial by fire: How it handled four songs

I gave it a mix of songs, most of them I already knew, to see how it fared.

Rockin’ in the Free World, Neil Young: This is a pretty easy song, all open chords. The main part is a E-D-C chord progression and the chorus is G-D-C. Riffstation handled this one completely accurately.

A song involving pretty girls and jewelry, ZZ Top: Again, a pretty easy song based on a E-A chug, with some  B, C# and F# thrown in as well. Again, Riffstation did an admirable job, although it temporarily thew me by referring to a C# chord as a D-flat (they’re the same chord, I just call it a C#, so it’s not inaccurate). There are a couple of ways to play the song, either with E major, or E5 chords. Naturally, it only detects the major chords, but I’ve played the song both ways depending on my moods.

White Room, Cream: This song isn’t really a fair test, since most of the song isn’t really chords, per se (for a good lesson on how to play it, I found this guy’s to be one of the better lessons). Riffstation didn’t really know what to do with the alternating major/minor chord progression in the intro, actually didn’t do a bad job with the verse chords, and did very well on the chorus. This is one of those songs I don’t think is a good song to have Riffstation detect the chords, but you can use the looping tools to help you learn difficult passages.

Wasted Years, Iron Maiden: This song shows one of the big limitations to Riffstation: while it will tell you the correct chords, it will not tell you the position they are played in. So, for Wasted Years, it did a good job on telling me the first chord is an E, it didn’t tell me that it’s played on the 7th and 9th frets; instead it showed an E chord on the 2nd frets. I’m going to repeat this several times, but while Riffstation is a great tool to help you figure out how to play songs, it is a complement to your ears; not a replacement.

Other features

Isolation: Riffstation lets you isolate the guitar tracks using the Jam Master tab. You can adjust the separation to let the guitar parts stand out as much as you want them to. I don’t like to isolate the guitars too much, since I like to hear the backbeat while I’m learning a song.

Looping: If there’s a part of a song you’re having problems with, you can select the passage in the uppermost window by clicking and dragging, clicking the loop button on the playback controls, and then hitting play. This is handy also when learning a solo. While Riffstation won’t transcribe the solo, you can loop the passage so you can figure it out by ear, or, if you have the tabs to it, while reading along. What I’ll usually do is pick a measure before where the solo actually begins and loop that with the solo.

Tempo controls: As you’d expect with a program of this nature, you can affect the tempo while the song is played back. This is very handy if there’s a passage you are struggling with, and especially useful when combined with the looping tools to repeat that troublesome passage.

Final thoughts

I think Riffstation is a fantastic tool to help musicians learn new songs. As I said, Riffstation is a complement to your ears; not a replacement. You are still going to need to listen to the songs and detect if Riffstation was correct in its analysis. The developers have said that the program is about 80 percent accurate, and I found that to be the case. However, I didn’t throw at it songs I felt it would have a problem with, like Hendrix songs. What it does do is get you in the ballpark and helps you build your ears.

What I’d love to see in future versions — other than better detection tools — is a way where it can play a version of the song based on its analysis of the song, so you can tell if it’s even close at all.

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We Are Hunted started out as a discovery service for music popular on P2P networks and music blogs, and has since branched out to provide music listening through its own apps on Android and Spotify. The team also previously built a number of iOS music apps, including one called Pocket Hipster.

The new Twitter app will curate music based on the people you follow on Twitter, and then stream tracks from Soundcloud, according to CNET writer Casey Newton, who went on to explain:

“Twitter Music uses four main tabs. ‘Suggested’ recommends songs and artists based on a user’s follower graph — artists they are following, and artists that other people they follow are following. #NowPlaying brings in links to songs tweeted by people you follow who tweet using that hashtag.”

Twitter has been putting a growing emphasis on media in recent months. The company gave photos, audio and video a bigger space in its feed with the launch of Twitter cards last summer, and more recently launched its first video sharing app Vine. However, the apps reported reliance on Soundcloud as a music hosting provider shows that Twitter may still shy away from striking its own deals with major media companies.

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It was a good reminder. Back in 2007, the News Feed was a lot boxier. It had a lot fewer photos. There was more text, and everything seemed smaller.

In those early days, Facebook pioneered a different look that distinguished it from competitors like MySpace, offering a cleaner design and fewer options and customization for users. It was a new approach, and it worked. But the amount of content shared to the site has grown by an astounding amount since those days, as you’d expect from a site with now over a billion active users, and the News Feed hadn’t exactly kept pace. It had started to look cluttered and dated, and navigation (not to mention surfacing interesting content) was a challenge.

Mark Zuckerberg takes questions after announcing the updated News Feed in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters on March 7.

So from a visual perspective, Thursday’s update clears out most of the clutter from the homepage, taking Facebook back to its original design proposition of simplicity and filtering. And it emphasizes the idea of Facebook as the “local newspaper,” bringing you a small slice of the most interesting and informative posts on the homepage — and giving you sections where can dive deeper into the material where you want.

I wrote on Wednesday about the three advantages Facebook still has that I didn’t think it should break with the new design: content discovery (showing you interesting things you hadn’t previously discovered), visual media (photos and videos still look the best on Facebook’s page), and the content directory (taking advantage of all your friends and their information on the site.) In many ways, the re-design announced Thursday played perfectly into these three strengths, primarily the first two.

“We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a wide variety of content,” Zuckerberg explained during the hour-long presentation.

With content discovery, the new News Feed — structured after the metaphorical newspaper — is all about giving you more content to read and discover (in fact, it seems more like a consumption page now than one for sharing — interesting to consider that users are probably sharing more from mobile devices than desktops now). The re-design introduces tabs on the top right of the page that let you toggle your view: “All Friends” (who you haven’t hidden from the newsfeed), “Close Friends” (an older feature where you can designate certain people), “Following” (pages and people you subscribe to), “Groups,” “Photos,” “Games,” “Music,” and “Other.”

In each of these categories, users will be able to select specific set of content to dive into. “All Friends” gives users a chronological series of updates from friends, providing a feature that Facebook employees said was highly requested from users (especially considering the criticism the News Feed algorithms and perceived lack of transparency have faced in the past.)

The “Following” page serves as almost like a page for news, assuming you like any celebrities, journalists, news outlets, or organizations on the site who post updates. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton recently criticized the company for not sharing his posts with subscribers as much as he would expect, and while the company refuted his claims, the Following page certainly addresses this need for asynchronous relationships and sharing.

And the company emphasized music — the music page will show songs your friends are listening to through apps like Spotify that use the company’s Open Graph. Each of these tabs give you a new set of information to dig into and greater control over the information you see.

From a design perspective, the emphasis on photos is a huge part of what’s new. Photos are far more dominant in the main news feed, appearing larger in previews and playing on two obvious influences: the Instagram experience of a continuous photo scroll, and design for mobile that inherently incorporates a simpler, stripped-down look.

While it’s still slightly unclear how advertising will play into the changes, since the company gave virtually no attention to ads on Thursday, it seems obvious, as The Atlantic pointed out, that the larger visuals the company debuted will play perfect with ads when they get the same treatment as user photos. Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call it’s something the company should provide. Mike Isaac for AllThingsD pointed out that for Facebook, it’s all about giving people compelling visuals, and surely that will go for ads as well.

Michael Reckhow, a product manager for mobile newsfeed, said they had worked so hard to build a cleaner mobile feed, that in looking at the desktop, they realized they’d already devised many of the solutions they needed:

“Mobile is inherently simpler,” he said. So it’s fair to say that in some ways, you’ve already seen the new Facebook — on your phone.

For Facebook, the question is how users will respond to the updated look. Hopefully for the company, adoption of the new features will go the opposite way of print newspaper subscriptions.

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The devices

Apogee Jam ($99): At 99 bucks, the Apogee Jam isn’t cheap, but it earns high marks for me. The great thing about the Jam is it comes with connectors for the Mac, and a 30-pin iOS cable. I’ve never had a problem with it and the audio quality is very, very good. The chief concern is with the two small, cables it’s easy to misplace them. To avoid that, I keep them both rubber-banded to the body of the Apogee. You can also buy replacement cables if you lose them.

Line 6 Pod Studio UX2 ($199): The Line 6 UX2 is a very versatile device. It will let you record two instruments at the same time (handy if you’re recording with a pal). It also has two XLR inputs if you want to mike your amps instead of directly inputting your guitar. But wait, there’s more: the UX2 also has more than 20 models of guitar and bass amps, and more than 20 models of guitar and bass cabinets. The amp models are based on Fender and Marshall amps. The UX2 is a good piece of gear to start building your budget studio around and is great if you’re recording multiple instruments at the same time.

Ubisoft Rocksmith Real Tone Cable ($29.99): While the Ubisoft Rocksmith Real Tone Cable is primarily designed for the Rocksmith game (not available for the Mac, which is either a good or bad thing, depending on your view of learning devices such as these). I’ve found it to be a pretty decent USB guitar interface given the cost, and while it has no iOS connectivity, that’s not a deal breaker, especially since this article primarily deals with OS X. In the short time I’ve had it, it feels like a decent cable and I haven’t experienced any issues with it.

USB Fender Squier Guitar ($199): Now, admittedly the USB Fender Squier guitar won’t let you plug in any instrument to GarageBand, it being a guitar and all. However. for $199, I’ve found it to be a great guitar. Since the Squier is Fender’s low-cost line, when I got mine I expected it to be extra low-budget, given the additional electronics for the on-board USB interface. Instead, I was quite happy with it and still continue to play it almost four months after I got it. The iOS interface is especially nice if you’re traveling and want to practice. It comes with the cables to connect the guitar to your Mac and iOS device.

Connecting the devices to GarageBand

Obviously step one is connecting the USB cable to your Mac. (Note: for best results plug them directly into your Mac; not into a USB hub.) After that, open GarageBand and go to Preferences and click on the Audio/Midi tab. Select your input device from the pull-down list.

After that go into your project and add a new track. Select Real Instrument from the selection screen if you are miking your amp, or using a keyboard. Select Electric Guitar if you want to use GarageBand’s built-in amps and effects.

Last, go the Track menu and select Show Monitoring for Real Instrument Tracks. This will ensure you can hear your instrument through the speakers while you play.

Using Amps and Effects

Unless you are miking your amp, you’re probably going to want to play around with GarageBand’s amps and effects. To do that, select the guitar track in the track listing on the left. On the far right, you can choose the amp you want. You can also choose from a number of preset sounds from a pull-down menu in the same area. You can also adjust the bass, treble, etc. from this screen.

How I use them

For input devices, I float between the Rocksmith cable and the Apogee Jam. For the most part, choosing one comes down to which interface I can easily find at the moment. The Jam and the iOS cables may take up permanent residence in my gig bag so I can practice outside the house regardless of what guitar I happen to have with me (I tend to favor Les Pauls over Fender guitars).

I don’t usually use the amps built-in to GarageBand. Instead I use the GarageBand plug-in for Guitar Rig and Amplitube. However, if you can’t afford either of these programs the included amps will do the trick. The presets are really helpful in quickly dialing in a sound.

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Using a new jailbreaking software for iOS 6, bloggers from 9to5Mac say they were able to have a look around the files in their iPad, and in there found some so far unused icons in the Music app:

 The files are called some variation of “radio button” with an icon that looks similar to the radio icon that used to be in iTunes for Mac (it was traded for a more prominent top location in iTunes 11 without the antenna tower). The iPad music app currently doesn’t have any radio functionality, so our first thought was that Apple would be adding an iTunes-like ‘traditional’ streaming radio to the iPad. Notably, jailbroken iPhones don’t contain these files in the Music app.

More interestingly, the name of these button files and are labeled with “buy” in the filename.

The images they found, below, are not currently in use. Nor, as mentioned above, are there corresponding images found in the iPhone’s Music app.

The image of radio “buy” buttons found by 9to5Mac in the iPad’s Music app.

It’s still not entirely clear how such a service would work, but Apple has been said to be in talks to license music from major labels to allow its iTunes users to pay a subscription fee to stream channels of music instead of one-off purchases.

If Bloomberg’s earlier report is correct, we should be hearing much more detail about the service sometime in the next two months.

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What are Apple Loops?

GarageBand ships with a pretty hefty selection of loops. A loop is basically a few seconds worth of a track that you can repeat as you want. For example, you could have drum loops that range from basic “kick, snare, kick, snare” to a multi-tom tom fill. They aren’t limited to drums either: you can find piano, bass, orchestral strings and many more.

To access the Apple loops, press the little loops button on the lower right-hand corner of the application window.

How to use loops

Using loops is pretty much a drag and drop operation. Select the loop you want to use and drag into your project window.

If you want the beat to repeat for several bars, mouse over to the upper-right hand corner of the loop until you see a circular pop-up. Grab that and drag it out as many bars as you want.

One other note: some loops work best with a specific beat count (the ones in the screenshot are for a 115 bpm count.) If you play them on a slower beat count, the loop will sound drastically different. I learned this the hard way when a lively beat I sampled sounded like the drummer took too much Valium.

Using loops for songwriting

I play the guitar and the bass equally poorly. Most of the time I use my guitar to write songs, but for some grooves I like to write on the bass. Therefore, since I don’t play the drums, I start with a drum track. Rather than use the supplied Apple drum tracks, I use the Beta Monkey drum tracks. The reason I love the Beta Monkey ones so much is they are recorded loops of real drummers in real recording studios and sound so much better than the Apple ones.

Sometimes I have lyrics in my head I’m writing music to, but most often I start with writing some riffs. To start the riff-writing process, I’ll set the key and bpm in my project info and drag out a very basic drum loop, usually a kick, snare, kick, snare level of basic. At this point I’m not too worried about fills and the like. I’ll then drag the loop out for a few minutes worth of bars, and also set the entire project to loop so I have uninterrupted boom-chicka-boom.

At this point, I’m not recording anything. I just want a consistent back beat to jam along with and see what clicks. Depending on what I think the song needs, I’ll also drag out some piano riffs, or any loop I think will spark the creative process. One of the nice things about even the supplied loops is there are so many varieties, sometimes sampling a random loop will send me down a fun creative path.

Once I’ve got a riff I’m happy with for the main verses, it’s time to start thinking bridges and choruses.

While I’m coming up with riffs, I’ll start laying the guitar foundations for the bridge and chorus. But now, I’ll start breaking down the infinite loop I’ve been working on. Rather than a straight drum loop, I’ll start looking for loops that compliment the riff a little better. If I decide to use my basic drum loop, I’ll shorten to the number of bars my verse has. Now, I’ll start adding some fills and different drum tracks for the bridge and chorus. Again, at this point I’m not hitting the record button yet (or, if I am, it’s just to remember a riff I might want to come back to, but nothing formal).

Creating a finished song

Once I’ve got the basic song structure down, it’s time to create a finished draft in GarageBand. Once I have the loops laid out in a way I’m happy with, I’ll break out my bass and lay down the bottom beat. Then, I’ll lay down the guitar tracks and the guitar solo. When I’m done with that, I’m probably not going to mix it too much. I’m not looking to publish this, mostly to have some basic tracks to use with a songwriting partner.

Final thoughts

Back in the day, I used a four-track recorder and a drum machine to write songs. Now, GarageBand and loops fuel the creative fire.  Since I don’t need the full power of an app like Logic Pro ($199) yet, GarageBand’s ease of use really makes writing and drafting songs a breeze.

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Just a few weeks ago, Sullivan announced that he was severing his relationship with The Daily Beast and launching a standalone website, and asked for reader support in the form of a $19.99-per-year subscription. In just a matter of days, Sullivan managed to raise more than $300,000 and said recently that he has a total of almost $500,000 now — and that more than half of those who contributed to his campaign paid more than they had to (one anonymous subscriber contributed $10,000).

Fans don’t want content, they want a relationship

When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was the “pay what you want” music experiments of bands like Radiohead and Girl Talk, both of whom asked their fans to pay for songs that they could have easily downloaded for free, and got millions of dollars in response. Why did fans do this? Because they wanted to support those artists, not because they wanted music for free — just as readers who want to support Sullivan probably don’t care that they can get the content free via an RSS reader (Note: Sullivan will be discussing his new approach at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The Kickstarter campaign that Amanda Palmer ran last year to raise funds for a new album and a national tour falls into the same category (as does comedian Louis CK’s method of going direct to his fans to sell a concert tour): after quitting a deal with a traditional record label, Palmer initially wanted to raise $100,000 to fund her recording. Instead, she collected 10 times that amount, or more than $1 million. And the reason why her fans wanted to donate all of that money has very little to do with their desire to get an album, or even to see her perform.

Part of what Palmer has done — in addition to detailing what she is doing with all of the money raised — is to turn what could have been a regular tour into a series of personal events. Some of those who contributed got invitations to private shows, in which Palmer would not only invite attendees to come on stage and play (something that caused some controversy because she asked for volunteers instead of paying people) and otherwise interact with her.

As she describes in a recent interview with Billboard magazine, the rise of the social web has made it much more feasible for an artist to reach out directly to his or her fans — and many of those fans are going to be willing to contribute something, regardless of whether they get a direct return or not (a theory that former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly has called “1,000 True Fans”). As Palmer puts it:

“I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is — which is that music has value, it’s subjective and we’re moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level. My theory is that things aren’t going to pick up until people … instead of saying people should want to pay for music, I think people should want to help their artists. I really think it’s a different way of thinking.”

Connect with fans and give them a reason to contribute

Getting up-close and personal with an artist like Palmer (who at some shows allows her fans to paint her body with washable paint) may or may not be your thing, but there’s no question that it inspires devotion in a fan base. And while Andrew Sullivan doesn’t go as far as Palmer, he is obsessively interested in what his readers want and how they are reacting to what he writes. As he described in his “declaration of independence” post, one of the reasons he decided to look at reader subscriptions instead of advertising was that he wanted to deepen his relationship with his readers.

“For the first time in human history, a writer – or group of writers and editors – can instantly reach readers – even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet – with no intermediary at all. And they can reach back. We want to create a place where readers – and readers alone – sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way.”

One of the most common responses to both Palmer and Sullivan is that very few people can get away with making a living from their fans or readers — in other words, that the two are the “one percent” of artists or creators who can do this. But whether it’s one percent or 5 percent or more, the fact remains that the tools that allow Palmer or Sullivan to do this are more readily available than ever, thanks to platforms like Kickstarter and the TinyPass paywall system Sullivan is using — or 29th Street Publishing, which allows writers to create their own mini-magazines.

Will this allow every writer to do what Sullivan is doing, or every artist to do what Palmer is doing? No. But their example (and others such as Jonathan Coulton) show that as Mike Masnick of Techdirt puts it, when an artist connects with their fans and gives them a reason to buy or contribute, they will almost always do so. All that’s required is that you have something valuable to offer — and that you are as fanatical about your devotion to those fans as Palmer and Sullivan and Louis CK are.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Andres Rodriguez

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