GUEST POST: This article by Scott Perry of Sperry Media was first published in the newsletter of his New Music Tipsheet.
I really like the Chris Cornell website. Not only is it clean and easy to navigate, but I think it's a strong reflection of the work that goes into fleshing out an artist's image these days. Of course you have an audio player, embedded videos, pix, discography, tour dates, news, and wallpapers, but then you also have the blog plus the links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace.
And all this is just for his own site, before any marketing efforts are done outside of his own sphere - you multiply the options for touch points at every partner's website (MTV, Verizon, the tour promoters, press, blogs, and other media outlets), and you start to realize just how much more complex it is be (or manage) an artist these days.
Used to be, radio was the napalm that got you a village of listeners/fans in one fell swoop. These days, you gotta send the hounds into rabbit holes to find your fans. And even when you do find your fans, you have to keep them happy and maintain that relationship over a long period of time.
The good thing about the internet is that you can flesh out a connection to fans and build a mythology that you could only superficially build through working the traditional media. The bad news is that it takes a lot more monkey grease to make it happen, rarely reaches the numbers of people that mass media once did, and may not result in as many unit sales for such efforts.
But don't let the complexities of modern communication make you think that all this has to be complex -- these days, less is more. Sure, I'm trippin' haaaaaaardcore on all the material available online for the Watchmen movie (games, old hero pix “found" on flickr, “unearthed" classic video footage randomly posting to YouTube, text messages to find character posters in cities all across the States), but this is an incredibly complex storyline whose entire content cannot fit in the confines of a two and a half hour movie.
Take a look at sites like Late Night with Jimmy Fallon or 18 of the Best Music Tumblelogs to see how the spare, crisp aesthetics of Facebook and Tumblr (+ the limited space afforded by iPhone-sized screens) are affecting the future of web design. Even the latest LA phenom, Korean barbecue taco truck KOGI uses a blog & Twitter to alert their army of fans of their whereabouts & events -- no flash intro, no junky layout, just the facts, and prominent links to their flickr & Twitter pages (5000 followers in less than 6 months!) - very 101, simple, clean, effective (PS: it also helps to have a killer product).
