Second, the music industry has already gone through the initial stage of the process that publishing is entering now with the rise of the e-book: Thanks to social networking getting the word out and the ease and inexpense of sharing digital media and the way recording an album's worth of MP3s is now within the reach of a musician working outside the studio system, you get people who are making a working career out of being indie musicians. They're not filling entire stadiums on tour or making the megabucks -- but they're making enough money to make a living doing what they want to be doing, and we can buy their stuff and know the bulk of what we buy is going to them directly instead of them getting a few cents on every CD while the bulk goes to some soulless corporation. Self-published e-books are making the same thing available to authors now, and indie movie producers have been around for a while (though it's just so damned hard to come up with the funding to produce a film, which is why Kickstarter has been so fabulous along the lines of helping people fund weird exciting projects).
I agree with the other commenters regarding going to sites that help promote non-label musicians and seeing what you can turn up -- and for that matter, browsing around on Kickstarter looking for something you'd like to help fund. (I haven't actually done anything on Kickstarter, but I gather the structure is the project has a set amount of time to raise the total amount and the donors only actually get tapped for the money if enough people pledge to cover the full amount. And yes, you get something for being a donor.) Or, yeah, I've been doing a lot of browsing around on Amazon looking at crappy self-published genre fic because I've been having some guilty-pleasure urges that I couldn't find in fanfic and I'm comfortable with dropping a couple of bucks on something that's at about the same literary quality but is going to be hitting the buttons I feel like hitting this week. (I should do some more buying from the people self-publishing who I know from fanfic are actually good writers.)
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Second, the music industry has already gone through the initial stage of the process that publishing is entering now with the rise of the e-book: Thanks to social networking getting the word out and the ease and inexpense of sharing digital media and the way recording an album's worth of MP3s is now within the reach of a musician working outside the studio system, you get people who are making a working career out of being indie musicians. They're not filling entire stadiums on tour or making the megabucks -- but they're making enough money to make a living doing what they want to be doing, and we can buy their stuff and know the bulk of what we buy is going to them directly instead of them getting a few cents on every CD while the bulk goes to some soulless corporation. Self-published e-books are making the same thing available to authors now, and indie movie producers have been around for a while (though it's just so damned hard to come up with the funding to produce a film, which is why Kickstarter has been so fabulous along the lines of helping people fund weird exciting projects).
I agree with the other commenters regarding going to sites that help promote non-label musicians and seeing what you can turn up -- and for that matter, browsing around on Kickstarter looking for something you'd like to help fund. (I haven't actually done anything on Kickstarter, but I gather the structure is the project has a set amount of time to raise the total amount and the donors only actually get tapped for the money if enough people pledge to cover the full amount. And yes, you get something for being a donor.) Or, yeah, I've been doing a lot of browsing around on Amazon looking at crappy self-published genre fic because I've been having some guilty-pleasure urges that I couldn't find in fanfic and I'm comfortable with dropping a couple of bucks on something that's at about the same literary quality but is going to be hitting the buttons I feel like hitting this week. (I should do some more buying from the people self-publishing who I know from fanfic are actually good writers.)