"Don't make people pay for music. Let them'

A wonderful talk by Amanda Palmer on what looks like a radically alternative approach to making a living from music. In fact, in some ways, it is not really radical at all: it is simply a return to pre-recording-industry methods (busking), that is updated to incorporate social media. But that assembly of technologies makes all the difference, transforming a millennia-old system into something quite wonderful and quite new. This is a person who has embraced the adjacent possibles of social media in a remarkably whole-hearted and inspiring way. Interesting that what the industry deemed as a 'failure' (selling a mere 25,000 recordings) was, in the absence of the need for the mechanisms to turn a profit for a company geared to traditional methods of distribution, turned into a spectacular success. But what is perhaps more interesting is an alternative way of thinking about success, production, economies, and trade that actually works, without the structures and strictures of the industrial age, at a very human scale. Many great stories in this talk.