Wired posted my new column yesterday, an attempt to coalesce some thoughts around a trend in fan funding that isn’t really happening yet, but really should be — fans hiring artists directly to make the art they want to experience and own. I’ve been thinking about this since 2008, and surprised it hasn’t emerged yet in a big way. I’m really just hoping that someone sees this and gives it a try.

Amanda Palmer blows up the music business.

Two weeks after Kickstarter launched in April 2009, I was fishing around for an idea to test the platform and launched a project for Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

Like many to follow, my Kickstarter project hit the initial goal in the first few hours and eventually quadrupled it, with $8,600 raised from over 400 backers. Modest by today’s multimillion dollar blockbusters, it’s still considered one of the site’s early successes. The album was released shortly after, adored by the only 400 people in the world who find the idea of “chiptune jazz” thrilling.

But unlike nearly every other album project on Kickstarter, I’m not a musician. I’ve never written a song, with or without vintage videogame consoles, and wouldn’t know where to start.

Instead, I hired musicians I love to make the music. My job was organizing the project — giving the musicians feedback, setting the budget and timeline, and handling all the mundane chores of licensing, production, promotion and fulfillment.

Without intending to, I’d added a new title to my résumé: I was a record producer!

As Kickstarter’s exploded in popularity, I’ve started to see signs that there are others like me — a movement of fans as producers, commissioning work from their favorite artists instead of waiting for the artists to come to them.

To me, it feels like the next logical step in the evolution of fan funding. Already, fans are expecting to witness the creative process with behind-the-scenes progress updates and feedback forums. Now, they may actually help decide what gets made. If I’m right, the implications for working artists is potentially huge, providing an unexpected source of revenue, as well as potential creative headaches.

Here are some potential applications, and some who are leading the way.

The New Event Organizers

The idea for Kickstarter began seven years before its launch with a concert in New Orleans that never happened. Perry Chen, founder and CEO, wanted to organize a late night event during the 2002 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that would cost $20,000, but didn’t want to deal with the upfront risk. His thought: pre-sell the tickets to the nonexistent event on a conditional basis. If there wasn’t enough interest, he wouldn’t lose his shirt.

He gave up the project, but not the underlying idea. Ever since it launched, I’ve thought events were the most underrated use for the platform. The very first project to crash the Kickstarter servers, in fact, was the flood of people trying to buy a ticket to see Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum at a benefit concert in NYC.

Last week, I launched a Kickstarter project to fund XOXO, a new conference and festival in Portland, Oregon. I worked with Andy McMillan, the creator of The Manual and Build, to budget the costs, invite speakers, book venues, and effectively design an event without spending a dime. Within 50 hours, the event was completely sold out with over $160,000 raised, making it the largest event ever funded on Kickstarter.

We’d designed an event we would want to attend, and tested the waters to see if anyone else agreed. If they hadn’t, the only loss would have been our time.

Again, like Kind of Bloop, I found myself in the position of a producer; this time for a festival organizer instead of an album. I’m getting more and more comfortable in these shifting roles.

From the beginning, musicians have experimented with Kickstarter for funding their tours, from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman’s five-city tour to Kim Boekbinder’s Impossible Tour, a set of ten separate projects testing local audiences.

As far as I can tell, nobody’s flipped it around and tried to commission a musician to play for fans. Most bands already play corporate events and private parties. If fans collectively raise the same amount of money, why not play a house show for them instead? For fans, it’d be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see an artist they love in an intimate setting. For musicians, it’d pay well without the malaise that comes from playing the Intel holiday party.

Though there’s no reason commissioned works need to be limited to music.

Commissioned works are perfect for collaborations. Why not team up your favorite indie comic book artist with your favorite videogame creator, like Pixeljam and James Kochalka? Or musicians with authors, like Ben Folds’ collaboration with Nick Hornby? Or hire an illustrator you love to make art based on that cult indie film you and your friends keep watching? Sure, go ask Olly Moss to make prints based on Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

Projects like these have three big requirements.

1. Strong, achievable concept. Commissioned works should be scoped down to something realistic, because you’re paying for their time, but high-concept enough to capture the excitement of other fans.
2. Organizer. The funding may come from the crowd, but there needs to be a single person managing the project and handling all the logistics and small details.
3. Due diligence. The organizer will need a firm agreement from the artist, committing to a timeline, payment, and any other demands. Also, if the project results in a tangible work, determine who owns the rights to it before you start raising money.

Fans Liberating Art

The rights issue is an interesting one. With Kind of Bloop, it was effectively work-for-hire. I paid the artists the complete proceeds of the Kickstarter fundraiser and I owned the finished album, with the ability to sell it in the future without hassle.

But a new class of commissioned projects are taking the rights issue a step further, liberating works into the public domain. This week, two classical music projects that funded on Kickstarter released their work into the world, free of all copyright limitations.

Of course, symphonies from the Baroque period are already in the public domain, but the modern recordings of those compositions are almost all copyrighted.

The Musopen project, funded in September 2010, raised over $68,000 to hire the Czech Filmharmonic to perform original recordings of classical symphonies from Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and others. The result was announced last week: 27 symphonies, uploaded to Archive.org in raw ProTools format with individual recordings for each instrument.

A second German project, funded in June 2011, sought to create a new score and recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Open Goldberg Variations completed recording in January and released the new score and recording into the public domain last week. A free iPad app followed, released only yesterday.

Both projects were organized and funded by fans of classical music. Fans did the research, raised the money, and paid musicians to do what they do best. Together, everyone worked together to enrich our shared culture, to the chagrin of classical record labels.

Every day, it seems like Kickstarter is evolving into a kind of dream factory — manifesting the dreams and wishes of an individual that shares a vision with their community.

If this is the future of fan funding, I’m in.

I’ve written a couple times about YouTube’s Content ID in the past, the powerful and oft-abused technology used to automatically detect potential copyright infringement and allow the purported copyright holders to block or monetize videos.

You probably saw Isaac’s adorable lip-dub proposal, choregraphed by a bunch of drama geeks in Portland.

In the Vimeo description, they also posted the video to YouTube, which is now “blocked on copyright grounds.” There’s only one possible infringement claim, and that’s the soundtrack, which used Bruno Mars’ “Marry You.”

Despite the fact that Bruno Mars himself loved the song:

Congrats to Isaac Lamb and the future Mrs..I don’t think I could’ve made a better music video for this song. Thank you vimeo.com/42828824

— Bruno Mars (@BrunoMars) May 26, 2012

Before blocking copies of the YouTube video, Warner Music Group filed a DMCA notice with Google to remove 27 links to the song from their search results.

There’s a strong argument that their non-commercial use of the song should be fair use, and that hyperlinks from Google should never be censored, but let’s just grant WMG the benefit of the doubt. It’s their song, and they’re clearly the copyright holder.

Instead, I want to draw attention to the other claimants for the YouTube copyright takedown — Keshet, La Red, and Scripps Local News.

I wasn’t able to find any information about Keshet and La Red, but why would Scripps be listed in the copyright claim?

A number of Scripps-owned local ABC TV affiliates aired the story, like this report from ABC 2 Baltimore. Content ID is smart enough to detect partial use of a video, and now even detects the melodies in cover songs. But it’s not smart enough to figure out that the original video predated the newer upload, as in this recent example with a comedian’s video broadcast on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

So the Scripps TV broadcasts are indexed by YouTube, and the Content ID robots do the rest. And because Content ID disputes are judged by the copyright holder, complaints are routinely ignored or denied.

As a final stupid footnote, there are still multiple copies of Isaac’s proposal on YouTube. The most popular? This one — uploaded by a TV news network.

I’m doing some testing with the Google+ Search API, and it seems like it’s completely broken. Can anyone else confirm?

Try searching for something popular using the Google+ API, ordered by recent. Here’s a test for ‘iphone’. For me, the most recent result was 25 minutes ago. (Your results may vary, depending on time.)

Now, do the same search on Google+ itself, and click the “Most recent” link to only show recent posts.

At first, Google+ shows the same sparse results of relatively outdated posts… Then, slowly, it populates with newer posts from the last couple minutes.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way for the Google+ API to show those newer posts. Any help? Any Googlers out there able to help out?

On Tuesday morning, Andy McMillan and I launched XOXO, an epic festival and conference about disruptive creativity — bringing together artists and makers bypassing traditional middlemen to do what they love for a living, with the technologists building the platforms to make it possible.

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at the video we made, which pretty much explains everything:

We’d confirmed most of the entire lineup by Monday, including the founders and CEOs of Etsy, Kickstarter, Metafilter, 4chan, Canvas, Simple, VHX.tv and The Atavist, and the creators of World of Goo, MakerBot, Indie Game: The Movie, Star Wars Uncut, Diesel Sweeties and Black Apple. And Julia Nunes! (This is as close to WaxyCon as you’re ever going to get.)

Andy and I debated back and forth about whether the project was ready to announce, and both of us were nervous. It’s a unique project for Kickstarter, and we didn’t know if we’d provided enough detail to convince people that we’re working on something really exciting. We’d run all the numbers, and to do everything we wanted without cutting corners or selling out, the tickets would cost around $400. Was that price too high? What if only business and marketing types sign up? Is the festival too long, too short, too far to travel?

So many doubts, so many fears. We were betting it all — pre-selling every single ticket with a $125,000 goal. And we were serious: if it came up short, we’d walk away. Months of planning would be wasted, but at least we wouldn’t have lost our shirts.

Until the last minute, we were debating whether to push it yet another week out to polish things up. Finally, we bit the bullet, cleaned up some final issues, and launched at 11:20am on Tuesday.

Hugely excited to announce @xoxo, a new conference & festival this September in Portland! Get your tix quick: kickstarter.com/projects/waxpa…

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 22, 2012

The reaction was explosive and immediate. In fact, I’d fully intended to write about the launch on Tuesday morning, but within 30 seconds of posting the Kickstarter project, my inbox exploded. I knew that Kickstarter’s new social features were powerful, but this was intense. Before I’d even tweeted it myself, 20 people backed the project.

Less than two days later, it’s passed $110k raised with over 60% of the tickets sold. (Update: It sold out completely in 50 hours!)

This is the most money I’ve allocated to a Kickstarter project–because it’s going to be amazing. See you at XOXO kck.st/JDMcWl

— apocryphal mat honan (@mat) May 23, 2012

Its high time for a new tech conference for people who build things, not overrun w/ brands & marketers. I am all for kck.st/JDMcWl

— bigrocket.net (@bigrocketdaily) May 23, 2012

The list of speakers we’ve put together is great, but the list of attendees is amazing. We could easily do five more conferences just from the current attendee list. Some of the smartest and most creative people in the world are coming to XOXO, and almost every time I search a name I don’t recognize, I’m impressed. Putting all these people in one room is going to be something special.

As far as I know, XOXO is also the biggest event ever funded on Kickstarter. When I first started working with Kickstarter in 2008, the idea of funding events came up regularly. Kickstarter was originally inspired by a concert that Perry wanted to throw in New Orleans back in 2001, but didn’t want to deal with the up-front risk. I’ve always thought it was a perfect use for the site, but up until this point, barely anybody’s tried to fund their entire ticket sales on it. I think this really validates Kickstarter as a tool for funding events.

There are a million things to do and we’re just getting started. But, for now, I’m just grateful that everyone got it. We’re at the very start of a Cambrian explosion of creativity, made possible by technology. Everything is awesome.

Kickstarter. Steam. App Store. Food carts. Netflix. Square. I like this trend. DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS.

— Cabel Maxfield Sasser (@Cabel) February 9, 2012

Tonight, I watched Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech to this year’s graduating class of the University of the Arts. All of it’s worth watching, but this part of the speech (at the 17:20 mark) resonated with me.

We’re in a transitional world right now, if you’re in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I’ve talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we’re supposed to’s of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

I couldn’t have said it better.

So, go check out the project, watch the video, and check out the speaker lineup. If you want to, back it. And I hope to see you in September!

A little late on this, but wow, ROFLCon III was amazing. I was there to moderate a morning keynote panel on the supercut meme with Rich Juzwiak, Duncan Robson and Aaron Valdez, three of my favorite supercut creators. It was a privilege to share the stage with these guys, who are all amazing at what they do. It ended with a debut of Duncan’s Three Point Landing, which the audience adored. Here’s the whole thing.

Every talk I saw was amazing. All the sessions are making their way onto YouTube, and are all worth checking out. I posted some of my personal highlights on Twitter, but if you missed them, here are my favorites:

Jonathan Zittrain’s introductory keynote was thoughtful and inspiring. Jason Scott’s solo talk on the Mysterious Mr. Hokum is a crazy story of a pre-Internet scammer. Flourish Klink’s panel on fangirl culture was eye-opening, a glimpse into a massive subculture of the web I know far too little about.

The most entertaining, hands down, was Craig Allen’s behind-the-scenes story of the Old Spice campaign, with a surprise Skype cameo by Isiaiah Mustafa.

The most underseen and misunderstood session was Wonder-Tonic’s pitch for Localoffrly.biz, a douchebag startup turned into comedy performance art. (Bonus points for actually launching a site.) Hard to believe, but some people in the audience weren’t sure whether it was a joke, and started to get frustrated when they stopped the gamified talk between each “level.” Brave.

And, of course, Chris Poole’s solo talk, which ended up inspiring my Wired column that was published last Wednesday. I reprinted it below, hope you enjoy it.

Early this month, the Internet invaded the MIT campus for ROFLCon III, the biennial two-day conference that brings together the subjects of net memes with those who study and adore them.

Among the meme celebrities — Tron Guy, Paul “Double Rainbow” Vasquez, Antoine Dodson, Scumbag Steve and Chuck Testa all attended — were those who are deeply invested in the future of Internet culture, both emotionally and financially. Founders of community sites like Reddit and 4chan, academics studying memes, and the cottage industry that’s capitalized on them, most notably the Cheezburger Network’s Ben Huh. And, of course, the whole audience participated in their propogation.

From the moment I boarded the plane to Boston there was an undercurrent of change running through the conference. I sat next to Whitney Phillips, a University of Oregon doctoral student speaking on a panel about her research on troll culture. She’d attended every ROFLCon since 2008, and realized that she’d have to revise her thesis in the next month — the meme landscape is in a transitional period, but it’s not clear what it’s transitioning into. She echoed something I heard repeatedly over the weekend: “It just feels different.”

It felt apropos that this was the last ROFLCon, with the organizers “putting this trilogy to bed and riding out into the sunset.” Or, at least, until “we can figure out how to continue doing it great justice.”

The Internet is still spawning memes at an accelerated rate — and they’ll never go away. But there are some major shifts under way that may fundamentally change the way they’re created.

Every meme, like folklore, shares two common characteristics: It must show reproduction (the ability to be copied) and variation (the ability to mutate).

These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it’s possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As Internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.

From the Interest Web to the Social Web

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a fundamental shift away from discussion forums and other niche communities to social networks and aggregators. In a 20-minute talk at ROFLCon, 4chan and Canvas founder Chris Poole characterized this as a shift from the interest-based web to the friend-based web.

Poole is concerned that the web is losing its emotional depth, a richness that comes from lurking, failing and learning before finding your place in a community. The difficulty gave it more meaning, and the resulting communities added far more value to the web than they extracted.

Now, aggregators like 9GAG and Cheezburger are ridiculously popular, but memes rarely originate there. Unsourced images are posted and watermarked by their new hosts, muddling their origins and diluting the context of the original image. As Poole said, “It’s hard to feel emotionally invested in 9GAG.”

To me, this is part of the natural expansion of online community. Reddit users hate 9GAG for stealing their memes, but 9GAG is popular because it’s easier to use, making it more inclusive to Facebook users than Reddit’s sprawling subgenres and somewhat esoteric community norms. It’s the same reason that, for years, 4chan users hated Reddit for stealing their memes and bringing them to a community that was much easier to understand.

Unlike social networks, each successive community doesn’t seem to cannibalize its predecessor, but instead simply finds a larger, newer audience. The original community stays largely the same, which feels like stagnation relative to the “next big thing.” With each new site, the mainstream base and shared knowledge we call “Internet culture” converges into a mixed cultural heritage.

But there’s one potential risk that affects the cultural production of memes.

Meme Mutation

Ever tried using 4chan on a iPhone? It’s completely impossible to upload images from an iPhone or iPad, immediately limiting your contribution to the community to commenting alone. Sites like Reddit let you post a URL, but modifying and uploading images to a public URL from a mobile device is, for the moment, not easy.

Also for the moment, it’s extremely rare for mobile apps to allow community remix and sharing. In fact, I could only find two iOS apps that supported posting your own remixes to a public community space: Mixel and Make Pixel Art. (If you know more, leave them in the comments.) All others only support sharing to your contacts or your own social network, but not the public, unmediated space that memes thrive in.

It’s not surprising, then, that the only memes that seem to originate on smartphones are text-based — autocorrect fail, iPhone whale, and texts from last night.

It feels like we’re on the verge of a breakthrough to unleash the creative potential of these devices, but mobile developers are limiting our options to mild tweaking, at best. Instagram’s filters made the simplest cosmetic changes, and you weren’t able to modify anybody else’s work. Draw Something let you draw, but only with a single person and no shared history. Where’s the Canvas, Polyvore, deviantArt, and YTMND of the app world?

In the absence of good remix apps, image macro generators like Meme Generator and Quick Meme have filled the gap, making it possible to instantly generate a new meme from a mobile browser in seconds. No tools, or time investment, required.

This is incredibly empowering, but also limiting. Your imagination, and the scope of the meme’s breadth, is limited to the capabilities of the meme generator.

It’s reasonable to think the shift from desktops and laptops to mobile and tablets will continue, especially for the new generations of young Internet users that typically generate memes. If the app ecosystem doesn’t grow to accommodate it, we may see remix participation drop, largely substituted by the lightweight interaction of likes, favs and comments and lightweight prebuilt memes from generators.

In his talk on Saturday, Poole said, “Memes are the instruments with which we play music. The way things are going, we’re going to lose our song.”

Memes may not go away, but I’m worried we may lose the concert venues where the music is performed — the quirky, difficult communities that foster creative expression and make it meaningful.