TheCapitalClinic

This blog was written in partial response to Clif’s blog entries on Why we need the Artist “Middle Class” to Succeed [my paraphrasing of his title], SocialBuxx™ - The New Social Currency Exchange, and finally his most recent blog, What is Art: Quantity vs. Quality? [which title I also paraphrase]. I centralize my comments here because I thought these blogs were relevant to many discussions around the subjects of “Music for Free” and the “New Music Ecosystem” [whatever that may be – and we don’t know yet].

I think that many of the Indie Artists who had found their way here have the following qualities: They are smart, incredibly energetic, willing to think out of the box, frustrated with the current system, and are willing to share ideas and collaborate [to some extent] to come up with new solutions. The problems that arise, if any, are the usual vexing ones typical of entrepreneurs in nascent stage of development – how do you share the spoils of success not yet achieved?

Indie Artists should find a way to work together without getting in one another's way. You are by nature inner-directed rather than team-driven (and fagedabou being "corporate"). I can appreciate the concern about traditional “artists collectives” is that too many cooks ruin the broth.

Also, most folks here [being smart - see above] know that the basic economics of "music for sale" no longer works [unless you win the lottery like the Spitzer working girl who also happened to be an "artist in the making"]. Isn’t it wonderful how the world turns..

So the questions remain [and there are a whole string of similar ones]: How can you "work together" to gain from the additional network energy created without formalizing relationships? How can "Artists" [to be honest, we don't even know what that descriptive term even means anymore in the new web-era] "Capitalize" on their "Art" [according to a new definition of what Art may be – a point I will get to below]?

The reason I have focused on "Social Capital" as an useful intellectual framing exercise [as participants in our collective Nightschool For Entrepreneurs will have noted] is that, while it is a "default bucket" for now [everything of value that is not "financial capital"], it focuses the mind on how to make it into something more than a default notion – the opposite of X [financial capital]. Truth to tell, I made a living during most of my professional career out of thinking “opposite of X” without precisely knowing what the contra-item was and the only thing that I knew was that X was not working. However, the objective should be to advance the notion of “Social Capital” into something easier to grasp and apply in one’s career as an Artist.

I was immediately drawn to Clif's articulation of SocialBuxx™ because it encapsulated in one word the intuitive notion that "Social Capital" could be quantified into something more than just the “opposite of X”- although, to be sure, we still don’t know that “Social Capital” has a solid conceptual grounding in economic [read: measurable] terms. It would be a huge win for the default notion of “Social Capital” [a topic I have been struggling with for years to challenge the broken system of corporate governance that gives a false primacy to “Financial Capital”], if “Social Capital” qua “SocialBuxx™” could gain "currency” to be earned by selling “around the music” as much as “selling the music” [which I think was one of the core ideas behind the creation of the fuzz platform].

Maybe we should start to rethink not only how to “Capitalize” on our Art by taking a hard look at what “Capital” means [which has been the major focus of thecapitalclinic – in fact that is why the clinic was set up] but verily to question what “Art” itself really means in the new “music” ecosystem. If we are selling “around the music”, what indeed is the nature of the value-added aesthetic we are really dealing with?