NP: Alabama Shakes, Boys and Girls

There's a lot to chew on in Andrew Sullivan's decision to make his blog a standalone entity. There's some sort of dual-track view where you look at what he's doing, and what other big blogs (Talking Points Memo, for example, and I'm guessing Brietbart?) have done as the content piece, and then look at the sort of thing Dan Sinker does as the delivery piece, and then you may just have some sort of new media model that's able to deal with the two things (and value them) separately. Except that a lot of these new news content plays are also low-level aggregators, which complicates things. Huffington Post, of course, wants to be both, with varying degrees of success. And it might make me a bit of a hypocrite to want silos in media (and music), but not in my chosen profession, although I think I can talk my way out of that if pressed.

On the other hand, it also seems very similar to the non-revolutionary artists in the music business (Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Amanda Palmer) who grow their brand within the system to the point where they can sustain themselves outside of it. In an era of media consolidation, this seems perfectly natural -- the big entities get bigger, and slower and less diverse, and the ecosystem reacts by spinning off smaller, more nimble species. Which multiply, and then consolidate, and then become the big entities of the next cycle. Only now they tweet about how it's a totally new thing that has never happened before.

Then again, the interconnectivity might be the secret sauce that's been missing. Everything is niche programming these days, and the Internet makes it easier to find those niche audiences. So in any event, it's a matter of how sustainable/profitable any particular niche audience is.

Where it gets fuzzy for me--and why I'm always skeptical of "revolutionary" claims--is scalability, because while I'm sure it's liberating for Sullivan to be on his own, a proliferation of imitators both dilutes the audience in terms of available dollars, and makes it more difficult for readers to find what they want. But that's where the delivery piece could maybe work, except that it hasn't worked for, say, music.

Since online music ends up being my frame of reference, the question is if Sullivan is seeing himself as just an artist who is self-releasing his material, or if he's trying to build a new kind of record label, using himself as the guinea pig. Should be interesting to watch, one way or the other.