A few examples from this year:

e-books: Probably the most active area in large part because there is huge shifts taking place in digital publishing. From former mid-list writers like Barry Eisler to superstars like JK Rowling, writers are increasingly making waves in digital publishing.

Video: The story of the year for artists-as-entrepreneur came at the tail-end, with Louis CK saying no thank you to corporate middlemen and putting his new concert video online for a pop.

Radio/Music: All sorts of independent entrepreneurs are putting audio entertainment online, from the rise of podcast kings like Leo Laporte to a huge number of independents like Adam Carolla and Marc Maron. Music artists are being given freedom too, through new platforms to create and share their music like Soundcloud.

So what is driving this movement towards the artist-entrepreneur that will give it huge momentum in 2012?  Here are a few underlying trends:

The distribution chain is collapsing across content verticals

The middleman is under attack on all fronts, whether its in video, music/audio and e-books. As devices like TVs become connected, as books become e-readers and tablets, and music is now digital, the storefront is fast-becoming the entire distribution chain.  With e-books it’s Amazon or Apple, with radio it’s iTunes, with video it’s Google/YouTube, Netflix and other upstarts who are investing in original content, or simply direct-to-consumer efforts using web-payment platforms like Paypal.

Louis CK, who created his own site, paid for bandwidth, and used Paypal for payment, captured how many artists are beginning to think when he said in an interview with Bill Simmons that he “didn’t want to cut out the middleman, I just didn’t need one. There wasn’t any reason to have someone there. I just thought make this thing and put it up.”

Content production, distribution and monetization tools are becoming democratized through the web

In e-books, distribution and storefronts have already collapsed into one, but managing distribution across multiple channels is difficult since storefronts are still siloed (Amazon is separate from Apple iBooks, which is walled off from Barnes&Noble, etc). However, companies like Smashwords enable creation and distribution across multiple storefronts, while Vook, post-pivot, is working on SaaS tools to create e-books and manage their distribution, complete with reporting and management dashboards.

In music, artists are starting to embrace sites like Soundcloud to create music and share it, while others direct-to-fan sites like Topspin Media are enabling artists to create commerce sites to sell music in turnkey fashion. And it’s not just music sales, but actual concert tickets. The Pixies used Topspin to sell tickets for a recent concert, utilizing email campaigns and to notify fans and processed the tickets using an iOS app at the door.

With video, big middlemen still dominate, but that is changing as video creation and distribution costs come down in a world of connected devices. As Ryan Lawler wrote in a piece for GigaOM Pro:

“independent content creators stand to gain the most through massive reductions in the cost of recording equipment and editing software, as well as the greater availability of streaming video service on connected devices. They gain new distribution opportunities for their content and greater possibility for monetization. Consider any of the top YouTube video channels, which probably wouldn’t be able to survive in the pay-TV universe but have created thriving businesses due to the cost structure online.”

Generational shifts towards technology savvy-artists

As Matt Mullenweg put in in his New Year’s resolution on GigaOM:

“For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.”

Matt is right, in that scripting is the new literacy, and a growing form of artistic expression. Tech-savvy artists are creating apps and developing sites to put their art into the world. Whether its Matt Inmann creating his work and coding his site at The Oatmeal or young app developers like Robert Nay, artists are becoming coders and vice versa, since, as Mullenweg states, scripting is “new literacy”.

No doubt, the vast majority of economic wealth is still distributed through large corporate media, but as new technologies enable artists to reach consumers directly through push-button creation and distribution, there is a movement afoot. Expect this movement to expand in 2012 as more artists take control of their own economic destinies and become part of the artist-entrepreneur generation.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• The role of organizations, individuals and managers in the new workplace
• Working out loud: how work media and social cognition are altering business

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She’s gone through 14 computers thinking somebody is hacking them.

US $149.99 End Date: Sunday Feb-12-2012 9:20:52 PST Buy It Now for only: US $149.99 Buy it now | Add to watch list

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Dwight Silverman, Mark Milian and Ryan Block. HP and webOS, developer fate, beyond Flash, Boy Genius, the end of the PC era, and more. Wiki for this episode Transcript posted 24 hours after show release by PodsInPrint. Story links at delicious.com Suggest stories for next week’s show by tagging links “for:twit”. Running time: 1:33:13
Video Rating: 4 / 5

OPEN (ep 3) explores the inner-workings of the TWiT Cottage and the creative process of Leo Laporte. Leo has build an online network with over a dozen shows, a staff of 7 and an unrelenting drive to elevate the level of conversation about tech and media. The Spark Series is a collection of short documentaries by Marc Ostrick and Michael Sean Wright that show the application of emerging tech tools empowering the creative process of communication. Our goal is to ignite conversations into action.

US $51.22 End Date: Saturday Feb-11-2012 22:54:37 PST Buy It Now for only: US $51.22 Buy it now | Add to watch list

Lady calls Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Show claiming her WI-FI access has “disappeared”, come to find out that she doesn’t even have a router! She’s been stealing someones wi-fi for the past year! She even bought a wi-fi extender hoping to get it back. BEST Tech Guy caller EVER. PERIOD. Please Subscribe for more awesome videos!!

Listen as Jennifer tries to explain how she used to get free Wi-Fi from the Linksys and now she can’t. Leo Laporte is nice enough not to call her a moron and instead explains, in great detail, why she is a moron.

Friends, there’s no such thing as “free Wi-Fi.” Someone is paying for something, somewhere. Heck, even municipal Wi-Fi comes out of your pocket. Practice safe browsing.

Watch the whole thing. It’s nineteen minutes long, but it’s good for you.

You watched it all, right? You aren’t peeking down here while it’s still playing, are you?

Seriously, you’re done?

No? I’ll wait.

So, you watched it. You know now that it was all done with visual tricks, but not digital tricks. I can’t express in words how happy it made me watching this commercial, and then learning that it was done with real sets, real cranes, and real old-fashioned ingenuity. The next time some kid asks you why they should stay in school, and go to shop class, or learn any kind of basic carpentry, point them to this commercial. There’s still a place, and a very important place at that, for real things: real craftsmanship and real cleverness.

“CrunchGear. Always doing great stuff.”

And Jimin helped.

Iceland is all about being (literally) cool, which is why they want to become the server capital of the world. They offer natural cooling crucial to cutting down data center costs and energy consumption.

Adaptive roof-tiling technology that absorbs heat during the winter and reflects it during the summer. How? Simply by switching between black and white.

A summary of Leo Laporte’s career. For some reason, I find Laporte hotter than Olivia Munn.

Bill Gates (and his own Commander Melissa) recently provided a cost estimate to the FCC: $10 Billion needed to run fiber optic cables to various educational institutions and hospitals in the US.

Apparently, around 40 years ago, the US navy was working on pigeon-guided missile technology.

Rest in peace Stephen Gately. The Boyzone singer’s last tweet is available for everyone to read here.

Post from: The Gadget Blog