Artist 2.0

Over the past few years, there has been chatter about new media developments, for instance "Web 2.0," "Music 2.0," etc. I believe we are witnessing the emergence of a new type of artist, "Artist 2.0," who will cross traditional borders of media and incorporate old and new media in order to get his/her ideas across. Here are two recent examples:

1. Joss Whedon, during the writers strike, decided to produce an internet musical webseries (his brother actually coined the term "mushortio" to describe it) outside the traditional studio system. "Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog" turned out to be such a huge success that it crashed their server during the first day of it's release. It was streamed free for one week, but offered for sale on iTunes as well, and it continues to be in the top ten TV seasons now, 3 weeks later. It is currently streaming ad-supported on Hulu.com, and will be released on DVD in a few months. The soundtrack will also be released soon, presumably on iTunes. Whedon and company spent no money on promotion for the series. Instead, they used MySpace and Facebook, obviously to great effect!
   
2. Trent Reznor is in talks with HBO for a television adaptation of "The Year Zero" (see my earlier post.) This will reportedly be accompanied by another album, as well as an Alternate Reality Game (they also did an ARG for the original record.)
   

Now, just in case you think I'm grasping at straws, I Googled "Artist 2.0" and found an NY Times article published more than a year ago where they used the term. I guess I can't get credit for coining the term...

I'm reading: Artist 2.0