I get asked to do interviews often. Most of the time I do them. Some of those times I repost them here for you guys to read, if you’d like. This interview was for a college student writing a dissertation on YouTube’s influence on the music industry. If you’re writing your own school paper about YouTube, indie music or DFTBA Records, you might find some of this information helpful. =)
1) What was the reason you began to take interest in youtube to this greater extent? At what point did you think or realise that there was opportunity here to utilise YouTube in the way you have to start your label?
It was all very innocent. I never set out to start a company. Before DFTBA Records, I had been on YouTube over two years, making videos with my friends, vlogging, etc. In 2008 I was part of a project called fiveawesomeguys. There were five of us, and we took turns uploading a new video every single day of the week. I was Monday. Through this project I became pretty close friends with Charlie McDonnell (Tuesday) and Alex Day (Wednesday). They were both uploading fun songs to their YouTube channels fairly regularly. Their viewers kept asking them where they could buy those songs, I mean tens of thousands of people. Charlie and Alex had to keep telling them, “nowhere”. I decided I wanted to change that.
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A few days ago I was interviewed by 24/7 Creative, an online project for artists, designers and musicians. I was their featured “Voice” for the YouTube and Guggenheim collaboration Play. I wanted to share the article with you here in case you missed it. I rambled on for a while, but they edited me together well:
The following article was originally published by 24/7 Creative, a community for artists, designers and musicians.
Alan Lastufka: I love the idea of mass, independent, free distribution of art. YouTube is truly the first time that anyone from anywhere can reach an almost unlimited audience with video.
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This is a three part series, previous posts in this series:
- Part 1: Thoughts from a Reader (hey, that’s me!)
- Part 2: Thoughts from a Writer (a conversation with NY Times Bestselling author, John Green)
To conclude this series on eBooks, I had a discussion with Kathleen Fitzgerald, the content manager for Scribd.com. Scribd is a website that provides a “platform for readers, authors, publishers and anyone else seeking to express themselves”. Scribd allows you to upload and instantly publish your eBook to share with the world, for free. Not only does Scribd offer self-published (or user-generated) content, but Scribd also offers commercial works by publishers like Simon & Schuster and The New York Times.
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This is a three part series, other posts in this series:
- Part 1: Thoughts from a Reader (hey, that’s me!)
- Part 3: Thoughts from a Retailer (a conversation with Scribd.com, eBook publisher and distributor)
Yesterday I shared my thoughts, as a reader, about eBooks. My post was sort of a reply to Alex Day’s article (linked in the first post). But we’ve all heard a lot of readers’ opinions about eBooks. Who I really wanted to hear from were the writers and publishers soon to be embracing, or shunning, this new format.
The following came out of a discussion I had with John Green, whose latest novel, the New York Times Bestselling (and Edgar Award-winning) Paper Towns, was published in 2008. John’s first novel, Looking For Alaska, was published in 2005 and won the Printz Award. His second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, was published the following year, in 2006. John is currently working on two new titles; he’s co-writing the novel Will Grayson Will Grayson with David Levithan (co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) while working on a new novel of his own entitled The Sequel.
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This is a three part series, stay tuned for
- Part 2: Thoughts from a Writer (a conversation with NY Times Bestselling author, John Green)
- Part 3: Thoughts from a Retailer (a conversation with Scribd.com, eBook publisher and distributor)
eBooks have been receiving a lot of buzz lately with the release of Amazon’s Kindle 2, a device which allows you to purchase, download instantly, and read eBooks. A few days ago, Alex Day posted his reasons for not embracing this “new” format as quickly or easily as he embraced digital music. You should read through his post before consuming this series, just so you have perspective from both sides of the discussion. In this post, I’m going to discuss a few of my personal reasons for embracing eBooks, and which points about future development get me the most excited.
- Searchability. This point is particularly strong for non-fiction, technical or guide books. The Index at the back of most tech books helps, but it can’t index everything, nor does it typically index phrases. Being able to “google” within a book you read a few minutes, weeks or months ago to find any section instantly is an attractive feature. A feature that I’m sure is equally attractive to students writing book reports, or those filling out the “Favorite Quotes” section on new social networking sites.
- Storage, weight and cost. Just like iPods are capable of holding tens of thousands of songs in the palm of your hand, the Kindle holds over 1,500 full-length novels. iPhones equipped with the free app Stanza can also hold and display thousands of eBooks. I don’t have room in my home for that many titles. Also, this reduction in paper, fuels for shipping physical copies around the world, and no required shelf space would be great for the environment. Also, without all these middle men, prices could come down a lot without affecting the average royalties for authors and publishers per copy sold when compared to physical sales. (more on that in parts two and three)
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