I totally agree that musicians in todays market have to find ways of making their product desirable in new and different ways – thats one of the reasons why we decided to make the Efpi releases (at least for now) 100% handmade and numbered so that there is an attractive physical product for people to enjoy. And as I mentioned in the article, I have greatly enjoyed the way that ArtistShare has shared Maria’s and Chris Potter’s creative processes, and I have learnt a lot from the extra content that was made available. I think I still feel though that there is a difference between selling ‘you’ through your art and its creation, and selling ‘you’ as yourself, although I acknowledge that drawing the line between the two is very difficult (especially when teaching etc). I also realise that more mainstream rock and pop artists are forever meeting competition winners and sponsors, which I suppose is no different – it could even be said that this is more extreme than what is on offer through ArtistShare and similar models, as at least through the site the artists and their work are open to all fans rather than a selected few.

I suppose this leads on to a wider debate about whether artists nowadays are making themselves too accessible in general – I remember reading British pop musician La Roux saying a few months ago that she felt that through social networking tools such as Twitter, artists are giving their fans far too much information about themselves and losing the air of intrigue and mystery that people like Prince and David Bowie enjoyed (and encouraged) in the past (Google throws up the original source here). This is maybe straying a bit too far from my original point – and I recognise that the industry today is very different from when Bowie and Prince were in their prime so to expect the same treatment would be unfair and unrealistic – but I think I can see the point she was trying to make.

Obviously in your position you will have vastly more insight and knowledge of the music industry than me, so it has been valuable for me thinking about what you said. For example your comment about people not paying for recorded music at all got me thinking about the wider implications of services such as Spotify that I had not really considered whilst at this early stage of my career. Fortunately, at the moment (and admittedly I’m working on a much smaller scale than ArtistShare) I am lucky that many people have chosen to either purchase a physical copy of the EP or make a donation when downloading the MP3 package rather than download for free, but I recognise that as my position (and indeed the wider industry) changes in the future then my feelings may also change – by choice or necessity!