Jonathan Coulton, writer of "Code Monkey", "Re: Your Brains" and the song at the end of the game "Portal", as well as many other excellent notable songs, has recently posted about his "business model", prompted by a recent Planet Monkey podcast on the subject.

The post as prompted a number of heart felt comments, including one of my own, about how JoCo is more than a business-model. It prompted me to think about why JoCo "worked", in that I'm now a fan of his to the point of buying his music.

I can only speak from my person experience which was:

• Someone emailed me "Code Monkey", which I loved, and being the kind of person who likes Artists rather than Songs, I tracked down who wrote this little gem of a song.
• Said person (JoCo) had a website where he talked about writing music, and, posted every one of his songs online to listen to.
• I listened and liked a fair number of songs (five or so stuck out from memory).
• JoCo provided a way to buy his songs in MP3 format for $1 each, paid via PayPal. On top of that, when I emailed about buying lossless versions of his songs he replied and was happy to arrange it. His website now allows purchase of FLAC as well as MP3.
• Almost all of the songs he has written are available to buy. Even the ones he doesn't like any more.

The ultimate key is that JoCo is talented, can sing, can play his instruments and is prolific enough that your typical random person will probably find at least one song they like out of the tens he has on his website. The only extra step in this model is PayPal which allowed him to easily accept money from people easily and safely. I never felt I was trusting my credit-card number to some dodgy eCommerce website built by an out of work IT nerd.

For me though, the biggest push was availability. I could listen to everything, I could buy everything.

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen a band recommended, only to either not be able to find them on the web or there is no way to listen to their music. MySpace helps a little, but all too often the band will put up one or two songs they think you'll like, which I won't, then I'll never listen to that band again. Poor them.

My band finally has point one: we've put almost everything up on our website, our two CDs as well as everything else.

But we don't have point 2. How do you buy? At the moment we ask you to email us, which no-one would ever bother doing. We're also distributed through The CAN which gets us on JB Online as well as chaos.com and various other places. Unfortunately the price for "Current Melbourne Temperature" EP ($15) we set in 2004 is just too high as to effectively make it unavailable. No-one will every take a punt on 7 songs for $15, even if they like some of them, when these days albums can be bought for $10.

So we're pushing to get the price changed to $5. We're also pushing to get CMT released digitally. I'm hoping in the near future we'll be able to point people to someone to easily buy our music. Fingers crossed.

Thankfully this price is so low I can now sign the "we expect to make no profit" form from the tax office and do away with an ABN. Setting up a company and ABN for the band was one of the many things that eventually lead to the breakup. It was horrible.

Do I think anyone will actually buy? I don't know. I expect fewer than 10 sales, but ultimately I can't complain about having a garage full of CDs if I don't provide a way for people to take them off my hands...

Either way, it will be fun to "relaunch" the CD. We might even advertise.