As a follow-up to my recent post about keyword-based advertising on blogs, I wanted to talk a little bit about the broader subject of corporate sponsorship of multi-media artists in the digital age. Been thinking about the subject for a while, and have even been doing the historical research into the arts patronage system that sprang up in Europe, but my thoughts about the subject didn’t really coalesce until I saw this advertisement on YouTube for a contest sponsored by the SanDisk corporation, which makes hard storage devices: memory cards, etc.

Myself and a bunch of my friends here in Baltimore-town have been making all kinds of digital media products: especially videos and audio, but also other types of recordings and unique combinations. Blogging fits somewhere in all of this too: for me, it’s become kind of a unifying platform for organizing (however loosely) and presenting these recordings and things to the outside world.

As someone who is very deeply enmeshed in digital media in all its forms, and who is interested at least in the notion of sponsorship of independent artists, it strikes me that the corporations or merchants who would have the most to gain from such an arrangement would be the companies who make devices to record, store, edit and transmit what I’m referring to as digital lifestyle artifacts.

The artifacts and products people like me and my friends come up with vary greatly when it comes to shape, size, format and even quality. But there’s one thing that digital storage allows us: to produce massive quantities. When I was painting in art school, my friends and I used to make jokes about whoever painted the biggest painting or the one with the most multiples or panels automatically had a leg up on the competition. Nowhere has this theory proved to me to be more true than on the internet. Over the past five years, I’ve published 6,627 individual blog posts, tons of music videos, a huge amount of audio recordings, and have acted in or played part in numerous projects other people have created - so many that I’ve honestly lost track.

My point is basically this: there needs to be a new way for independent and emerging artists to make money in partnership with corporations selling compatible products - because artists need money and corporations are constantly in need of new content and image to help them sell their products. Selling CD’s as a market seems to be basically over. I’m not a typical mid-level consumer, but I haven’t bought a CD in years - except one made by a friend of mine. As a result, the concept of something like a “record label” seems to be pretty much dead in the water, although a few survive, and some are even thriving. I’d like to see the successor to such an arrangement take the field. And I’m expecting it to happen with a company not unlike SanDisk: a company which is dedicated, ostensibly, to preserving and sharing memories.

As more and more of the average person’s life becomes digitally-encoded, the importance of that marketplace is going to explode. With the push away from the passive consumer model to the more active “prosumer” (producer + consumer) model, people who are at the forefront of content-creation - in other words artists - stand to benefit the most from an active and equitable partnership with corporate sponsors. I expect that the artist’s content package of the future (something I’ve been pushing towards in my “IP” internet package model), will be sold, traded, mixed and remixed on removable media which can quickly and easily be transmitted across a variety of devices and platforms. But that’s just an example of what could be possible if people really begin putting their heads together to find creative solutions that meet the needs of not just artistic and corporate concerns, but of audiences hungry for interesting new content in whatever field, genre or market sub-niche they may call their home.