Check this out. Amanda Palmer recorded a new album, and is using Kickstarter to fund production. Right now she’s several times over her target goal with four weeks to go, so I’m not especially worried that she won’t manage it. But I’m still going to scrape up $25 during the next few weeks because I want that CD, dammit.

But I’ve been speculating on the future of music, and I wonder how well this will work in general. For someone like Amanda Fucking Palmer, hey no problem. Tweet the link a couple times and watch the funding roll in. But how about a brand new band? How do they go about funding their first album?

I think it could work with some savvy use of social networking and a little money to start with. Record a music video and put it on YouTube, offer sample mp3s on your home page, interact with your fans on Twitter and encourage them to share your work with more people. Nobody’s going to be blasting past $100,000 for their first album, but with work and care I think they could manage to get one out there. Then I suppose a tour would be in order, that seems to be standard procedure for an album release.

I don’t have a very solid understanding of how the music industry works, but I kind of get the feeling that RIAA and the big recording companies are slowly becoming irrelevant. I’m not sure how this will change over the next ten or twenty years, but it should be interesting to watch.