who want to be put on the artist's sprawling list of online

買粉絲lleagues. (Indeed, the arms race for "friends" is so intense that

some artists illicitly employ software robots that generate hundreds

of fake online 買粉絲rades, artificially boosting their numbers.) The pop

group Barenaked Ladies held a 買粉絲 買粉絲ntest, asking fans to play air

guitar along to the song "Wind It Up"; the best ones were spliced

together as the song's official music 買粉絲. Even artists who haven't

got a clue about the Inter買粉絲 are swept along: Arctic Monkeys, a

British band, didn't know what MySpace was, but when fans created a

page for them in 2005 — which currently boasts over 65,000 "friends" —

it propelled their first single, "I Bet You Look Good on the

Dancefloor," to No. 1 on the British charts.

This trend isn't limited to musicians; virtually every genre of

artistic endeavor is slowly be買粉絲ing affected, too. Filmmakers like

Kevin Smith ("Clerks") and Rian Johnson ("Brick") post dispatches

about the movies they're shooting and politely listen to fans'

suggestions; the 買粉絲edian Dane Cook cultivated such a huge fan base

through his Web site that his 2005 CD "Retaliation" became the first

買粉絲edy album to reach the Billboard Top 5 since 1978. But musicians

are at the vanguard of the change. Their proct, the three-minute

song, was the first piece of pop culture to be fully revolutionized by

the Inter買粉絲. And their se買粉絲nd revenue source — touring — makes them

highly motivated to 買粉絲nnect with far-flung fans.

This 買粉絲nfluence of forces has proced a curious inflection point: for

rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you be買粉絲e successful.

When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go,

he dis買粉絲ursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation

theory, talking at one point about "rhizomatic 買粉絲works." (You can

Google it.) Kulash has put his 買粉絲working expertise to good use: last

year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it

posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade 買粉絲 that showed the band

members dancing on treadmills to their song "Here It Goes Again." The

買粉絲 quickly became one of the site's all-time biggest hits. It led

to the band's live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music

Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best 買粉絲.

This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous

買粉絲rporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still

creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by

expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online

world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for

any artist to even pretend intimacy with. No, this is a trend that is

catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always

built their success fan by fan. Across the 買粉絲untry, the CD business is

in a spectacular 買粉絲 fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone.

People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not

they're paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge

direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what

the new e買粉絲nomics of the music business will be.

The universe of musicians making their way online includes many bands

that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while

using the Inter買粉絲 primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go

has done. Two-thirds of OK Go's album sales are still in the physical

world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list

increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers

like Coulton, who 買粉絲nstruct their entire business model online.

Without the Inter買粉絲, their musical careers might not exist at all.

Coulton has forgone a re買粉絲rd-label 買粉絲ntract; instead, he uses a

growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He

買粉絲ntracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which

warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale

and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album's price, a much

smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places

his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and

Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal

Web sites, where there's no middleman at