Olafur Arnald is a 21-year old composer who lives in Reykjavik, Iceland. I am listening to his beautiful compositions right now as I type. His work is breathtaking. I would not know who Arnald’s was if he went through the traditional route of publishing his work through the music industry.
For his latest album, Found Songs, Arnald challenged himself to write and record a new piece of music every day for one week. He lived up to his promise and posted the recorded songs daily to website to download for free. As a way to tackle his resistance, he encouraged his community to hold him accountable and share his work, posting to his website, “Feel free to send me hatemail if I miss out a day!'
Arnald turned to his community for inspiration and evangelism. He opened up his experience through Twitter. The community was able to have an inside look at his life and inspiration for creating each song through his tweets. He incorporated the community into the challenge by asking any artist that was inspired by one of the songs to post their work to his Flickr page. He is selecting the best photo for each song for the album cover. He also turned to the community to help spread his work by bookmarking and sharing the Found Songs web page on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
Through the power of social media and online communities, Olafur Arnald won. He fought the resistance, completed an album in one week and had his work spread throughout the world.
This is the best I've seen yet of SAMBA, thanks for sharing this guy.
Posted by: Stephen Bateman | 05/01/2009 at 09:39 AM