First, singing for my lunch: I had a great time with Paul Myoda's media/technology/art seminar Wednesday at City College. A bunch of very cool folks. Paul, of course, is one of the designers of the Tribute in Light, and quite a bit more, as you can see at his NY gallery, Friedrich Petzel.)
Then, singing for my supper: I was just checking my Amazon Associates reports, and I found some eye-popping results:
I can see how mentioning something more obscure, like A Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Wim Wenders' Yohji Yamamoto documentary), might tempt people to shop (or at least window shop). But the soundtrack seems like an intentional purchase; you'd just go to Amazon directly. No complaints, just many thanks.
The real surprise, though, was seeing the impact of variations in commissions for a soundtrack or DVD (usually 2.5-3.0% now) vs a classic book (up to 15%). You're buying 20 soundtracks for every catalog of Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle or every book/DVD of David Byrne: E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) about PowerPoint art, but those books easily rack up 10 times the commission.
It almost makes me want to become the Gizmodo of art tomes.
