This weekend, Pop!Tech Balladeer Jonathan Coulton was featured in the New York Times Magazine article “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” . The article describes how the internet and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster) have changed the relationship between musician and fan. Rock stars need MySpace pages, blog entries, and they need to respond to fan-emails because–they need the fans. Today fans are expecting all these things. No wonder Jonathan has become a poster-boy for this New Music Paradigm. Besides being an extremely approachable human being, he is also a decidedly accessible rock star as well. In fact, his accessibility has become something of a vocation for him.

He says: “People always think that when you’re a musician you’re sitting around strumming your guitar, and that’s your job,” he said. “But this” - he clicked his keyboard theatrically - “this is my job.”

Jonathan’s a kind of Internet Superstar. While standard means of sales and distribution such as retail CD sales, top 20 radio play or MTV appearances still prevail, the Internet has spurned a whole new channel for reaching audiences and has also created a new metric for determining popularity. Jonathan currently has 5,359 MySpace Friends alone - writing notes to him, emailing with him and, more often than not, getting a response back from him. Not too shabby!

Right now, “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” is the #2 most-emailed article on the newspaper’s site, which translates to a spike in traffic to
Coulton’s blog at www.jonathancoulton.com

The article is also chock full o’ links to videos of Coulton’s songs and a great NY Times exclusive “Decoding Code Monkey“.

Check out Jonathan’s Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his perfomance at the conference last year.