You've heard the A side. You've even heard the B side. Now...
'Encouraging, resourcing and promoting postindustrial creativity'
C-Side Media is a vehicle for encouraging, resourcing and promoting creativity. It arose originally in the Cityside community - a group well known for creativity in the international alt.worship movement. However, other like-minded and like-hearted creative people and groups are also very welcome to become involved. Initially, at least, we will be adding contributors by personal referral.
C-Side Media is intended to take the form of an artists' co-operative, run (probably) as an industrial and provident society as described under "Starting a Co-Op" on the website of the New Zealand Co-Operatives Association.
"C-Side Media" will act as a unifying label (or "freebrand" - Mark Laurent's term) for various creative projects, and will provide means and resources for doing and publishing creative work of all kinds - books, music, spoken word, film, animation, posters, art prints, playscripts, graphic novels, computer games - anything that can be reproduced. It will also be involved in promoting performing arts.
Contributors get the following:
"Postindustrial" creativity is creativity enabled or enhanced by new technologies which mean that relatively small production runs - even single copies - can be produced economically. This is thanks to the increasing availability and decreasing cost of technology which can translate a digital original into a physical representation, such as a book, CD, DVD, T-shirt, greeting card, carving, piece of jewellery....
For more thoughts on the economics of postindustrial creativity, see the article on this site: "Does Information Want to be Free?"
We aren't a business setting out to make a fortune. We are a small artists' co-operative setting out to make it easier for creative people to distribute their creative work. So:
Note that if you are selling $1000 worth of work in a month, the first $500 still only attracts the 2% levy. It is only the amount from $501-$1000 which is charged at 3%.
The figures of 500, 1000 etc. are calculated in your nominated currency (normally your local currency unless you are outside the countries which use our supported currencies) - so if you are British, it is 500 pounds, or 500 euro if you are in the eurozone. This is so that people with currencies that are internationally weaker, but buy just as much if spent locally, are not penalised.
In addition to our levy, our credit card processing provider also charges a base rate of 3.4% + 0.30 USD on each order (percentage reducing with volume), plus currency conversion fees. That is, they generally charge you more than we do.
C-Side Media has a number of purposes, including but not limited to:
Digital reproduction technologies for art (posters and prints), books, and audio and video recordings are entering a new phase. It is now feasible to produce a fully professional copy of a creative work with minimal upfront costs in small quantities - even down to a single copy in some cases - and still sell it at an affordable price.
This opens up huge potential for 'niche' publishing and means that we can bypass corporate gatekeepers and go directly to the public who want what we create - however large or small that public may be.
Where possible, we will use existing commercial 'on-demand' companies to produce and deliver copies of our creative works.
(We will also offer existing works which have already been published.)
C-Side Media material will be accessible through its website, www.csidemedia.com. We will use the Cityside website as a channel to connect with the several thousand people who already visit that site and so are probably interested in what we are doing.
The basic site, with several different creative works available, went live in October 2004. We are currently extending, expanding, improving and promoting the site and developing more tools for creative contributors and more options for people ordering creative works.
Who has started this?
Mike Reeves-McMillan. He also has a full-time job, and this isn't it (not yet, anyway), so he is very open to offers of help.
Who else is contributing?
See our contributors page.
Who else can contribute?
As mentioned above, at least initially we will be adding new artist contributors by personal referral. However, if you want to get a personal referral, contributing first in a non-artist role is a good way. An artists' co-operative requires much more than artists.
Log in (if you have not already done so), and click the "My Page" button. On that page you will see a form for offering your skills to other people.
The following non-artist skills would be useful to us:
To see other skills requested by our contributors to help them with their works, visit the classifieds page.
You need to read this!
A full list of policies can be found on our policy page.
To help pay our hosting costs we may from time to time take part in affiliate programmes with other sites on the Internet. This means that when you create a link to these sites we will automatically rewrite it to include the code which identifies us as the referring site, and so gets us the benefit of the affiliate programme.
Valid from 05 August 2003