Back to basics: escaping the cyber mall

E-commerce, once the buzzword of online marketing, is so cheap now that any potential merchant can add credit card services to their page for a minimal monthly fee. For access to a bigger marketplace, stores can list on mammoth sites like eBay, Etsy, CD Baby, or Amazon.com. Locally traffic to online auction powerhouse TradeMe accounts for 50% of all web traffic in New Zealand. But to do business with Rene Spudvilas it's very simple. Email him.


Actually Rene, who deals in rare Japanese bicycle frames, initially began selling on eBay, with immediate success. "I only started after selling my own frame on USA eBay, which was the first Keirin frame I bought after moving to Japan. That frame was the 3rd most watched item in the world for sports category, and I got so many emails asking if I could find more for potential buyers." But he quickly got turned off, "After that I bought a few more frames to sell, but wanted to avoid eBay, because I did not like their fees." Avoiding the generic experience, poor customer service, and anonymous feel of large online marketplaces, he set out for himself. Rene realised how unique his product and his clientèle was, and decided to capitalise on it, "even if I only had a small blog, fans would find it, simply because no other search results would come up on google, if anyone typed *keirin* or *njs frame* etc..."


Spudvilas continues the DIY aesthetic throughout all aspects of his business. He takes photographs of the products himself, with close-ups of what his customers are really interested in. Descriptions forsake corporate speak, personally endorsing products or using more fan-boy terminology. Some products he uses himself "on my daily ride", others are "super sexy old school". Suppliers are really just friends with hand-crafted goods that he can vouch for. His latest product line is from Kishiguchi Yo, "one of my first friends in Japan, who grew up around a lot of pro keirin riders."


Local record label CMR continues in this same vein. Specialising in "Limited edition lathe-cut records, vinyl records and CDs", the site consists of a long list of albums. Reviews are long, eloquent affairs lifted from other sound magazines and distributors worldwide: The Wire, Tofaki, Incursion, Earpiece. The catalogue is rigorously updated and posted in plain text to alternative audio culture mailing lists such as New Zealand's AF (Audio Foundation) list.


Dusty Klein's Cadence Clothing fashion line is a one-man operation that he intends to keep that way. Quality is handmade and meticulous, but also allows for chance and "variants between pieces." Escaping the managerial and ethical dilemmas of offshore clothing factories, production is done in "small, detail-oriented runs." A relatively new company, Klein has intentionally limited his expansion, "believing that growth is not a necessary means of success." Promotion is organic, Klein photographing or filming riders that wear his apparel, and posting these on YouTube or Flickr photosets with titles like "Seattle respect".

New music, new model

These sounds have a history. Recorded on "the corner of Spring and Flinders Sts on a rainy afternoon, the corner of Spencer and Flinders Sts on a baking hot morning, a train ride from Parliament to Melbourne Central, a stroll through the food stalls at the Queen Vic markets on a Saturday morning, and a visit to the CERES Environmental Park in Brunswick," expat New Zealand duo Montano built their latest album from the ground up from found sounds, or field recordings. But you won't find it in record shops. They've put the whole album on Amie Street.

We've blogged in the past about new ways of marketing, distributing and selling work which is already digital, (Artists give it away with new distribution models). Amie Street goes a couple steps further than a simple "give what you want", or "get it for free" model, taking some tips from the school playground. If you're the first to discover a hot new band and download their tracks, it's free. But once that popularity hits the masses, the price of each song starts rising for every download it gets, capping at 98 cents. Plus - like the playground - if you're the cool kid who recommended the band to everyone from the get go, you're account is credited when they all catchup and start racking up the download count. And artists are taking notice; rappers like Busta Rhymes just put out a mixtape on Amie, Aussie dance kids Justice released their latest single, and Lou Reed dropped a couple one-off tracks that aren't on any albums.

TradeMe eats itself: Auction sites reused by artists

William Boling is an accomplished photographer. He studied drawing and painting at Georgia State University and L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Rennes, France. Featured on both Rhizome and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boling's studies of time and place are restrained and rigorous. But for this latest series of work, he didn't travel or scout locations. He surfed.

Finding and pairing objects from both TradeMe and it's U.S. counterpart, eBay, Boling created a series of odd couples - dress shoes and deer hooves, paintings and princess diana posters. Through Window, he's printed these and auctioning them off over the next month. To complicate matters, he's then taking the screenshots, emails, and user feedback involved in the first phase, compiling them into 3 books, and auctioning these off at the end of the project.

And while this is new terrain for photography, subverting web services and highlighting art as commodity has cropped up in other places recently. Daniel Malone purchased space for himself to promote his recent Gambia Show, "Black market next to my name". An upcoming show at Te Tuhi will also utilise TradeMe extensively. Austrian artists Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio staged "Google Will Eat Itself" a couple years ago, filtering funds received from Google AdWords to purchase stock in the global search giant.

Update: Emil McAvoy's "Better Work Stories" series follows this pattern, confronting TradeMe buyers with disturbing history both old and new: 1981 Springbok riots and police rape allegations. His "Police Baton sculpture for sale" features 3 batons in red, white and blue, incorporating molds of the artist's penis. Current bid: $1,010.00.