{"id":3539,"date":"2011-12-20T15:15:07","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T07:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=3539"},"modified":"2015-02-18T07:42:19","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T07:42:19","slug":"my-latest-muse-marketplace-sg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2011\/12\/20\/my-latest-muse-marketplace-sg\/","title":{"rendered":"My latest muse: marketplace.sg"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.train-them-well.com\/marketplace.jpg?w=770\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an idea I have that&#8217;s been stewing in my head for a couple of years that I think is finally begin to emerge properly.<\/p>\n<p>There are new business models emerging that allow us to skip publishers. Writers can write and sell e-books online. Musicians can write and sell music online. We can skip the middleman. We have blogshops and eBay.<\/p>\n<p>But not all of us have learnt to use this yet, it&#8217;s still relatively a new thing. Most musicians I know still think about trying to get record deals. The way I see it, a record deal isn&#8217;t the answer to your problems- it&#8217;s what you earn once you&#8217;ve built relationships with your fans. It&#8217;s like a degree- it doesn&#8217;t have value in itself, it&#8217;s just something that shows what you&#8217;ve accomplished. It&#8217;s not a substitute for the actual accomplishment, the work that you have to do.<\/p>\n<p>The challenge as I see it is thus: Singapore does have good music, good writing and good art. <strong>But it&#8217;s not as visible or accessible as it could be, as it should be.<\/strong>\u00a0At present, it&#8217;s far too difficult for well-meaning Singaporeans to support our artists and creators. This shouldn&#8217;t be the case!<\/p>\n<p>I encountered <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kiva.org\">kiva.org<\/a> yesterday, and I loved it so much that I immediately signed up for an account (it&#8217;s effortless) and lent US$25 to a girl in Tajikistan to fund her gift shop. And I&#8217;m wondering- could we do the same thing for Singaporean creators and entrepreneurs? I don&#8217;t see why not!<\/p>\n<p>I want to build a site and community that&#8217;s focused on making it easier for Singaporeans to support our creators, modeling it loosely after kiva.org. Here are our artists, here&#8217;s their work, click here to buy it and support them. A bonafide marketplace.<\/p>\n<p>The first thing I have to do is to develop a mastery of the sales mechanisms- how to take something and sell it online. Once I do that, I have to teach others to do it too. And then I&#8217;ve to create a common space where everyone can buy and sell their work, in a community of people who feel good about supporting one another. It can exist. It should exist. Let&#8217;s make it happen.<\/p>\n<p>Please let me know if you&#8217;ve thought of something similar, or if you like the idea and would like to get involved. I don&#8217;t exactly know what I&#8217;m doing yet, but I know that I want to make it happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an idea I have that&#8217;s been stewing in my head for a couple of years that I think is finally begin to emerge properly. There are new business models emerging that allow us to skip publishers. Writers can write and sell e-books online. Musicians can write and sell music&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-V5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9274,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539\/revisions\/9274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}