Jonathan Coulton
In 2005, Jonathan Coulton dropped out of a perfectly good software career to write music on the Internet. He embarked upon a bold experiment called Thing a Week, in which he home-recorded and released a new song every week for an entire year, giving them all away for free. Even he thought he was crazy. But while a struggling music industry fell to pieces over file sharing and shifting business models, Coulton quietly and independently amassed a small army of techies, nerds, and dedicated superfans who buy his music even though they don’t have to.