I gave serendipity a chance today at SXSWi, opting to attend a session solely because the title caught my eye—Making Sure The World Doesn’t Suck: How Independent Content Can Save The Media. The payoff: a lively session, although the topic often felt like an umbrella that anything could fit under, and the brief video chat with Sean Lennon embedded below.

Lennon was the outlier on the panel moderated by IFC’s Evan Shapiro, rankling some of the others when he said “you don’t have to be dedicated to be a blogger.” He quickly added that he wasn’t trying to impugn the character of bloggers, just to highlight the low barriers of entry for blogging and many other areas. Yes, agreed game designer Harvey Smith, but “a low barrier to entry doesn’t mean a low barrier to making great content.”

When an audience member shouted out OK Go as an example of viral video, Lennon quickly pointed out that when he was at Capitol EMI, “They had this incredibly viewed video (the treadmill) but the proportion of sales to video was incredibly small. It was shocking.” Not something this audience really wanted to hear.

Lennon now is part of Chimera Music, a music collaborative, and produced his mother Yoko Ono’s last album. For her current tour, they use a video done from 1950s Japanese animation for a budget of close to zero. The video got a great reception from the SXSW crowd, with instant requests for the link. One problem: it’s not online—and not because of rights. Lennon explains why in our conversation.