Nowadays, artists are also expected to build and maintain a relationship with their fans through their websites, social media accounts and other online forums. The trouble is, building a following on ONE website takes a lot of time and effort; maintaining vibrant communities in a dozen different places requires full-time attention. Many musicians are discouraged and frustrated by the sheer amount of time they spend in front of their computers.

Is this why we wanted to be musicians? To spend hours updating tour schedules, posting status updates and photos on every social network that pops up?

Enter ArtistData. Over the past few years, ArtistData has grown from a time-saving idea into an indispensable tool for more than 20,000 artists and industry pros. Using their system, artists can now update ONE account, and ArtistData syncs the relevant information with websites and social platforms all over the web, saving literally hours of mind-numbing, redundant grunt-work. Enter your tour date information in ArtistData, and it’s synced with your Facebook, MySpace and iLike profiles. ArtistData even keeps your official website’s data up-to-date!

ArtistData isn’t just useful for keeping your tour dates organized, though. You can post status updates, photos, tour posters or flyers and see them distributed across your networks. You can quickly and easily create a tour book based on the data you’ve entered. You can even sync your event calendar with iCal or Google Calendar to help you stay organized. I have the Calendar app on my iPhone synced with our ArtistData account, which means I always have up-to-the-minute information about upcoming shows, and it’s easy for me to see at a glance when and where we’ll be playing, with no extra effort beyond allowing the app to access our ArtistData feed.

Brenden Mulligan, the president and founder of ArtistData, has done it all in the music business: he’s helped organize festivals; he’s worked as a road-manager on a national arena tour; he’s even spent time working for record labels in Nashville. Brenden was kind enough to answer a few questions for me the other day. We talked about his company’s mission, the future of the music industry and the importance of social media in cultivating strong artist/fan relationships.

BRIAN: Artists today have more tools than ever before to interact with fans and keep their audience up to date with the most current information and content. ArtistData is a great example of a website/service that utilizes technology to help artists stay organized and in touch with their fans regardless of the platform they choose to use. How does ArtistData help musicians build the artist/fan relationship? Do you think it’s important for artists to cultivate a personal relationship with their fan base?

BRENDEN: I think forming a personal relationship with the fan base is more important than ever. Unfortunately, ArtistData doesn’t directly do that (how’s THAT for self-centred marketing?!). But what ArtistData does is remove hours of monotonous data management and free up a lot more time for artists to cultivate that relationship. I remember when we started, we used to say that by auto-updating MySpace, we’re not saying “don’t use myspace”, we’re saying “use myspace for valuable stuff, like actually talking with your fans, not boring copying and pasting”. That’s the philosophy we’ve had. ArtistData is a tool that gives artists more time to do what’s important: create music and communicate with their fans about it.

BRIAN: How does ArtistData help musicians bring their careers to another level?

BRENDEN: ArtistData allows musicians to have a lot more time to do what’s important. We take the monotonous data management and make it a breeze, giving them more time to spend talking with their fans and creating music.

BRIAN: Where did ArtistData come from? What was the motivation behind creating a social media aggregator?

BRENDEN: When I was at Aware Records, one of my main jobs was figuring out the digital music landscape and keeping artist profiles updated. In very little time, updating websites was an entire days work. It’s was pretty clear from the start that there needed to be a tool to allow artists to update them all at once.

BRIAN: How important is the social media trend to an artist today? Will social platforms and the tools they provide artists eventually replace the traditional music industry as a whole, or can labels learn to exploit these new media and remain relevant?

BRENDEN: It all depends on the artist. Some artists are just better off on their own, and other really benefit from what labels can provide. I think what it’s doing is giving artists choices. Artist’s don’t need to (and should never) start their career with the only goal to get signed. They’ll be really disappointed. They should have the goal of slowly going a meaningful and committed fan base and if one day, certain relationships with labels, agencies, publishers, etc present themselves and are a good fit, fantastic! But artists have plenty of tools to do it on their own and should always start out with that in mind.

BRIAN: Do you think fans want/need a closer connection to the artists they admire? Is there a downside to stripping away the mystique, or does intimacy cultivate a more lasting interest in an artist’s career?

BRENDEN: Again, it all depends on the artist. To generalize, a singer songwriter probably has a lot more to gain by really letting the fans into their lives, where a mega-rock band might benefit from being a few steps removed. I think it all depends how the band wants to be perceived, and that a lot of times is consistent with the music they play. Fans of bluegrass or americana, in my opinion, are naturally more interested in songwriting than fans of top 40 processed pop. So blogging, tweeting, etc about the songwriting process will probably be more effective in the bluegrass market than others.

BRIAN: Do you think the emphasis on “extra content” we see today will help bands to discourage illegal downloading of their albums? Is this a battle we should be fighting, or is our time better spent figuring out ways to reach the people who ARE getting our albums for free?

BRENDEN: As unpopular as it might sound, I think all this “extra content” is crap. People want the music, and you shouldn’t try to trick them into buying the music to get extra footage. Sell them side by side and the fans who care will buy the extra content. But no one who would normally go steal the album is getting tricked into buying it because they get an extra video.

I also don’t think we need to just assume no one will pay and give it all away for free. I am a big supporter of giving a song or two away for an email address, but bands should get paid for the work they do. The problem is pricing. I think people are still wrapped up in thinking that albums should still cost what they used to cost ($10-$18). Personally, I think the bands that take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t cost NEARLY as much to manufacture, record, create, an album and sell the digital tracks for a lower price are the smarter ones. The marginal cost of selling 1 more album is almost nothing, so $5 is a pretty great profit, especially if you can make the people who would have tried to steal it think “well, it’s only $5. I’ll just buy it.”

BRIAN: What does the music industry look like in five years? In ten?

BRENDEN: There will still be a LOT of musicians and a LOT of music fans. The musicians with the real talent will still succeed and tons of musicians who aren’t good enough to really break through the noise will still be blaming their lack of success on external issues. There will still be tons of live music in cities around the world every night. And the happiest people in the industry will be those who are happy earning a decent living playing music or helping musicians. The unhappiest will still be those trying to get back “the good old days” and wondering why they can’t travel by helicopter anymore.

BRIAN: Is there a great online tool for artists that you think is largely overlooked?

BRENDEN: I think the most important tool could be facebook, but facebook needs to give artists a better way to form a true presence there.

BRIAN: Agreed – the access is there, but the tools haven’t caught up just yet. And finally: what is the one piece of advice you’d give an independent artist looking to find an audience in today’s music industry?

BRENDEN: Take time to make the music amazing. Co-write. Get mentored. Take lessons. Because the better the music is, the easier every other thing they do is.

BRIAN: Great advice! Thanks a lot Brenden, and here’s hoping more artists discover all the ways ArtistData helps them to work smarter, letting them spend more time on the important stuff: writing, recording and performing great music!

iBad

Not so much.

As far as I can tell, we’re looking at a device for people who want all the limitations of an iPod Touch, but still want all the inconvenience of a netbook. It’s as if Apple looked at the market, decided that they were making a little too much money, and figured they’d design a device that illustrates beautifully just how much better all of their other products are.

I can just imagine that meeting:

“OK all, we really need to lower the bar a bit here. The public is expecting too much from us now, after the successes we’ve had in redefining the way the world experiences portable media. How do we disappoint all the tech-bloggers out there?”

Someone stands up. “First of all, let’s make it just a little too big to comfortably carry around without a laptop bag, but NOT make it as useful or powerful as a laptop. We should also make sure the screen isn’t protected, so it can get scratched up by the other stuff you carry around in your laptop bag. Like, for instance, your LAPTOP.”

Someone else chimes in, “We should probably make the human interface method less convenient than a computer or iPhone, too – maybe force users to either lie the device flat on a table or cradle it in their lap? Can we make it impossible to use well one-handed, but also difficult to look at while typing if you put it on a flat surface?”

“Good point. And while we’re at it, let’s NOT include any sort of camera, any sort of peripheral support or any kind of multi-tasking. Live video streaming and video conferencing are getting more and more popular, so we should make sure our device is useless in those areas.”

Looking at this thing, I can’t help but laugh – I’m reminded of this video:

Sarcasm aside, you can probably guess I won’t be buying version 1.0 unless they figure out some creative way to blow my mind before the iPad hits shelves in Canada in a few weeks.

(Written on my MacBook Pro and proofread on my iPhone. So much for journalistic distance..)

One great (and free) tool I’ve had a chance to play with that really illustrates the difference is

By Demand Media

Demand Media‘s new “live blogging” platform CoverItLive. I discovered CoverItLive through, of all things, the official website of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Mike Ulmer, a frequent blogger and contributor for the Leafs, uses CoverItLive to host live “blogs” during certain games, and after participating in a couple of these events I decided to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood.

In essence, CoverItLive is a unique combination of blog, chatroom and live text interview. The interface looks like a classic chatroom, with a twist: users submit their comments or questions, and the administrator receives the posts in a list, after which it’s up to them to publish whichever comments they choose and to respond as they see fit.

Insert interactive polls on the fly

The strength of this system is that it incorporates the advantages and interactivity of a live chatroom with the comment moderation and control of a blog. Admins can use as much or as little of their readers’ input as they desire, and they also have the option of “promoting” any reader to an unmoderated status. Admins can privately message any contributor; they can put certain posts onto a special “hold” list; they can even ban users if the need arises. They can also create “producers”, either by promoting live readers or by invitation in advance. Producers have all the powers of an administrator, and having a couple of producers on hand can be very handy during busy events when the questions and comments are flying.

There are a variety of additional tools available to administrators. For example, you can upload media (photos, videos or music), write blocks of text, or create polls for your users which you can access from a sidebar while your event is live. You can edit or delete posts on the fly, or you can re-visit an event after the fact to edit or fine-tune it.  You can even insert a live video streaming window (through a streaming service like Ustream.tv), although in my limited testing this function seemed a little buggy. Still, CoverItLive is officially in beta, so a few glitches can be forgiven considering how much of their system works flawlessly. I’m sure many companies would be charging handsomely for such a service in its current state, especially since there’s no catch: no ads, no commitments, and no hassle.

On the audience side, things are equally slick. Users can log in through their Facebook, MySpace or Twitter profiles, or not at all (if they can stand being stamped with the dreaded “Guest” label). Demand Media was nice enough to include an API as well, so webmasters  can choose to have their contributors log in with their own custom credentials.

Sharing your event is relatively easy. Just paste the provided code to embed the event window anywhere you like – with certain limitations. CoverItLive is embedded in an iFrame, which makes it hard to integrate into MySpace or Facebook pages, and even sticking the window into my WordPress blog took some messing around. The advantage of an iFrame (if you can get it to work) is that it is rendered the same way on any device – so my CoverItLive event looks just as good on my iPhone as it does on my desktop PC. Still, most people will be hoping to embed their events in all their usual online haunts; iFrames make this a little less convenient. Demand Media’s workaround is to offer standard HTML code, enabling users to view your event in a popup window – not ideal, but definitely better than nothing.

Another great feature of the CoverItLive system is Enterprise Groups. By creating a group and adding events to it, you create a mini and consistent blog window, complete with a list of upcoming and completed events and the ability to “replay” any event you may have missed.

Embed your Enterprise Group window.

The nice thing about Enterprise Groups is that you have the option of leaving certain events live indefinitely. You can invite producers or “panelists” to individual events, so that writers can check in whenever they feel the urge and have full moderation powers – but only for the events you specify. Live events are highlighted in the sidebar, and users can switch between events on the fly as they please. Best of all, when nothing is live, users can enter their email address to be reminded about upcoming events at a preset time (and yes, you can export those email addresses).

Of course, from inside CoverItLive’s administration system, you can view detailed metrics for your events: number of live viewers, number of comments submitted and published, number of replays watched for a given event and more. If that’s not enough for you, just about EVERYTHING is customizable. Turn off reader submissions. Choose to enable or disable reader avatars. Even specify Twitter search terms, and watch as relevant Tweets are posted to your event in real time!

In the dozen or so events I’ve hosted, I’ve had nothing but positive feedback from my audience, and the few bugs I’ve found are quite minor and easily forgiven considering the overall quality of the package. And at “free”, the price couldn’t be more right. Fans love the feeling of watching a blog or interview happen before their eyes, especially when their own questions get answered – and unlike a chat (which can be hard to moderate live) YOU dictate all the live content. No overly chatty or aggressive user can take over the conversation, and you don’t get stuck answering the same questions over and over.

For the blogger looking for an interactive twist or any writer or artist looking to connect more directly with their fans while still maintaining control over their finished product, give CoverItLive a shot! There are a lot of reasons to love this program, and I look forward to discovering the rest of them. Here’s the link once again:

http://www.coveritlive.com

coveritlive rules

In the world of social media, more isn’t always better. It’s hard to figure out just where to spend our time and energy, especially when our efforts rarely produce any instantly quantifiable results. When I first started trying to build my band’s online presence and I sized up all the options, I subscribed to what I now think of as the “Dog Licking Itself” approach: if it’s free, and easy, and produces no noticeable negative consequences, well…. why not?

The longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve grown to understand that there ARE negative

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

consequences to this all-inclusive social-media-love-fest way of thinking. We all have only so much time in our day, and unless we’re really lucky (or really good at it) updating social networks doesn’t pay the bills. Setting up accounts everywhere you can splash an avatar may seem like a no-brainer, but there’s one major snag: if your content isn’t current and dynamic, it isn’t exciting. And if your profile or site doesn’t inspire excitement in the people who find it, they won’t come back.

The strength of new media is its interactivity. Fans get excited about your band, or your product, or your ideas, but in order to KEEP them excited, you have to provide them with content. Even if you’re not personally conversing with people on your site or profile, frequent updates and new content will give your audience the impression that you care about communicating with them, and that you feel they deserve your attention.

Consider this scenario: you have gone to the effort of setting up accounts on all the major networking platforms, but you’ve found that Facebook is really much more user-friendly and feature rich than the others, so you have gradually stopped updating your other profiles and you’re really focusing on building your Facebook following.

A potential fan hears about you somehow (radio, blogs, reviews, whatever). They are interested enough to search for you online. They type your name into their favorite search engine, and BANG – there you are! The first link takes them to your MySpace page.

Upon clicking through to your profile, they notice that although there is some content there, YOU haven’t logged in for a few months. Your last blog post is talking about 4th of July celebrations, and it’s now early December. The last comment from a fan is six months old. They poke around, and then navigate back to their search results.

Second on the list is your profile on LinkedIn. This one’s even worse – you DO have a profile, but that’s all – from the looks of things, you’ve NEVER updated anything here. You only have a few dozen fans and it’s obvious the profile is in a coma.

But…. lunch break is over, and your disappointed potential fan hasn’t got time to keep searching. Maybe they’ll try again later – or maybe not. Perhaps they’ll find your beautifully moderated and content-rich Facebook Page and you’ll have a brand-new hardcore fan… or maybe you’ll never even know how close they came to joining your circle.

This is the oft-overlooked danger of jumping into the world of social networks with both feet. Most people don’t stop to consider it, but you’re essentially creating a new website associated with your brand EVERY TIME YOU CREATE A PROFILE. Think of all the time and money we spend trying to keep our homepages fresh and exciting. Does it make sense to clutter up search engines with results that won’t hold a user’s interest? Isn’t it better to figure out where your target demographics are most likely to congregate, and focus your efforts there?

If you’re determined to spread yourself as far and wide as possible online, here’s my advice (for what it’s worth):

1. Use services like Ping.fm to update ALL your social networks at once – send photos from your phone, ask questions, keep people interested.
2. Musicians: make sure you have a service like ArtistData set up so that you can automate as much content as possible: tour dates, blog updates, photo galleries etc. This way, even if you can’t take the time to get personally involved in EVERY network in which you choose to participate as frequently as you’d like, you won’t be left with a bunch of zombie profiles and your presence online will be fresh and dynamic – however someone might find you.
3. Before setting up a new social network, do a little research. Who is using this service? What advantages does it offer over other, more established networks? How much time will you need to spend every week to keep this new profile active and interactive? It’s better to skip a network you won’t use than to let it fall by the wayside and decompose.
4. Make bookmarks for all your sites, and make sure you have a way to remember all the logins and passwords. I keep all my social networking bookmarks in the bookmark bar of my browser AND pinned to my start page. It’s easier to remember to update a profile when it’s constantly reminding you of its existence.
5. Don’t be afraid to close a profile. If it’s not working, you’re not networking.

And always remember the lesson of the overzealous dog: just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s a great idea… and never forget that you’re IN PUBLIC.

(As usual, these opinions are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of… well…. anyone else).

The music business is, as everyone knows, in a state of clumsy transition between the analog past and the digital future. Although it’s well documented that the labels had lots of time to prepare for what’s happened, most of them did little or nothing – beyond suing a few potential customers and clamping down on internet service providers, that is. In a stunning example of “cover-your-eyes-and-ears-and-ignore-the-world-ism”, many of the people with the power to control the inevitable slide instead ran around applying band-aids to axe-wounds, with predictable results.

Clubhouse Studios in Rhinebeck, NY

What caused this nosedive? Well, to hear the industry execs tell it, you’d think there were cartels of suave techno-pirates working diligently to bring the labels to their knees. Music “thieves” were painted to look like hardened criminals one illegal MP3 download from abandoning the rule of law altogether, running naked through the streets, robbing banks and firing their tommy-guns joyfully into the air. These reprobates had to be stopped in the name of a free-market economy, for the good of the free world, in the name of good, hard working people everywhere.

The problem was, these “criminals” weren’t out to break any laws. They saw an industry grown fat on its own excesses; an industry happy to flaunt its wealth; an industry arrogant enough to charge $20 for an album of filler songs and soulless cookie-cutter drivel. And they started to wonder why they were paying so much for so little.

When you control the means of production – when your product is delivered to the waiting public through a narrow, tightly-controlled and highly regulated pipeline – you get to charge whatever the market will bear. This is the basic founding principle of capitalism, right? For decades, we had no choice but to pay whatever the stores chose to charge for music. Fine. Problem was, we had to pay BEFORE we had any guarantee of the quality of the product we were buying. Can you imagine if every transaction was like that?

Suppose you walked into a grocery store and had to order (and pay for) your produce before getting a look at it. Maybe the bunch of carrots they gave you would be great – crunchy, juicy, plump and delicious. Or maybe the grocer would realize that since you couldn’t get carrots anywhere else, he didn’t have to worry so much about the quality of the produce he was providing. You’d start noticing that instead of 12 quality carrots, you were getting just enough good ones to keep you from returning the bunch in disgust. Chances are, the only carrot you’d really enjoy would be the one you’d heard on the radio nonstop for the last month.

Wait.

Right. My point is, what if you suddenly found out that you could try each and every carrot before deciding whether you wanted to buy them? Best yet, you could sample them FOR FREE, FROM YOUR HOME!! Goodbye lecherous grocer, hello satisfying salads. Never again would you have to suffer the indignity of biting into a rotten carrot you’d been promised was great – nor would you have to sit through the REST of Fergie’s album. Heh.

At first, the music industry turned a blind eye to the growing trend of “try-before-you-possibly-buy”, with the excuse that “people won’t be satisfied with inferior quality MP3 files for long – they’ll realize that their CDs sound much better”. Sounds reasonable… but it was actually, really, REALLY stupid.

Thing is, the only reason MP3 files sounded bad was that they were compressed digitally, to make the files smaller, to facilitate faster download speeds. This was back in the days when cable or broadband internet was the exception rather than the rule, and a 3 mb MP3 file would take you from a few minutes to a few hours to download. It was nothing short of criminal negligence on the part of the labels not to acknowledge the inevitable: when bandwidth and storage space got cheaper, the size of the files being downloaded would cease to matter – and the quality would start going up.

Art from "Soapbox Heroes"

The funny part is that CDs aren’t really all that great when it comes to audio quality. (nerd alert..)

CD quality audio is 16-bit, with a 44,100 KHz sample rate. This isn’t really very high at all. As an example, our last two studio albums were recorded and mixed at TWICE that quality, and had to be “dithered” down for the transfer to CD format. I mention this only to illustrate the obvious next step in the downward spiral: when it no longer matters how big your song file is, suddenly you’ll see bands releasing super high quality (read, better than CD) versions of their songs digitally – and the CD as a “high-quality” music format will be instantly obsolete. I give it 6-8 months, a year at most, before you start hearing of bands selling ultra-high quality digital albums through their websites… if you haven’t already. Labels have been HEMORRHAGING money in their attempt to keep consumers tied to a format that is, for all intents and purposes, already in a terminal decline.

The really sad thing is that the EXACT SAME THING is happening to all forms of video entertainment, be it TV, movies, or music videos. The ONLY reason it’s taken a little longer is that video files are harder to compress and are therefore much bigger. When our computers get to the point where downloading a hi-definition episode of CSI Miami takes as long as it used to take us to download the theme song, the TV and movie industries will suffer the EXACT SAME FATE. Thus far they haven’t shown many signs that they’re ready for the coming crisis.

While this was all going on, another interesting trend was developing: bands were starting to realize they didn’t really need the big labels anymore, at least not in the traditional sense.

Historically, the only way an artist could reach the masses in any significant way was to sign on the dotted line, put their career in a major label’s hands and toe the line, hoping they wouldn’t get TOO screwed in the process. Artists were built and destroyed by commercial radio, MTV, music magazines and industry award shows. There was ONLY ONE SYSTEM, and if you wanted mass exposure you had to conform yourself to that system, to one extent or another.

Then came the internet.

Suddenly, an artist didn’t need a team of people licking envelopes and posting newsletters to their fanbase – a couple of minutes writing an email to the email list would take care of that nicely, and much more personally to boot. Artists could target potential fans directly through talkboards and forums, and eventually through social networking giants like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook – sites with demographic-based search engines BUILT IN!

All of a sudden, you didn’t need to be played on the radio for thousands of people to hear you – you just had to drive traffic to your website or MySpace profile. With virtually no effort, you could send a message to 10,000 of your fans instantly, telling them about tour dates, new releases, special offers, or just spouting your thoughts and rants on any subject. Kinda like I’m doing right now.

The real catalyst in this whole farce however, comes from a glaring disconnect between the labels and the artists they’re supposedly representing. The industry was – and is – OBSESSED with the idea of controlling access to their artists’ music, for purely economic reasons. The artists, on the other hand, DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE MONEY. (Most of them don’t, anyway.) For the artist, the whole point – the passion driving them to live below the poverty line and get kicked around by club owners night after night – is writing, performing and living their art. Ask any musician if they’d rather keep their music in an iron fist, control the public’s access totally and sell 5000 albums the conventional way, or have their songs spread around the world online, listened to and loved by millions of people, with no personal financial gain. Now take into account the fact that the average major-label act would never see a penny from the 5000 albums sold anyways. What do you think they’d say? I know what I’d say.

An aside: don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with an artist making money from their art. If they produce something that the public places value on, and the public is willing to pay for that product, the artist has every right to expect compensation for their work – however, the very fact that so many artists starve themselves and scrape by doing what they love is evidence of the fact that the art, not the compensation, is the motivation behind the artist. End aside.

What happened next is pretty predictable: the labels attacked the consumers who were stealing their products, expecting the artists to jump on board and join the good fight. What actually happened was the opposite, for the most part. Artists realized that rather than being the million-mouthed monster destroying their careers, the internet was an incredible tool for self-promotion and would enable them to be much more self-reliant, with less and less need for the publicity machine provided by the majors. Plus, by cutting out middle-men, musicians could actually start SEEING some of the money their music was earning. The average independent musician sees more real cash from 10,000 independent sales than many major artists see from a million sales. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a fact, and a telling one. And even though most of those musicians aren’t in it “for the money”, the money is very nice as well, thank you.

What happens next?

Well, the first thing everyone needs to get their heads around (if the music industry is going to survive) is that radio and television, in their current form, are dead. D-E-A-D. Broadcast media will collapse when they can no longer sustain themselves by selling ads; they will stop selling ads when the companies buying ads realize that people aren’t watching or listening anymore. Personal Digital Video Recorders like TiVo are speeding this process up; what’s the point of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a TV commercial when all your target consumers are recording their favorite shows and skipping all the ads? The most important concept in media in the next few decades will be the concept of Media On Demand. And there’s NOBODY out there who, given the option, would demand to sit through commercials. Where will people go to find the entertainment, news and information they crave, On Demand, without commercial harassment? YouTube. Blogger.com. Any number of no-fee-ad-free avenues to digital media. Broadcast TV and radio do not fit into this picture.

When TV and radio disappear, so does the pipeline the music industry has been leaning on all these years. You can’t sell 10 million albums if you don’t have a way to reach 10 million people at once (bye bye, MTV), and although the internet is a great way to reach a lot of people, it’s much less controllable. If you think of websites as “channels”, it seems pretty obvious: paying for an ad on NBC makes sense when there are only a hundred channels to choose from, but if there were a hundred million…

The days of a few hand-picked artists dominating the music industry are rapidly coming to an end. True, there are still millions of people out there who will buy whatever they’re told is cool – but in order to sell to those people you have to be able to reach them, and to be their ONLY source of information. That used to be easy, but it isn’t anymore. Look at what’s happened on MySpace: instead of a few bands having a few million fans each, you’ve got literally hundreds of thousands of bands with tens of thousands of fans each. These bands are out there, touring, selling their music digitally, selling tons of t-shirts and stickers and doing quite well for themselves because they’ve realized that SUCCESS DOESN’T MEAN SELLING TEN MILLION ALBUMS FOR A FACELESS CORPORATE ENTITY. Success is playing a song you wrote in a city you’ve never visited, and hearing a thousand people sing it back to you. Success is cultivating a die-hard fanbase who will support you and allow you to do what you love for ten years, twenty years – not two singles in the top ten, a whirlwind of publicity and a lifetime of obscurity. Success is making any kind of a living doing the thing you love. It sure as hell isn’t making a fortune for a hundred leeches who can’t whistle one of your songs or recognize you at an industry party.

The labels who will survive are the ones who are smart enough to redefine their position in the industry. Labels who understand that success in the new music industry means carving out a niche – finding and reaching out to the people with whom your music will resonate for years to come – these are the labels who will serve a purpose, and who will shape the music industry of the next few decades. We’re really lucky to be working with a great bunch of smart people at UFO/Invasion – (www.ufomusic.com). Labels like UFO and other “new-model-indies” are quickly redefining the concept of the record label, and are thriving in the process.

What this all means is that artists are in control of their own destinies in a way they have never been before, and as a result the bands who survive will be the ones who can get back to the basic purpose of being in a band in the first place: producing music that we, as consumers, actually want to listen to. I, for one, am glad to see the state of the industry today – maybe in an age of real freedom of choice the cream will start rising to the top.

Or maybe, in an age of infinite Entertainment On Demand, with no dominant cultural voices shaping public opinion, the mediaverse will fragment into millions of super-specialized slivers and we’ll all get lost in the noise. Whatever happens, I think it will happen soon – and those of us who aren’t willing to evolve will find ourselves becoming dinosaurs much faster than we’d expect.

Thanks for reading – till next time!