Making a New Music Industry

I've recently read quite a few posts on DRM, the RIAA, and other inconveniences standing between some people and their music. I haven't bothered to make any links to these topics because they're not hard to find. I actually find them tough to avoid sometimes. I have found most of these articles mind-numbingly boring, someone complains that they can't get music on their iPod, or that customers don't appreciate what the music industry is trying to do for them when they don't let them put music on their iPods, or anywhere but an iPod. I wish I had an iPod.

What I'm going to write about today is my solution to the problem of music as an industry. Not that it's a problem for me since I live in Canada, but being the imaginative individual that I am, I'd still like to come up with a solution. It's quite simple really, a company simply needs to implement an automated system to take advantage of the Long Tail.

If you don't already know about the long tail, I'll give a brief explanation. Fifty percent of potential sales are made up of a relatively small variety of items, but this still leaves fifty percent of potential sales made up of a very large variety. The key is that these two halves are the exact same size. The problem is having the capacity to sell a large enough variety of items to make a profit. This can only be accomplished if the cost of selling one more type of item is drastically lower than the tiny profit to be made by selling that item.

To put it in more concrete terms, the bands you hear on the radio and see on television make up the bulk of music sales. However, there are thousands upon thousands of bands out there, making music, but not selling albums (or concert tickets, or t-shirts, or band logo toilet seat covers). All these bands combined could make up the same volume of sales as the lucky few selected to get air-play.

What is needed for this to take place is a highly scalable model for distributing music, and selling associated items. I won't get in to too much detail right now, but the key is self-service. Any band with a song and a mailing address should be able to sign up on their own, and have their music and merchandise marketed and sold just like every other band who has already signed up. This kind of self-service sign-up is exactly what made google the force they are today. Anyone with a credit card can sign up and buy advertisements.

With all this being said, it should be clear what the music industry will look like in a long time or a short time. They will provide the marketing, and sell merchandise on demand. The music for the most part will be given away free, so people can decide for themselves what music they really like. As this model builds, no one will expect to make a living selling music. There will be enough bands giving away their music for free that every musical taste can be satisfied with something that can be obtained for free. The way musicians will be making a living is by selling things associated with their music, or even by some of the traditional methods.

This new model will not prevent musicians from making their millions, not that they're intrinsically entitled to the potentially make millions, but just because they're giving away music to be listened to doesn't mean they're giving away their rights to it. Movies, television, advertisements, and radio broadcasts still need music to play, and are willing and able to pay for it now and in the future.

This should be becoming perfectly to everyone now. A band provides whatever content they care to provide, the new record company sells whatever they can to whoever they can. What makes this so exciting is the need for scalability. There's not much hope of a top-40 band trying out this new model. They're already a top-40 band, so the current system is working for them just fine. What the new music company needs is thousands of bands to put together the listener base of the top-40 band. This wouldn't be a problem for an internet based interface to a music company. The reason the company will be able to get thousands of bands is that they will be built around selling everything for every band. Because the company is concentrating their efforts on selling anything from anyone, it will be worthwhile for every band that's not already in an exclusive contract to sign up.

The rest is simply a matter of creativity and marketing. People want music. Having such a wide assortment of music should make it more likely that any given music lover can find music they like. This will lead to a wider audience, which means that any given band should be able to find someone who at least wants to listen to their music.

It's easy to see how this model can grow very quickly to a huge potential customer base. Potentially larger than the top-40 customer base. What's more it's actually advantageous to let people listen to music without limitations. Not just let them, but really try to get to listen to more music that they will like.

There is no new technology required to do any of this. It's all a matter of implementation , and a realisation that it can be done. I've wanted to do this myself for a while, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I would love to hear anything and everything you have to say on this topic, or on the post itself. Tell me why this will or will not work, something I wasn't clear about, something I ignored. I'm also interested in hearing how you enjoyed the post itself. Did it keep you interest, did it read well, did it flow smoothly from one thought to the next?

I wrote this post without the use of an outline. I'm also not reading it over before I post it. These are the exact symptoms of writing anxiety I am trying to overcome. This post also took me two evenings to write due to my inability to put effective sentences together quickly. Maybe I should be sticking to topics, instead of writing about the post itself, since this topic seems to have brought out the problems I need to overcome. We'll see how it goes.

Never Giving Up

I'm making another post as soon as possible, hoping that by making many posts, I'll get into the habit of writing before I lose interest. The same technique worked when I was learning to play bass. I would sit in my room and just make sure the bass was making sound for hours at a time. Eventually it became routine, and soon after I was playing because I loved it. If this blog works as well as my bass routine I'll be moving on to more difficult techniques in no time.

I've always found that one of the most difficult parts of non-technical writing is creating smooth transitions from one thought to another. I was taught in English class to write an outline before starting a piece of writing. Among other things, an outline makes it much easier to organize thoughts and the transitions between them , which is why I took the time to write one for this post. I know it's a little too formal a technique for a blog post, but I'm just making noise for now.

Today seems to be my day for nurturing my good habits. After a two-week hiatus from lifting weights due to a sore wrist, I can finally continue my fitness regime. I've been going with something loosely resembling The Hacker's Diet. I track my weight and body fat percentage with a spreadsheet, and use that to determine when I need to make adjustments. Over the last two weeks the spreadsheet has shown me that I seriously need to make adjustments.

I wish there was a way to objectively measure my writing skills progress the way I can with my weight. I feel like I'm getting better since I finished up to this point in this point in just over an hour, but that doesn't sound like a good metric to measure writing skill by. It doesn't matter. I'll just keep playing blog until it starts bing fun.

Writing Anxiety

If this works the way I hope it will, this will be a blog that documents how I overcome my anxiety about writing. The title, "Two Hours" is a what's-it-called to how much anxiety I get. Two hours is how long it took me to come up with the title.

I invite any grammar and style corrections if anyone would like to offer them. I'd look up that sort of thing myself, but it won't sink in unless I practice, so I'm taking care of the practice first, then maybe if writing starts to interest me I'll start to look up that sort of thing. So far this hasn't gotten me very far, it's taken me far longer to write this post than the blog title, and I've been really pushing myself just to write anything at all.

My brother was telling me one time about a famous musician's (I think it was one of The Beatles) opinion on how songs end. The opinion was that having songs fade out at the end is a cop-out, because it means the artist doesn't have to actually write an ending.