There are so many valuable sources now about new music business analysis and idea creation, it is hard to keep up.  For those of you who may have missed them and may want to see, here’s a few that I’ve found useful and interesting. (And if you notice the “full story” dates, some aren’t even that new)

1.  Resnikoff’s Parting Shot: Smashing the CD… to Bits

“What would happen if the majors stopped pressing CDs right now, closed down their plants, and wrote off their physical retail networks?  The answer is that they’d lose billions, right off the bat!  The lights would start flickering immediately!

But, they’d also quickly shrink unnecessary overhead, ditch ineffective legacy commitments, assume nimbler stances, and refocus all of their energies towards digital formats and concepts.  And, start building companies designed to survive in the 2010s.”

By Paul Resnikoff (full story here)

2.  Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

“Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today‟s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today‟s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute.

What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants”.

Digital Natives Digital Immigrants ©2001 Marc Prensky  (full story here)

3.  Minds For The Future: Why Digital Immersion Matters

“Like many other crucial skills, digital literacy needs to be taught and learned through constant practice.  Naturally, this doesn’t explain why some Digital Natives will get more out of their sessions than others do.  But what about those who get much more practice?  Its estimated by Professor Urs Gasser that for kids who turn fifteen in 2016 or so, “they are likely to spend somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 hours per year on digital technologies.”  Going onto say that, “Five years later, at age twenty, they will have accumulated at least 10,000 hours as active users of the Internet, if the current statistics still apply.”

This amount of time, in turn, is equivalent to what Malcolm Gladwell argued to be the magic number for true expertise in Outliers.  Whether you take into consideration world-class violinists, concert pianists, chess grandmasters, star athletes, Bill Gates, the Beatles, and what have you, 10,000 hours appears again and again.  “It seems,” neurologist Daniel Levitin writes, “that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”  Ten years, Gladwell says, is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice.  For these Digital Natives it will only have taken them five years”.

By Kyle Bylin (full story here)

4.  Digital Natives In The Classroom

“Digital Natives, Generation-D (digital), Nintendo Kids, the MTV generation, whatever term you chose to describe them, today’s youth has grown up with an uprecedented access to and appetite for technology and new media. Since 1970, when Pong (the revolutionary video arcade game) was introduced, children have voraciously consumed a steady diet of digital games, music videos, and the world wide web. More recently, they have enthusiastically embraced technologies that are on the leading edge of the technology wave including live chats, instant messaging, smart mobs, blogs, wikis, modding, and more. While these terms might be common parlance in the vernacular of Digital Natives, they are cryptic and foreign to the “Digital Immigrants” who struggle to understand and master these new technologies.”
by Michael Culligan, SDSU Educational Technology (full story here [EDIT: Link now down])

5.  Advice For Musicians In 140 Characters Or Less

“I recently asked Hypebot’s Twitter followers to contribute their best advice to musicians in twitterspeak’s 140 characters or less. Below are a few of the best that that I gathered usingTwitoaster, a free online utility that threads and archives twitter conversations, bringing context and adding stats to your Twitter communications.”

By Bruce Houghton (full story here)