The underlying problem with this discussion is that it implies that we are having fewer greatly loved songs and/or great songs that are “heard” fewer times by fewer people. Does a lack “radio dominance” equate to a lack of how many times a song is listened to by fans?  Does a number 1 song on the chart get more “earplays” than a number ten song?

If we talk about “earplay” rather than “airplay” (charts), I would suggest that we have more songs getting more earplay today than when radio charts were a more reliable measure–which they probably no longer are.  People have many more ways and opportunities to listen to a song than they did even ten years ago.  Technology has brought us choice. We now listen to what we want, when we want, whether it is via CD’s in the car or iPods anywhere.  Nobody sits and listens to a radio station waiting to hear their favorite new song played.  And even if a station is playing a certain song 3-5 times a day, what percentage of their listening audience actually hears it.  We are just not getting a lot of earplays out of radio these days.

This does not mean that there are not current songs that are as valued, as loved, or as often heard as in 2000.  It just means that the listeners’ tools for listening have expanded, allowing them to hear their favorites more often — even though we don’t have a way to accumulate the numbers.  But every hunch/instinct I have tells me that the Talley Trio’s “Broken Ones” has and still does receive way more earplays than “Searchin’” did in 2000 and after, even though it did better on the charts.

And, I would argue, that there is another result to this expanded listening availability of the music. People are never far from their music. When life circumstances create a need, we can quickly grab and listen to the inspiration we want or need. This deepens our experience with the music in ways that radio airplay never provided.

So we may no longer have songs that dominate radio charts, but we do have songs that can dominate and minister to our experience in more ways.  It is just inconvenient that we can’t measure the value and give out a plaque for it.

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)

People become attached to certain artists as a result of a myriad of factors about the artist and all this gets “bundled” into how they “experience” that artist. Here are some of the factors involved in that experience:

• How the artist looks, dresses, and talks on stage
• What topics the artist chooses to talk and sing about
• What others around me think and feel about the artist
• What happens at concerts
• How often I get to see and hear, or hear from the artist
• How much the artist seems to feel and think like me
• How, whether, and how much the artist talks to me offstage
• Does the artist answer my calls, emails, etc.
• Does the artist have a web presence that is interesting to me or that I can participate in
• What do I know about the artist’s “private” life and what do I think about it
• Are there places, other than concerts where I encounter the artist: do they teach music, produce CD’s, write books, use social networking, etc.
• Does the artist ever engage me in person outside, or alongside, of concerts.

All these aspects (and more) of “experiencing” an artist fold together to create an image held in the mind(s) of those following an artist to determine how much the artist’s ministry is valued.  And here’s the really important part: the value of that entire experience represents how well the artist’s ministry succeeds. Bookings, CD sales, concert attendance, and sales of other products, are all really just “souvenirs” of that experience.

Most artists do not fully understand the quality and quantity of the kinds of experience they do or could offer. They simply look at their success as a function of how many CD’s they sell or whether they get “good bookings.”

Artists can “grow” their ministries by learning how to look at themselves broadly, and understanding the real breadth and depth of experience they offer.  Deeper and more meaningful experiences for followers means a more fulfilling experience for the artist.  And this will result in a more stable funding for the ministry as more followers find more value for more “souvenirs” of their experience.

1. Build, own, control, and maintain your own new platform and experiment until it works for you.
2. Rent one of the new cookie-cutter enterprise platforms that are set up to do this for you.
3. Partner with a company who understands the current landscape of tools and concepts that will act as your “web presence” staff.
4. Hope the traditional platforms approach will “turn around” and start working again.

We’ll discuss the first three.

Own And Build Your Own.  If you have the time, the inclination, the webskills or ability to learn them, and know or know how to keep up with new marketing strategies, this can be the best way to go. You have to be as creative about connecting with your fans and how to grow your base as you are with your music.  If you do not already have all these abilities and skills, this can be a very time-intensive process. If you do have the skills and understanding, it still takes a lot of time and you have do decide if the return on investment of your time is worth it. Your time is not free. You also have to keep up your creativity as an artist. Your “new” platform is not just a website to maintain, it is understanding and using multiple tools to make up a web presence that will keep you constantly engaged with your fans and responding to them as if you were in concert with all of them at once, every week of the year.

A good example I know of where an artist is learning to do this effectively and successfully is The Dills.

Enterprise Platforms.  There are a lot of new web companies now springing up that offer to “be your web platform.” They will set up a fan-oriented web presence for you and other artists who buy in to their system and operate some aspects of it for you. Most of them offer a menu of services with more complex ones costing more.

I should note here that FaceBook, MySpace, and other such social networking sites are the forerunners of these newer enterprise sites.  They all “congregate” many artists and their fans together under one umbrella—their own.  They all can offer some options but have to standardize to a certain extent. In other words, you can’t just make their platform do anything you may want it to do.  Also, most of them, while allowing you and your fans easy access to each other, maintain your mailing and other lists on their server which you may or may not have access to keep if you leave their service.

I probably should offer an example but, not being much of a “fan” of these services myself, I think I’ll just let the more enterprising among you find them yourself.

Partnering. (or maybe just hiring).  If the artist is really knowledgeable about new marketing concepts and tools but is busy at being an artist, he can just hire a web developer who will design a web presence and build the tools wanted to create a robust platform where the artist provides the content he wants in the just the ways he wants. This is a really good option if the artist can afford it and can sift through various developers to find the one who can create what the artist wants.

On the other hand, if the artist is not so knowledgable, he can look for a developer who is very up to date with both web design and who understands well new marketing concepts, and make a partnership agreement to share profits.  This can be a good option if the artist has little time, little money, and can find the suitable partner.  “Suitable” being the primary obstacle here.

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Whatever option or direction you choose, do not expect permanency. Finding the new platform that will replace the old is not something that will remain static. What works today will change tomorrow.  The key is to maintain the effort to become and stay more connected to more of your fans.  Change and experimentation will be keys because we are in a time where consumer values and interests are in a state of what appears to be permanent change. Oxymoronic isn’t it?

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If you have an interest in this and other new marketing ideas for artists, check out the Seminar link on the right sidebar. A new class begins this month.

1. A position, such as “celebrity”, “pastor”, or “President”; and/or
2. A tool, such as a blog, website, magazine, or TV show; and/or
3. An audience, such as the readers of a magazine or viewers of a TV show.

In marketing thought, the word usually encompasses all three of the above but with an emphasis on #3.  Who is reached? How many are reached? How easily are they influenced by the platform to buy or otherwise consume and/or act on the message?

Traditional Marketing.

In the view of traditional marketing, platforms are seen as more or less static and each has a certain known value in terms of sales.  A certain long-standing successful magazine, for instance, is seen as a platform whose audience has certain responsive characteristics that you, as an advertiser, can depend on for sales.  When you decide to use (rent) their platform you can expect certain results.

In this sense, a transaction is taking place.  You are paying dollars to “rent” their platform (advertise) and expecting a return on your investment that will make the “rental” worthwhile.  Christian bookstores are a platform where record labels “rent” space by allowing the store to keep part of the proceeds from sales.  This is seen as a valuable transaction if the store has a “good” audience.  These are two different kinds of “platform rentals.” In the case of the magazine, it makes money regardless of the advertising success. In the case of the bookstore, it makes nothing if the recording does not sell.  This type of platform rental transaction is seen as a more “vulnerable” transaction and the store covers itself by retaining the right to return product to the label for credit. The label, in either case, has no cover.

Platform renting in this traditional sense is the business of entities in this model. If you want to “use” their platform again, you have to rent it again.

Another feature of traditional marketing is the “chaining” of platforms.  A music artist may transact with a record label to rent their perceived platform which includes the label’s ability to rent a radio platform, a product distribution platform, and various other promotional platforms.

This chaining of platforms in the music world has placed a whole series of platform rental transactions between the artist and the followers of the artist. The artist now depends on the whole chain to “grow” or achieve success. And all the connected platforms in this rental chain depend more or less on the success of the others.

And, as we all know, any chain is only as strong as the weakest link.  And, as we all know, most of the traditional platforms in the music world now are weak links.  Why these traditionally good platforms have now become weak links between the artist and fans are the subject of way too much discussion to get into here. The point is that some new way of understanding platforms is needed and there is a lot of experimenting and some success stories.

Enter “New” Marketing.

New marketing is a set of very fluid and sometimes contradictory ideas for getting around the fact that the platform rental model is breaking.  It attempts to understand and create ways to use new platforms that do not involve rentals and, usually, advocates primarily creating your own platform for interacting with constituents. New marketing usually denies that platforms are stable and reliable unless they are understood as platforms of conversation with a talking/listening mode — as opposed to the old model where platforms could just direct its constituents to act in a certain way.

In its most radical form, new marketing would advocate that the follower (fan, constituent, member, etc.) in fact IS the platform.  Such an approach attempts to create connections with the platform/follower that are so valuable that the follower will spread the message.  This is exactly the meaning of “viral” marketing and is what has made YouTube the success that it is.

Less radical forms go for the (non-monetized) sharing of platforms.  A blogger may interview a celebrity artist (who already has a platform) to expand his own platform (traffic) while the artist looks to build his own following (platform) by reaching the blogger’s readership who may not know that artist or who may see the artist in a more favorable light as a result of the interview.

In either case, the very meaning and basis of the idea of “platform” is changing from one that sees stable and reliable entities telling their audience what to do or buy (and charging advertisers for so doing), to one where the audience determines the rules of the game and the way to build that audience is to listen and converse with meaningful dialog.  Such conversation creates a valued experience that influences both parties.  In the music world, fans grow more attached to the artist and the artist learns what the fans want them to create.

This idea is, of course, not so new. Successful sellers of things created have always needed to understand their audience. New marketing simply focuses on that and brings new creative platforms to the task.  If there is one aspect that stands out in this process it would be attitude. Valuing the audience is an attitude—one that is mostly lacking in the platforms that no longer work. The folks in “our audience” these days have little time for being told what to like or buy.  They gravitate toward valued experiences and may, sometimes, purchase souvenirs of that experience.

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If you have an interest in this and other new marketing ideas for artists, check out the Seminar link on the right sidebar. A new class begins this month.

Now let’s talk cake ingredients. Cake has to be sweet. Could be refined sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, honey, or even molasses, or some combination. Your music is the sweetener. The cake(s) you can offer depend on the sweetener(s) you use and that has an effect on whether people like your cake. Repeat, it “has an effect” but it is not the whole cake!

This brings up a major question about who you are / what are you offering. You are offering cake, not just a sweetener (music). You are offering a whole bunch of ingredients in that cake. What are they? Almost no one thinks about this. What you are offering people is a mixture of ingredients, not just the sweetener.

When you understand and can name all the ingredients (beyond the sweetener) that make up your “cake”, you will begin to know why people REALLY follow you. Then you can serve needs.

All this tends to be credited (or blamed depending on your point of view) on scriptural warnings about wealth, love of money, and greed. (One could wonder as to why other scriptural passages like the parable of the talents have not taken precedence.)  Against this poverty mentality background, it is no wonder that lots of artists and other business entities in the genre live “on the edge” or just barely get by, and some even “wear” it like a badge.  While the issue of money is discussed often and everywhere and “dumbs down” almost every endeavor, rarely is the question “are we really that poor?” asked and put to the test.

You would think that the Gaither success story over the past 15 years would have put the issue to rest.  Yet even some artists who have been participants in that success are still careful to observe the poverty mentality rules when working on their own outside of the tour.  Which begs the question as to whether the shared belief in this mentality is actually functionally true or whether it just functions “like the truth” because we believe in it and follow it.  I would argue the latter.

Beliefs are powerful.  There’s an old story about a jeweler who had a small line of matching items that were not selling after months of sitting in the store.  The owner, before going on vacation, left a note for one of his clerks to change the price of that line of jewelry by one-half.  The clerk misread the handwritten note and doubled the price. When the jeweler returned he discovered that the whole line had sold out.

If a promoter follows a pattern of putting on concerts in gyms with poor sound and lighting, he is going to draw crowds that are only comfortable with very low ticket prices and looking only for “bargains” at the record table.  When the Gaither tour comes to town, however, people are willing to pay higher ticket prices for a great venue and buy all the CD’s and videos that they value.  Bill has valued himself, the artists, the tour and the people.  He shows that the genre’s fans do value the artists highly and, even more, they value seeing those artists framed in a setting that is “as good as” those of other genres.  And they value seeing themselves in that setting equal to fans of other types of music.  They value the artists, they value themselves, and they value the appearance of equality with other artists and fans of other music.

So what exactly is value?  Value is the perceived worth of something compared to price or cost.  We know that value is relative — it depends on who/where you are in life.  If you are poor and hungry you value eating.  A little higher up the ladder you may value the quality and nutritional value of food.  Further up you may value fine restaurants.  Value moves us toward having our needs and/or wants, met.  It means we will choose to move toward things we value and not others.

But value is also co-determined by whoever is offering the thing of value.  The “presenter” sets a price based on the value of the offered thing to him.  In so doing, he begins a “discussion” with the buyer.  But in the southern gospel business, those with something to offer tend to shortcut this discussion by starting with the question “how much will someone pay?”,  where he devalues the buyer.  Then he offers something “cheap” because of his perception of the buyer.  The offer is degraded, the event is degraded, the artist(s) are degraded, and the value of the music is degraded.  The “industry” is degraded.

Then, in this context, we try to offer ministry and expect people to think it is valuable! Hmm.

A “tribe” is any group of people who share some value and cluster around that value when when someone (a brand) offers it. Brands and tribes go together. And they are really just words. Any pairing of groups of people with someone or enterprise that shares and mentors that “real value” can become such a pairing. Tribes look for leaders and if someone steps up, that someone represents the brand (becomes the leader). Here’s some examples.

artist and fans (or audience)
pastor and congregation
writer and readers
songwriter and artists
choir director and choir
promoter and ticket buyers
radio promoters and stations
salespeople and customers (or accounts)
tweeter and followers
etc.

The great thing about “new marketing” theory is that the principles apply to any of these kinds of pairings of leader and followers, and, how there must be a “continuous conversation” where the leaders must listen and pay attention to that “shared value” of the followers. The “old” marketing is built mostly around businesses with customers and how to get those customers to do what the business wants. Leaders (businesses) who attempt to use new marketing methods to control their followers in that old marketing style will discover themselves out of business. No followers. This is probably why many “big business” firms try out new marketing but just can’t make it work — they just can’t get away from their old habitual mindset that wants to control the buyer. How many times have you seen a business start a new advertising campaign that says “We’ve listened and heard you and now we are offering ____________” (something else they want to sell that you really don’t want).

Tribes can be potential, a group of people who share a value but have no leader, or actual if one appears. People in a church who like to sing may want to start a choir but they don’t become one until there is a choir director. The leader must provide that “real value” or the thing falls apart. As in what happens when the choir director wants to choose material that the choir doesn’t like. A leader with a vision may hunt for and find a tribe by experimenting. A choir director may move from church-to-church until he/she finds a choir that values the director choosing all the material.

Most artists still think and speak old marketing. They want to “grow their ministry” by leading their fans without listening to them. And they expect “the industry” (record labels, agents, advertisers, etc.) to help them do just that. Even if they use new marketing “tools” like Facebook or Twitter, they’re mis-using them to try guide fans rather than listen to them. They believe that their CD and it’s airplay and distribution is what their fans want or should want most. When actually what the fans really want is more of that “value”, the inspirational conversation with the artists, of which the music is just a sample, a calling card.

Most of the bigger businesses in our industry are doing the same. Trying to get their consumer constituencies to buy want they want to sell them.

Not that there’s any bad intent here. It’s just that few can get their mind away from what has always worked–even though it’s obviously not still working.

Something has changed in the culture of how all tribes (followers) work. This is why the new marketing theories with its “tribes” and “brands” has shown up. The old way just doesn’t work anymore. For some reason, people now do not just follow what leaders say they should. They group together around sharing something they really value and look for a leader who will listen and provide “products” that have the shared value embedded in them.

And they just won’t “waste” their time, energy, or inclination on who or whatever does not provide that.

Finding ways of extending the usable life of perishable foods has been a goal of humankind for centuries.  In the 1800’s we began the practice of cutting out large blocks of ice from frozen lakes, transporting them by rail to cities, breaking them into smaller blocks and distributing them by horse-and-buggy to homes.  Companies grew up that crafted (usually wooden) boxes that held the ice in the top and had shelves below for storing perishable foods.  From the mid 1800’s through the 1920’s this was a growing “industry” with many facets: transportation, insulation technology, cutting tools, etc., and, the building of ice boxes became a furniture industry.

In the early 1900’s the first large scale refrigeration technology using ammonia as a refrigerant and powered by electricity appeared allowing ice to be made on a large scale independent of winter frozen lakes and reducing the transportation time and distance. More people had access to (cleaner) ice more often and more iceboxes were crafted and sold. Local stores sold them. The industry grew.

In the late 1920’s, entrepreneur companies experimenting with new (and safer) refrigerants and the miniaturization of compressors, began building and selling home refrigerators.  Electrolux and General Electric were the new names.

This was effectively the end of the “icebox” industry and all its parts, complete with bankrupt companies and lost jobs.

There are two important points to this little piece of history.  None of the companies involved in the icebox industry made the transition—they all went away.  And the new companies that created the “replacement” industry grew up “under the radar” of the old industry—the icebox companies weren’t even paying attention to the obvious changes taking place in refrigeration technology and its implications for transforming the industry.

Iceboxes did not entirely disappear until the 1950’s when electricity finally reached almost all rural areas. So a few of the old companies held on until the bitter end and, even though the end was clear, they never tried to make the transition.  Even though they had thirty years to figure it out.

Part 2 (Victrolas and iPods)

First, it was “the roaring 20’s” and then suddenly, “the Great Depression.”  Popular history often blames the “excesses” of the 1920’s with causing the depression.  And the depression is conveniently viewed as a time when everything came to a screeching halt. I would argue that the technological innovations and social/cultural changes of the 1920’s created a new kind of growth and expectation to which the (then) current rules, regulations, and operating procedures practiced by the government and “captains of industry” could not adapt. They did not see or did not take seriously the massive changes.  The model, or paradigm, they were operating under… broke.

While we visit the Great Depression as a time when everything broke, this is not exactly the case.  Most all the old forms in which people had placed their faith DID break because they could no longer contain the changes.  And that breaking “felt” like everything was broken.  When a big system or paradigm breaks it does feel that way.  But look at this.  During the depression, all kinds of changes that began during the 1920’s continued to happen.  Aviation technology and its uses grew.  There were great advances in architecture. The automotive industry continued to develop and grow.  We went from silent movies to “talkies.”  The development and uses of plastics grew.  The electrical appliance industry continued to grow and develop.  Radio spread and television was born.  The music recording industry continued to innovate and grow.  So, actually a lot was going on and all of it was catering to a new social/cultural/technological mindset that started before the depression. Under the radar.

The Great Depression stretched out while our governmental bodies and new commercial interests figured out how to create new operating procedures and placeholders that would stabilize this paradigm shift.  It took a while.  We had to stop and help the rest of the world “catch up” by ending the ideas of “supreme races” and Imperial Dynasties as outdated methods of human suppression.

We then had a few years of “stability.”  And now we are in the middle of another big shift brought about by even more technological developments and the fact that many of our subcultures realized pretty quickly (by the 1960’s) that all this new “stability” actually just got defined in ways that left them out.  But it took until the “fall” of 2008 for everyone to realize again that the most recent stable paradigm is…broke. Again.  And everything is changing. Again. Financial institutions. Automobiles. Health care. Foreign Oil. The  current “captains of industry” are lost. Again. Including the music business captains.

(So, when am I ever gonna get to the music business stuff, anyhow?)

Now.

It took selling a lot of phonographs (beginning with Victrolas) and televisions, to get us to a place where we could sell a lot of music.  Why televisions?  Because the popularity of televisions sold by appliance stores gave RCA (who also had a record label) places to also sell music.  And 45 rpm and LP’s as well as new phonographs to play them.  Appliance stores selling televisions in the 1950’s became the first national distribution system for selling music owned and controlled by a company that sold both televisions and music.

What’s important about this is that music became a widely distributed product as a result of other technological products—something to play it with and somewhere to sell it.

Today, that chain is entirely broken.  The digitalization of music (which seemed like such a good thing with the advent of the CD), along with the Internet as a distribution system, has led us to a place where music is in many quarters very cheap (and growing) essentially free.  And now, the new “place” of music in the scheme of things, is to sell other products.  Like iPods.  For artists and record companies, etc., music is on its way to becoming more of a “business card” (Hat Tip – KW) that exists mainly to “sell” something else.

And just what is that “something else?” If I knew the exact answer to that I would patent it. But every player in the music world better be finding out: artists, record companies, retailers, distributors, songwriters, etc.  There are lots of experiments going on with this and some are showing great signs of success.  And, just as in past cases of paradigm shift, most of the standard “players” in the business are not looking—just bemoaning the current demise and either hoping things will “get back to normal” or waiting until the “next model” for the industry shows up and proves itself.

Everyone in music who is practicing this “head in the sand” routine should take a lesson from the icebox industry – if you continue to ignore the situation and refuse to learn new things now…well, no icebox company will make the transition.

And, the ice is melting. As we speak.