A statement on the church’s website (which is now back up) gives a more complete list of the things to be burned:

Did you see it in the list??? SOUTHERN GOSPEL!!! And if you follow the internal Southern Gospel link on the website, it takes you to this additional information:

The website also singles out Joel Hemphill, The Anchormen, and The Crab Family as examples of what it calls “Ungodly Southern Gospel.”

The few Southern Gospel artists with whom I’ve spoken were all aware of this “news item” and none agreed with the effort. All expressed concern that our industry could be seen as connected to this kind of thinking. One artist, who happens to live within “smoke smelling” distance of the event, commented in LOL format, “Hmmm. I see they’re having chicken and barbecue–I wonder if they need a bluegrass band.”

In another response, a reader of a local newspaper, The Asheville Citizen-Times, wrote:

“I was happy to read that the Halloween book and music burning at Canton’s Amazing Grace Baptist Church will be accompanied by barbequed chicken and all the sides. After all, there is nothing like the smell of well-cooked satanic influences to whet one’s appetite.

However, the item did not say whether or not the chicken will be barbequed in the book fire itself; and, if so, whether the celebrants would unknowingly be ingesting the evil spirits of modern bibles and country music.

That might be counter-productive.”

Cliff Yudell, Asheville

Hey, I’m just giving out the information, fair and balanced. “You decide.” Does this news affect Southern Gospel?

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)

For $10,000 per title, a major label can buy the opportunity to force consumers to buy album-only downloads on iTunes. (Indie labels, including SG, need not apply–this is only available to major releases on major labels.) Read more details here, here, and here.

See this for what it is. A brash attempt on the part of the major labels who are bankrupt of new marketing ideas to force consumers who are now used to “choice” to have to buy ten songs at once to get any of the songs on their favored new releases.

Methinks this attempt to return to the good old days will be rejected by consumers. Worse, it may drive those who have been actually purchasing song downloads back to their “free” P2P networks to, in effect, “steal” the songs they want.

The forcing of consumers to buy-songs-they-don’t-want cat is out of the bag. That cat will never be recaptured. This is a bad idea that can only hurt the companies and artists involved. On the other hand, it will probably hasten the resolve of all who are moving forward to create the strategies of the future.

But, since I’m always open to debate… suppose your two favorite SG artists had new releases and one of them was only available as a full album download while the other was available either way, individual songs or full album. What would be your first thought? Would your buying choice be affected?

Here’s an excerpt from his article:

“According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, a speaker at the Future of Music Coalition gave a breakdown of album numbers that will be particularly shocking to young independent bands who hoped they’d be able to make a living selling discs. More than 115,000 new albums were released in the U.S. last year. Of those, 110 sold more than 250,000 copies in the U.S. last year–that’s not such a surprise, as big stars have always been rare. But only 1,500 titles cracked the 10,000 mark, and fewer than 6,000 sold a paltry 1,000 copies.

To give you some idea what 1,000 copies means, that used to be the standard manufacturing run for self-produced CDs. Indie bands imagined that they would use a hundred or so discs for publicity–sending them to radio stations and reviewers, for instance–and then sell the rest to local fans and on tour. Selling 900 CDs at $12 a pop would gross almost $11,000, which would be enough to cover low-budget recording and manufacturing expenses and perhaps buy some new guitar pedals and drumheads. Nobody makes a living selling 1,000 CDs. (Snip.)

Of the new titles released last year, almost 99 percent of them didn’t sell enough copies to let their creators earn a living from CD sales, and almost 95 percent of them didn’t sell enough copies to cover the most basic expenses involved in their recording.”

Of course, this article is mostly talking about “road sales.” What about retail distribution? Numbers have been released by Nielsen Soundscan for 2008. They look a lot like the past several years–the trend is down:

If your cellphone has a musical ringtone, step back and appreciate it the next time a friend dials you—according to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, you’re listening to a performance. In the latest sign of just how confusing the music licensing system is, ASCAP is suing AT&T over the carrier’s sale of musical ringtones, looking for a cut of the revenue—even though the carrier is already paying for the download rights to these tunes. In a recent filing unearthed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASCAP says that download payments aren’t enough because each ring constitutes a performance.

Other recent attacks on the music consumer include RIAA successfully suing a housewife [EDIT: Link now down] for (file) sharing songs. Of course they really have no hope of collecting on the $80,000 per song verdict. I guess they just want to scare housewives who (used to) love music.

On the other (forward thinking) end of the collision spectrum, there is another article out about a study documenting the benefits of file sharing. Significant points include:

1.  Overall production figures for the creative industries appear to be consistent with this view that file sharing has not discouraged artists and publishers.  While album sales have generally fallen since 2000, the number of albums being created has exploded.  In 2000, 35,516 albums were released.  Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008).  Even if file sharing were the reason that sales have fallen, the new technology does not appear to have exacted a toll on the quantity of music produced

2.  Similar trends can be seen in other creative industries.  For example, the worldwide number of feature films produced each year has increased from 3,807 in 2003 to 4,989 in 2007 (Screen Digest, 2004 and 2008).  Countries where film piracy is rampant have typically increased production.  This is true in South Korea (80 to 124), India (877 to 1164), and China (140 to 402).  During this period, U.S. feature film production has increased from 459 feature films in 2003 to 590 in 2007 (MPAA, 2007).

3.  The paper takes on several longstanding myths about the economic effects of file sharing, noting that many downloaded songs do not represent a lost sale, some mashups may increase the market for the original work, and the entertainment industry can still steer consumer attention to particular artists (which results in more sales and downloads).

4.  The authors’ point out that file sharing may not result in reduced incentives to create if the willingness to pay for “complements” increases.  They point to rising income from performances or author speaking tours as obvious examples of income that may be enhanced through file sharing. In particular, they focus on a study that concluded that demands for concerts increased due to file sharing and that concert prices have steadily risen during the file sharing era.

5.  The authors’ canvass the literature on the effects of file sharing on music sales, confirming that the “results are decidedly mixed.”

For file sharing geeks, the full study can be found here.

The authors were one of the first to challenge the early claims about the effects of file sharing.  Years later, many other economists have followed suit (including the study funded by Industry Canada).

To their credit, they seem more interested is serving their followers than worrying about whether someone gets to hear or see their music for “free.”  Someone has figured out that, in this “music 2.0″ world, they are not just “selling music.” Perry Fans want the music, yes. But they also want more: they want the whole package of who the Perrys’ are: their beliefs, their lifestye, their daily inspiration, and most of all they want the Perrys’ attention.

And The Perrys are giving them that; they are giving themselves. Genuinely. And using the internet to do it. And their “friends” are bringing other, new, friends to the fold.

There was a discussion recently on Averyfineline about whether the Perry’s are “the best” in Southern Gospel. This kind of discussion is mostly irrelevant today.  The Perrys are already “the best” to their followers. They are “famous” to their followers, whether the standard media notices or not.  And these followers are bringing others.

“Old school” connections with fans using “new marketing” tools. Music 2.0.  The Perrys are getting it right!