Music Bidness

R.J. Eskow makes some interesting comments about the woeful state of the Music business. It's at the Huffington Post. He makes some proposals to fix it, the outline of which is:

1) Create a Mission Statement for the music industry,
2) convene a Brain Trust of the best minds he or she can find, and
3) understand and surf "the velocity of music."

The Mission Statement?

To enrich and bring joy to as many people as possible, with as little cost and effort as possible, while at the same time allowing those who create and distribute music to make a good living.

The Velocity of Music

A friend turns you on to a new artist they heard on Sirius, maybe sending you an mp3 or a link. You might buy it, you might write about it in your blog. You might forward the mp3. Music already has incredible velocity. Even a low profile artist like me has some presence in Europe and Asia. The problem for the artist or distributor is that none of this produces revenue. Eskow has some thoughts on this, but no real solutions. He does propose a Brain Trust that would probably have an amazing effect on how we listen to music:

So who should be in the Brain Trust? No record company execs, please. Artists, managers, producers, computing and AI wizards, economists, poets - pretty much everybody mentioned in the spoken part of the Donovan song "Atlantis," plus anybody that gets namechecked in a William Gibson novel.

The whole article is worth reading.