Nothing is more dangerous than a monster who fears for its lifeline, and in these escalating cases of legal attacks, propaganda campaigns and fear tactics, you and I all know the days of the beast are numbered.

Hang on: As pitches go, this will be a long elevator ride ...

In my own industry, information technology, we know all too well how to drive an unwanted competitor out of the game: You commoditize their product. Once the lifeline is cut away, the monster can writhe and roar, but just as our heroine discovers in Nicholas Roeg's Labyrinth, the Goblin King has no power over us, we are free, and it's the Goblin King who fades away.

When I talk to my musician friends, there's a will to get their music out and be heard. When I talk to my ICT friends with their computing projects, there is this very same will to become known and to be of service to the larger economic community. Unfortunately, in both cases, their childlike vision collapses as soon as the ring comes near, and they fall back into the old ways, ways they have conditioned themselves to see as "tried and true", only, I wonder, seeing them all try and fail, just how true are these old ways.

The bands and singer/songwriters I meet invariably work at odd jobs and road gigs building up their savings to wager on the same dream: The CD. They hire the best producers they can find, book studio time, go through the sessions and the mastering and re-mastering and pinch their pennies until they can walk out of some replication shop with a box of disks.

But what happens next? They give them away. They trade with other musicians, send dozens, sometimes hundreds of these out to festival artistic directors, radio stations, programming directors, just about anyone, and sometimes it does lead to some airplay or a gig, but it's a false sense of success when the returns never do recoup the cost of that CD. The information technology people do the same, they build big websites on the finest hosting services, hire the best graphic talents, mortgage their homes and sit before a side-office filled to the brim with 'product' in shrink-wrap that will be sent out as 'promos' to every magazine editor, distributor and reviewer they can find.

It's a shot in the dark.

Chances are, neither will recoup the cost of that production run, and while the token of exchange in these disks may lead to some social networking that may lead to some work, the probabilities are not all that promising that the lacquered shrink-wrap will pay its own way, so, as humans do, when it doesn't work, they try again, getting progressively more disillusioned, making the mistake that it is somehow them themselves who are somehow 'broken', not doing it right, missing the point. They sign up for seminars, tutorials, conferences and programs all of them laying out the "tried and true" just as they have known, and it still doesn't work.

The Last CD

What if this artist promotion model is fundamentally flawed? What if the tried and true isn't? When Bandler and Grinder stopped to actually observe the habits of the successful, the shocking revelation they found was that the successful people very often, most often, hadn't a clue how they got where they were or what they did to go forward. When challenged with this, family therapist Virginia Satyr was indignant ... until Bandler demonstrated how he could "do Virginia" by mimicking not what she prescribed for her students, but what she actually did.

Successful artists, and successful software companies, are, for whatever reason, in the public eye. We always know what they have done next; their content is always 'fresh'. Just like a blog on a blogroll, you get more hits from those sidebars that list your site as "updated" because people want to know what is now -- they want to be part of it.

I've never recorded a CD. Never even had the urge. Back in the 70's and 80's we recorded many miles of tape, but I was always disappointed with the results. In the bands and sessions where I was a sideman, we would rehearse and rehearse, then go into the studio for take after take, splice together the best of the lot, burn it to a disk and then use the disk as our in to get some gigs where we'd play the same tunes for real live people, and our tunes would change, we'd discover more about the interplay between the piece and the audience, we'd refine, get ideas, review, re-write and evolve. Within maybe only a few weeks, the version we played live was far better than the disk, the disk, if anything, was bad advertising for what we could really do.

What if we abandoned the quest for the holy CD? What if, instead of struggling to make that definitive pre-archive we instead sought to be fresh, to be always new, and to bring to our audience the state of where we are today in a continuous stream of artist consciousness?

The Return of the 45

The RIAA controls the only economical means of distribution of the 10-track CD. They are entrenched with all the big Vegas acts, and when people are pulling that sort of BMW-reaching income, you can't talk to them about turning back. I say we let them have it. Back when we created the Information Highway exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, we installed a bank of CDROM jukebox machines for playing the latest digital games; this was Patrick Tevlin's idea, and his reasoning was "the CD is the biggest bandwidth pipe we have today" -- the CD is a broadband simulator containing a dead snapshot of 700MB worth of living distribution.

Instead of reaching for the CD, we need to recognize the true listening requirements of our audience: People like diversity. My proof is this whole issue of CDRs and DRM. Give someone twenty CDs, they will mix and match, ripping tracks to produce 'samplers' -- we've been doing this since the invention of reel-to-reel home-recorders. The real listening habit of people is to create landscapes of sounds that cross the lines between performers, they re-purpose our material to tell their own stories, to create their own mood environments, and to do that, their basic building block is the song.

Johnny Cash said, "The song is everything"

Why persist in the 10-track compilation? I've seen so many bands with 5 good songs that they pad with 5 not-so-good tracks just so the whole process of the CD production is efficient, which is important given the cost of that process.

Pull it All Together, Man

Here's my prescription to obsolesce the HMV-vended CD, and in so doing, cut the lifeline of the RIAA by obsolescing the efficacy of their entire distribution channel:

• We need recording studios to recognize the plummeting cost/performance ratio of their new digital equipment and to lower the cost of recording time; studios should offer simple, streamlined and rapid-turnaround production services focused on recording singles handed to the band as a high-quality, fully meta-data'd MP3 (or OggVorbis) tracks. This step is important because home recording can only go so far, we still need to distribute the costs of very critical and expensive components such as good microphones and acoustically tuned environments.
• Every time a band can raise some small increment of cash, say for argument sake, $40, they can book that hour of studio time sufficient to produce just that one single. It need not be polished, it need not be perfect, it need not be definitive, it just needs to be done ... and done as often as possible. The only reason today that bands and promoters are looking at $0.99 MP3 licensing is to recoup the out-of-control production costs of the CD, but what if the single cost peanuts to produce? Like, for example, the one-take/one-mic production costs Sam Phillips spent to record Elvis and Johnny Cash ...
• Promoters and management companies then put these singles into their online jukeboxes, leveraging what we know about blogs, they can then offer RSS and ping the weblogs and all the other semantic mycelia tricks to pump that one small ping out into the noosphere to tell people we have fresh content. We don't sell these tracks, they are loss-leaders intended to be given away; $40 is a fraction what it costs to produce a minimum lot of business cards, it's the price of a dinner for two at Kelsey's, and for the band and the promoter, it's pure and simple a "promotional expense".
• A new industry of play-list programmers can emerge, drawing on this network of RSS-linked content, refining the lists the way bloggers refine the great morass of weblogs into their blogrolls of the recommended.

I've already seen several upstarts who are positioning themselves to do the aggregating and play-list task, but I believe they will fail because they are still falling into the old mindset of centralized control. Ditto with the promoters and bands who put their tracks into centralized services that try to collect some critical mass of content in hopes of becoming an eye-ball magnet for advertisers. I predict they will all lose their shirts because they all miss the point of a network world.

Leave the data where it is, just trade in meta-data, and refresh, refresh, refresh.

Music Lives

A further fundamental truth to how people really use music: Listen. Do you hear any music? When IFC trims the soundtrack from a movie, when you watch old Hitchcock black-and-whites, you notice something missing. Music is in the malls, in our services, in our commercials, in the background of every second of television, behind every video game, at every important life event, and for most of these uses we want new music, custom made music tailored to the specific use the way Bach wrote for the church liturgies.

Music is not like painting or playwriting or really most of the other arts: Music is intimately temporal, epherimal, abstract and fluid. Music is here one moment, gone the next, and in the days before the mass-distribution recording, we expected music to be fresh, even the old favourites. As John Cage noticed when they first started to compare the electrical signals on recording wires, it is impossible for even the finest performer to exactly replicate a prior performance; John says he stopped listening to recorded music the day he attended a performance of some orchestral piece and a small boy seated behind him told his father afterward, "That's not how it goes!" -- records are only that, a record, a snapshot of some moment in time, a moment past, stale, for the most part, forgotten as the artist has already moved on to something new.

With all this free sample music out there, constantly replenished and refreshed, sure there's lots for a small rural radio station to pilfer for their ads, but remember, if we ensure the meta-data is accurate and leaves a clear trail back to the artists, then there's no excuse for commercial or public uses of the music not to contact the performer and arrange for a custom deal.

Distributed Distribution

The only data worth hosting is meta-data. That's why Google is a hot property. it's the secret of Amazon and eBay and Yahoo too: None of those sites has any content, they only aggregate and have data about content to help you find other people's intellectual property. You can find any MP3 you like off Google, but Google doesn't pay for the bandwidth while you download it, that cost is born by the site that holds the actual data.

The RIAA thinks in terms of trucks, skids, lots, storefronts, staffing and cash registers, and all of that sets up a barrier to entry few can challenge. I don't think we want to challenge it because it's going to become a ghost town -- when the mining companies pulled out of the gold rush towns, when the lumber mills shut down or the fisheries vanish, we find out graphically why it's stupid to have a one-supplier situation, and if the CD/DVD were to be obsolesced tomorrow, HMV, the RIAA, all of that would crumble, an entire card-house universe built on a tin mine, fundamentally tied to the supply chain for a commodity that no longer has any value.

In a world where new music singles flowed like water, cheap like borcht, freely traded and replaced with a new one before it stopped moving, the CD would worthless. With music readily available at your finger-tips, fresh music, now music, what use is there for yesterday's flat pop? About as much use as last year's Instapundit, and the comparison is completely apt and intentional.

Recorded sound would only be a conduit. A medium to carry today's sound today. The glut would relegate the recording industry of america to the role of plumbers, an association of rapid release studios who's only purpose is to feed the exploding demand for ever more, ever new, ever fresh new music.

The CD would become only another broadcast channel, a poor-man's broadband because what we want is the instant now.

Broadband is in eye of the Receiver

You see, the RIAA and the big record companies are banking on a wrong assumption: They believe their business is not really threatened until broadband is ubiquitous -- the flaw in their thinking is the assumption that we like the 10-track sampler of what the band did last year.

I'm on dial-up, I've been on dial-up since 1200-baud days, and that didn't stop me from searching out music online. If I really, really like Ragasi (and I do) I have no qualms about leaving my computer on after midnight to fetch their latest track; it's only 5-minutes a meg, so the MP3 takes 20 minutes at even the worst dial-up speeds. Broadband is only a state of mind to the consumer, it's only the amount of bits per second that is pit against our desire to obtain whatever it is we want. In 1988, I fetched an 85Mb research kit from Switzerland; it arrived as several hundred partitioned email messages via decwrl but I needed it, and while my ISP hated me for it, it was worth the wait.

Thus the distribution of the MP3 single opens up that huge under-serviced market of low-bandwidth fans, remote radio stations, international trade and all that, but what's more important, the serving of that single MP3 is such a small load that no webhost on earth is going to moan at Ragasi for listing that track on their site (especially given P2P distribution methods such as the Open Content Network to distribute the download should Ragasi's latest become an international hit).

Paying the Piper

There's no requirement for a big production website, no requirement for Akamai-hosted streaming content servers, no requirement for bands to spend big dollars on productions out of any fear this is their one-and-only chance. In my new model of distributed digital distribution, we can afford to cast all these pebbles up on to the beach, and in so doing, we can create a new industry around a new music distribution paradigm where the objective is not to extract graft for the privilege of owning an obsolete plastic disk, but instead the objective is to get the music heard and thereby create more awareness for more bands resulting in more tours, driving up the scarcity of concert venue seats and therein the business plan for doing it.

This is all doable today ... if we want it.

Angel Investors Wanted

I have the technology. I can build it. What I don't have is funding and while there's no reason on this great earth for you to help me here, and no reason why you can't just pick it up and run with this yourself, you know that I have the thought-out plan, the whole-systems view, and the capabilities and the passion for it.

And I know that if just a quarter of those who read this could invest $20 in my PayPal, I could crawl up out of the mire of my current fiscal crisis and keep my infrastructure to begin building a prototype meta-data portal to bootstrap the new distribution channel.

The model would be like the Howard Dean network, a portal that can be replicated by downloading the kit and running with it for your own location, still tied to the central information flow. It would, in fact, be exactly like the Howard Dean situation because I would leverage the same Drupal software to do it.

For $20, the cost of a restaurant dinner, you could float my company and get acknowledged as a contributor. For $200 you would fund the development directly, get the creditors off my back so I can drop my job hunting and work for all of you collectively for the benefit of the musicians and for the benefit of the audience. For $2000, well, I'd love you forever, sell you real shares, whatever, we can talk about that.

For my part in the bargain, I would devote my time 100% to producing a new portal where subscribing promoters and studios could directly announce their content and recording sessions, but where any RSS-enabled band, promoter, studio or venue could get their feed aggregated for the cost of an email message telling me the URL. I would develop the core engine, host the site, moderate and maintain the site, weed the spam, roll out new services, and fold all custom developments back into the creative commons of the Drupal.org archives.

In short, I would be working for you, the real music industry.

True, it's a risky investment, but look, I'm not asking for a handout to cover bad gambling debts or because I spilled coffee on my laptop. I'm asking you to fund a new media research prototype proof-of-concept, asking you to invest in a precarious startup who's only remaining asset is his brain.

If I can't raise enough and fast enough, then a bankruptcy trustee gets my finances, and there's only days left before this becomes inevitable. If that happens, they get all assets and everything is lost. Even if I can raise enough to stay that execution, I still have to meet my minimum creditors demands so I can feed and house the family or I can't spare the time from job-hunting; if I fail at either of these two stages, everyone loses.

But if we can pull it off, we can collectively snip the lifeline that feeds the RIAA and starves the new bands, we can get the new music out there, into the hands of people who will listen to it, and we can create a new music broadcast media network.

Rip me off for the idea, ignore me, blog me, send me kind words of encouragement or get behind me and help me make this happen. Balls in your court now.