Further to yesterday's plan to obsolesce the CD and thereby cut the RIAA off at their source, I had a very generous contributor ask me to clarify this subscriber business.

To tell you the truth, I'd explain it better if I had a better handle on it myself, but here goes my best boardroom whitepaper frenzy:

Making Free Music Pay

In a nutshell, I propose we take the blog phenomenon that works so well for political writers, and we apply it to musicians. The only difference really is that writers write, while musicians record sounds, but there's also that bit of meta-data around the recording and that's what we're shipping.It's my experience that musicians and promoters are too busy doing what they do to want to learn much about how weblogs work and how to run them. I propose to create a network of painless sites where they only have to worry about posting.

First of all, what I propose to create is a portal kit modelled after what the Howard Dean campaign has done; the kit will be free software based on the drupal.org engine, but packaged cleanly for installation by any record labels or artist promoters who wish to run a hub.

This kit is only a small step from where the state of drupal sits, it won't take much to get the first one up and running, and if we can distribute the costs of the development by planning for clone-site 'competition' (although I'd call them 'participating sites') we get there that much faster. So long as we keep pumping out the mp3's, I think there's room for lots and lots of these portals, world wide,
in every genre.

Initial, the financial return is going to be limited to these subscriptions and the ceiling for these subscriptions is pretty much set by the going rates for webhosting -- when most promoters spend less than a few hundred dollars a month on their total internet budgets, our first task must be to demonstrate to them that it's worth more. It's like email in 1993, I couldn't convince anyone it was worth the bother until after I had given it away for free, and once most people have tasted free services like yahoo, once it's essential to their business, they'll pay for premium.

Then we become useful ...

Long term, once the system has become essential, once the bands realize the benefits, then it becomes possible to turn around and offer value-add services and just plain beg them for donations to keep the network going. Much like blogrolling.com or dyndns.org, people don't really realize how much they need them until they have them, and once they have them, they will come through to keep it afloat.

Also, as the CEO of CocaCola said, what you have isn't a sales channel, it's a broadcast network, and thus it becomes possible to sell special subscriptions for special events to precisely target geographic, demographic or genre audiences. Not spam or advertising, but just in the same way a purple cow will percolate to the top of daypop, by introducing something remarkable into this network, the
interconnections guarantee that the people who need to know will know, and that has to be worth something to those who need ticket receipts.

Portals for Industry Networking

This is old hat to the mainstream blogger, but maybe not to the music players. Another future direction is to enhance the personal profile listings or to add contact management services where, like with Ryze or Ecademy.com, paid members (promoters or bands) can use the network for, well, networking, to find gigs, venues, promoters and performers. That value is initially zero on a zero sized network, but as we all know, the value of the network grows exponentially with population.

some features...

Within each hub, the local subscription model will be up to the owner of the hub. For the root hub I propose a subscription model where paid subscribers can list their content descriptions directly on the portal. In effect, we become their blog host, but specifically for a vertical topic, interrelating the content from the members to create a synergy more than the individual parts, much like the way Salon bloggers tend to align with and cite each other.

This becomes an entry model for those promoters (dare I say most of them) who would not have the skills or means to run their own copy of the portal hub, and who just need the means to publicize their artists. Initially they would use a simple plain-text webform, HTML editor widget or bloggerAPI software, but quite soon they could even post their announcements by email. My task is to make their contributions easy to post.

They promote their artists by blogging the release of each single, linking to mp3 files hosted on their own website or, for a fee, hosting it on mine. I can also provide consulting to hook them up with bittorrent or the open content network if that is required. It's this stage where I need to also get a buy-in from studios, to promote special recording session packages and get the artists thinking in terms of promoting themselves the way Sam Phillips did, the way Motown did, by the one-song single track, recorded cheaply and sent out to create the buzz around the artist. This part of my plan is entirely psychological, because I have to change the mindset of the musicians and promoters to abandon trying to sell CD units, and sell them on the business plan of venue seat scarcities.

Back to the technology ...

In drupal, each subscribing member has the ability to maintain their own blog, their own photos, files and other materials, so a promoter could blog the release of the single and include the artist photo, tour schedule and even, as one of our local promoters does, the PDF of the concert poster.

The reason they want to blog their release is because this portal server creates an aggregate RSS file for the whole portal (which feeds weblogs and blo.gs) and also, for those who are fans of specific promotion companies, we can offer an RSS on a per-member basis, and create a page that aggregates by genres. The latest additions can also be featured in the sidebar much as I do for the RSS feeds aggregated on http://www.teledyn.com/

For those who have the means to produce their own RSS, we would aggregate those feeds for free: People who provide the content to a service are providing real value to the hub, so if a band can get it together (and I can help them) to put up a band-blog, if they send me the RSS, I'll fold it in. Subscribers to the site are really purchasing the use of the promotion infrastructure, they are not just purchasing webspace (they are encouraged to have their own webspace for the band bios and to actually host their mp3s) Also, because they are local to the current hub, they get a special distinct sidebar space where their latest headline posts automatically.

The whole point is to get that mp3 heard before some other artist comes along and bumps them off the top of the list. We also open the doors for new business opportunities such as people creating playlists of new artists, or even someone creating a technorati or daypop-like rating engine -- daypop and technorati will also get this information, but there's room for specialization.

Other hub subscribers might include recording studios who would blog about their services towards these mp3 singles, their locations, facilities, costs and all, because they'd have the audience of people interested in indie recordings, which often includes up and coming artists. Tour promoters and venues also might want to blog their schedules.

Back to the hubs: Even for those who will run their own hubs, we configure those to ping the central trackback location so the root hub will show a running listing of all participating hubs. We create a network of these promotion hubs so each can regionalize and specialize by genre, but if you find one, you've found them all.

Hub owners are encouraged and assisted to create their own aggregate pages of RSS feeds they feel are related to their particular niche in the industry, so over time we have gained additional metadata in that if a country-music promoter has subscribed to some other feed (whether from a hub or from a normal blog kit like MT) that further aids the curious listener to consider that secondary feed as something they'd like.

it's guilt by association ;)

Because these hubs are connected through the RSS/aggregator/trackback, like blogs, it becomes much easier for people who like one set of artists to discover other artists, and because the MP3s are flowing fast and furious, just like blogs, we set up a reinforcement feedback loop where artists are encouraged to release more often just to stay at the top of the blog-rolls, just to keep the RSS going out with their name on it.

With all this trackback, rss and aggregations, we are also driving up the pagerank in ways Sony or EMI haven't even dreamed possible.

I'm not much of a salesman, and yes, I may very well be crazy and in need of therapy but I know what I'm passionate about and hopefully I've managed to convey at least a sliver of that; any and all questions only help me refine the plan more!