Just got off the phone talking to a friend who's deeply involved with the promotion of local 'folk music' talents and with the promotion of a certain large festival that shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, but be that as it may, the talk came around to my grand scheme to unseat the RIAA and to Tom, who's no stranger the history of Sun Records and the way Sam Phillips would bring in the bands for single-track quick-and-dirty demos, then pump that single to every DJ and promoter in his rolodex, it all, translated from the blog terms and into the quick-take snap-shoot throw-it-away MP3, seemed to him that it just might work.

But the trick, the real flipped-out, tune-in, turn-on, drop-out magic of it, though, is going to be convincing the artists to turn their backs on the sacred CD and just play. Instead of struggling on that 'definitive' set of glossy tracks to flog before disinterested eyes, they have to make the paradigm shift back to pre-LP days, back to when the song was the thing and when the whole point of the recording was just a convenient way for your reputation to precede you, a poor man's broadband. To make this work, recording artists have be content with the sort of Sound Marley and the Wailers got out of Rock Sweet Rock or what Presley squeezed out for Blue Moon and they have to see that level of in-and-out fast sound production as a good thing.

And they have to cease in their objectives to become recording artists, they have to go back to being the performing arts.

And I'm not hopeful. Tom got it, sure, but in the whole audience for this blog, only 4 of my readers got it. Of all those who grace these pages with their time and attention, and a blog-aware audience at that, only 4 think this music-blog network plan might be a viable way to unseat the channel-masters who lord over every avenue of music distribution.

Or, at the very least, only 4 think I have a shot at changing things.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

None the less, it's early yet. Maybe the world really is happy with the way the RIAA members are running their music listening for them, maybe all the bands and promoters out there are really very content with the super-star status quo.

Or maybe it just takes more than a day or two to get the word out.
I don't know, time will tell.

What I do know is this idea, whether done by me or done by someone after me, appears to have some resonance to the musicians and promoters I talk to, and to that end, today's pitch is on the end-product, the what to do about the free single releases.
h3. The Now Calling

A few things Tom said in one of his many nods of agreements that seem apropos. One was about some band he was bringing up for the festival, and how they had just spent oodles on a new CD, and how yes, they were giving them away, but even then, because the minimum run was 5000 copies, they're basically stuck with a lot of stale product because already their sound has moved on. That's one confirmation.

Another was about the festival he promotes and how they would have loved to piece together some sample CDs of the artists on the bill, but the legal hassles were enormous, each record company vying for their slice of the ego-pie, you can't you won't they won't we wouldn't and blah blah blah and for what? Because some festival wanted to drive up the scarcity of seats by illustrating precisely who all these unknown names might be, by letting the prospective audience audition them.

Back some years ago, ok, some almost 30 years ago, I interviewed Paul Bley for my weekly jazz radio program. Paul was, at that time, beside himself with joy for having finally solved the jazz musician's dilemma of needing an income from recordings but not wanting to be hampered by record contract obligations. The solution, said Paul, was to sit the musicians down and record 20 albums as rapidly as possible and then release one every year, over the next 20 years. It hadn't occurred to him that maybe just perhaps his fans would not be all that interested in how he played during those few days way back X years ago, and that they would really like to hear what he sounded like today. I have some of the Sun Ra disks Paul made. They all sound pretty much the same. They're good but ...

Release Early, Release Often

You hear that as the credo in opensource software: Release early (release to the public before it's perfect) and release often (follow with a stream of revisions to cement yourself into the media consciousness). Online, in these days when the total annual output of new data by humanity is something like 5 exabytes forget about people going back to find old data; they will just wait, wait for the inevitable something new.

In the new information glut, you gain consciousness through repetition, through being there, over and over. If I stopped blogging today, within the week, few would remember me, within the year even most websearches would fail to betray that I existed. I would be washed under the bridge by 5 exabytes of newness, and Google would have to pick through all that first before it found me.

Even in pop radio, even in the movies, I often note how some sometimes quite remarkable and always somebody's labour of love will be such a short flash in the pan, the media darling for the hour, in cinemas for only a few days before foom vanished, gone, buried under the bridge by another exabyte of newness. So sad really, their one shot at fame, and now, best they can hope to gain? Cult status.

Standing in the Andy Stream

Andy Warhol did say that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, but the corrollary of that was his observation about the stream of media annealing to these smaller moments so that, if you don't like what you are hearing right now, just wait 15 minutes: It will change. Applying the metaphor (paradigm?) of blogging to the rapid release of just now sampler singles, and then binding the output of many such single-blogging bands into promotional hubs such that, on any given day, someone is very likely to release at least one track, we have a broadcast network where if you don't like the top track, wait a few minutes: it will change.

Eventually, the rate of submissions cascading up through the trackbacks results in a webroll like weblogs.com where no one really intends to read every blog as it posts, not manually, anyway, but instead a whole new industry arises to mine that stream, to pan for the gold as the posts go by.

Remembering the CD

There are bloggers who are writers, fine writers, writers working on books and journals, and maybe I'm being a bit extreme in saying we'll obsolesce the CD: There probably will remain some role for the carefully crafted and tailored artifact disk, but what I am saying is that this role will not be as the sole or even the primary harbinger of musical culture, the CD will cease to be our only means of sharing musical expression.

The CD will become like the lithograph print, a limited-run thing, indubitably of a high quality standard, but in practice far more important for the number on the print than for any exclusive claim to the content of its expression.

But to get there, sure I can build the network to seed the demand by ensuring these new releases here near Owen Sound are known immediately to people in Austin or Madrid, and I expect there are studios out there who can accommodate the fast turn-around "low-tech/high-tech" (as Tom put it) to enable in principle the avenue of the cut-rate quick-track MP3 recording, but the real root of it all, the source of this revolution, this has to happen by the bands themselves, by the musicians who learn about sound recording what blogging has taught the novelists and political writers, who recognize that "perfection" is a noble goal, but exposure is what pays the bills.