The thing about working for everybody is that you're working for everybody, so if you've ever worked in a company with twenty bosses, multiply that by a hundred and that's my target: To be working for the 2,000 daily unique visitors to TeledyN -- and every investing angel talking to Mr PayPal gets us that much closer! Sure it's only 6 people today, but yesterday it was only 4 and we've seen a 50% growth in the angel population, and a 30% in investment in just 24 hours ---

Why Do Angels Throw Money Away?

The concept of angel investors used to perplex me. Why would someone pour out huge amounts of their money on some project where they expect no tangible percentile return? As noble and humanitarian as it sounds, there's just no money in it. I understand George Soros as someone who just wants to make the world a better place and rich enough to do it, but I have a small dilemma in this here plan of mine that's predicated finding a thousand kind stranger angel investors dancing on the head of this pin.

Pond Crafting

But then, being the whole systems sort of thinker that I am, I realized: If you seed the root source of a new industry, it opens up all sorts of spin-off industries, and given the bootstrapped ecology opened by the original investment, it may be easier to illustrate the ROI to shareholding investors. It's like Bob Young said of the first few years where RedHat was in the red:

"My job is not to be the biggest fish in the pond. My job is to make that pond as large as possible."

And in this case, in this plan to replace an entire industry with a decentralized alternative, we are not simply making the existing pond bigger, we are terraforming whole new pond waters, inviting whole new era of bio-diversity ...

Edge of an old New Economy

Ok, maybe not. One reason I think this will succeed is because it is not any new economy, but the retrieval of an old economy. Marshall and Eric McLuhan tell us that any new step in technology must by necessity obsolesce some facet of the current status quo, and also must retrieve something that was thought obsolesced by that old replaced technology. In this case, we are retrieving the economics surrounding the music single, calling back the says when the song was the unit of musical exchange and the performance was its media.

By resurrecting the music single as a medium of expression, and by positioning the music single as a free token of exchange intended for maximum re-distribution, we re-widen the music industry pond to once again include all sorts of spin-off ventures:

playlist crafters:

The great glut of sound will require guides, it will require people with the time and knowledge and skill to sift through the ever-expanding pool of free music resource to create their Top-10 lists, to recommend new picks to radio stations or festivals. This mimics what we saw when webpages first emerged and the earliest personal home pages were nothing more than reviews of other sites, a spontaneous re-organization of the chaotic webpage data as humans are moved to make sense out of the world and to share that sense with others. Playlist crafters exist today for just about every magazine and newspaper and radio station, but because of the staggering volume of data we hope to unleash, this pond is about to explode in size.

low-tech/high-tech recording studios:

Many small recording studios exist only to serve one band, or one performer and a small group of friends. They have no pretense of seeking CD-production contracts because they've been conditioned by the Madonna-scale production values, like teenage-girls looking at fashion magazines, they feel themselves lacking in the necessary equipment and skills to make a proper impression. This is a false assumption: Alan Lomax used exceedingly crude portable equipment, and the record of sound he left is of inestimable value, and George Martin, albeit a perfectionist's perfectionist, created Sgt.Pepper using effectively an old 4-track Fostex porta-studio. When the expectation on the production gloss is scraped off the music business, the barriers to entry in the recording market goes way down, back to where it was when the world had room for any number of Sam Phillips sized studios.

anthologies and retrospectives:

When everyone is recording, everywhere, all the time, we are laying tracks for cultural mapping like never before. Like the way most Brit Invasion bands traced their lineage from Soft Machine, the Marquee or Planet Gong, with a rich cultural commons resource of free tracks each geographically sourced and carefully indexed, all sorts of new research edu-tainment can emerge tracing relationships, evolutions, bifurications.

narrowbanders:

Not everyone has broadband, and certainly not everywhere. Where there is broadband, people may enjoy this new exploding diversity of music directly, but out in the rural regions and in developing nations, the free singles may become more precious opening a new industry for those who do have broadband (or patience) to package the music for their locale. The precident for this is the free-software CD where companies like CheapBytes or LSL will burn Linux CDs downloaded from the distro sites, and then offer those CDs for $5 each by mail order. In today's music climate, we know people are already bootlegging whole CDs, and I know from experience that record stores are often tricked (or not) into selling these knock-off product, but what happens when our perspective is shifted and we want the bootlegger to burn and relay as many copies as they can flog?

When the single is intended as a loss-leader, every voluntary contribution to spreading it far and wide is not theft, it is welcome and a very real and tangible contribution to the artists' success! And when the content on that re-packaging is free content, as with free software, it puts a cap on the amount our self-distributor entrepreneur can put on their wares because anyone else in their neighbourhood is _also free to download the same tracks and make the same CD -- only, when there are thousands of new tracks to choose from each and every day, obviously there is lots of room for complementary mail-order CD-burner services.

Band Branding

Here's an intriguing side effect that seems alien to the mainstream RIAA world, but is in reality the norm down in the folk-music circles where I swim: When the songs are being traded freely and rapidly replaced, the value of each individual CD will tend to zero while the value of the artist reputation will grow.

Folk music has no shortage of material; one trip to any Digital Traditions mirror or a few hours spent at The Session and you will have no shortage of good material for your next tour; in our realm, as with jazz and classical performers, the CD is only a vehicle for our real product. Our real product is our ability to interpret and convey that material.

And thus, when I hear of a performance by Tara Mackenzie I won't be expecting to hear old familiar hits, I won't even really be expecting to hear any songs or tunes that I know and of those I might know, I won't expect them to match what I might have heard from another celtic performer because the whole point of traditional music is to make the tradition come alive and live anew. Just as with blogs, the quality is not a one-of production characteristic, it is an ongoing integrity of the performance that follows the artist where ever they go.

And knowing that prompts us to want to go and see this person for ourselves, to meet with that performance integrity, and carry a little of it back home to fit into our own lives.

And the portals too:

Let's not forget the reason I'm out here barking for tipjar angels in the first place: There is undoubtedly another potential industry in the operation of the interconnected niche-microecology blogosphere of the music network hubs, a place where those who produce the music can connect with those who listen and those who relay sounds and book bands.

This schmoozing and hob-knob networking in The Biz is already happening all around us; like most applications of social software, the only thing we're changing here is to give them tools to bootstrap a new scale of networking online.

This network is essential to my plan, and this is why I am rooting my plan in this technology product stage. The network is the broadcast vehicle to by-pass the RIAA-dominated and contract stifled world of mainstream radio. The blogspace music network is our roadway over which all this new economy commerce can be carried. And the reason we need Angels instead of bankers here, is because, like any network infrastructure, the ROI is peripheral and second-order, generated not by the network per se, but by the profitable uses that can transact over it.