Bird-of-a-Feather Joe from Boycott the RIAA hips us to free-the-music distributor, stream broadcaster and fan forum site dmusic.com where you can find hours of new artist tracks and tasty tidbits like this diary excerpt from Robert Fripp:

The RIAA represents the interests of the majors.
The interests of the majors are contrary to the interests of artists.
The RIAA does not represent the interests of artists, and to suggest this is fundamentally dishonest.

I always liked Fripp. I even have a copy of Frippertronics around here somewhere. Now, wouldn't it be cool if Bob could still be recording next-door neighbour domestic fights and rolling out fresh soundscapes around them?

Working with the One-Tracks

DMusic is the same intent as my One-Track network, namely to work around the industry inequities Fripp notes, but our goal is not to be a centralized master repository of the music, only one node in a global network in the free exchange of the meta-data about the recordings. We would trade in the news originating from artist blogs and sites like DMusic, hooking sound sources to the audience by way of blogspace RSS/ping technologies.

So, for example, every time dmusic received (or approved or both) a new submission, the link and summary would go into their RSS, then that would be picked up by the OneTrack network hubs and begin propagating through the other hubs by mutual exchange avenues of RSS aggregators, filtered into genre, region or whatever by virtue and discretion of the aggregating site. Someone with an R&B/Soul personal interest might subscribe to the aggregated feed and thus this announcement of the new Lester Chambers track (fab!) would appear on that fan's website to be clicked on by their audience.

Given the next-step of trackback, that link to Lester's announcement propagates through the network unscathed, always linking back to the original story, and as soon as some R&B fan blogs about it, if they also have TB (and blogcensus says many do) dmusic gets an instant alert telling them of another fan so dedicated, they are willing to help promote Lester's release. As we do in blogdom, they can surf in immediately, add a comment, express some thanks, maybe even in the process discover that this trackbacking site has other artists that dmusic would dearly like to meet ...

In my model, dmusic would still be paying the actual delivery bandwidth cost --- there are good P2P methods for this, for example, "May has tracks(at the bottom of the page):http://www.teledyn.com/ocn.php using the Open Content Network, but BitTorrent is also an option and DMusic already endorses my personal favourite, gnutella --- but dmusic would not be responsible for the marketing (aka awareness) of Lester's track beyond their host website. The One-Track network does that for them.

Rethinking the Recording

Good production values are still valuable, but I'm cautioning against the excess that plagues our industry by raising the entry barrier too high. We need to rethink the recording away from the sculpted artifact of record and back to what it was at the start, simply a way to capture a moment in time. We want polaroids, not Kirsh portraits.

Thus I encourage Lester and the other sound-blog artists to lower their expectations for the recording quality so they can release a new low-tech track every few weeks, especially when preparing for a tour or fishing for festival bookings. They could even replace an early release by a re-recording giving fans a snapshot of the artist evolution.

By returning the recording back to a concept of a temporal and disposable commodity, we no longer expect to make our money off the distribution of the recording, we go back to our traditional role, making the money off playing the music. Best of all, recordings per se become commoditized, ubiquitous and disposable. The RIAA members would no longer find a market for the $30 CD, although they might still compete at $3/disk, only, who needs disks if you can get a track beamed to you free from someone's IR-equipped iPod?

In the One-Track universe, a recording is only a promotional channel, pure swag (which, let's face it, for most artists, is what it is anyway) and we can therefore freely allow for the re-distribution of our MP3 over Gnutella/Kazaa or even on bootleg compilations (much like the way CheapBytes or even RedHat have built a business off the re-bundling and quality control of free software) --- bootlegging ceases to exist as a concept and we gain that considerable global distribution channel as a partner rather than see them as an enemy.

Music Gets Shared Anyway --- So why not capitalize on it?

If I have broadband and my neighbour doesn't, I burn them a CD (the kids do this already, even with store-bought CDs), and if I'm particularly tuned in on R&B, maybe my compilations would be discerning enough to justify people buying my monthly sampler.

Bringing Artists to their Audience

To play in this game, dmusic has everything it needs content-wise, but would need to hook into the network and become at least RSS enabled so other related sites could help spread the word. Then, to kickstart the process, we need a central ping site where the data-mining robots can watch for the short message of the new content and decide if they want to index the page for their own services as done today for text-matter by www.blogdigger.com or www.technorati.com -- this then removes the need for fans to for the fans to constantly watch the music hosting sites (which they can't because there are too many of them); in the One-Track world, dmusic comes to them by way of the social software infrastructure.

In the current world, musician advocate sites like DMusic and eFolkMusic do what they can to bring the music to your attention, but they are still working from an old-world A&R perspective: The casual rules for DMusic is given in response to a poster asking how they can get on the Country Music Stream

• They have to not suck.
• We have to sort of like them
• We have to see your arse on the forums
• We'll think of some more torture.

Fair enough, but that's editorial control. Necessary in their case because they have a stable of artists and want to get the 'best' known, but I happen to like the renegade looseness of Grandpa Jones and I'm not all that fond of the slick flurries of Earl Scruggs (but still worship the ground he walks on); given my druthers, I'd take a stream of real mountain people singing the songs their mamas taught them, even if it was scratchy and full of "ooops, let me try that again" moments. That's just me, but hey, I'm a listener too.

Thing is, DMusic has that same lowest common denominator problem as the pre-Internet era radio program director, a shortage of broadcast pipe, a scarcity of minutes to fill with the stream. So they filtre by their preference, and that is a Good Thing because it provides a service. I don't discredit it, I'm only saying that there are other ways to get the same result.

And it's labour intensive. The A&R people for DMusic must audition every track, give it a thumb direction, and file it. Tedious and expensive, and I expect for them it is a labour of love, only their lovin' might give us a thrill, but their lovin' won't pay any bills. A next-step that I personally think would work rests on the Drupal concept of community ratings, and in a One-Track hub site, site members could review the material as a community, +5 points for playlist, -10 for the bit-bucket, but that is still limited and precarious because, to get a real consensus, you need a sizeable population, with only moments of sporadic involvement from any one member.

Much like the way blogspace works ...

In the blogspace, every 'artist' is welcome. No exceptions, no torture. You got the gear, you get the airplay. That's the reality of the web, and that's the everyday reality of the blogosphere. Everyone is welcome, everyone can do pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want.

Welcome to RoboRadio

Now, supposin' ... what if we take that feature of blogdex or daypop that says what's getting 'airplay' most often, and the rate of rise and fall, and what if we then fold in the known-technology such as those sites that scour the weblogs.com posts for Amazon links, only we switch that to MP3/Ogg links and all we do is queue them up for streaming airplay by taking maybe the top 200 and run them through a randomizing playback, then go back and refresh the list hour after hour.

All the hits. All the time.

Here's where One-Track becomes the educator: By leading artists to tag their recordings properly, this robot radio station can suss out useful metadata from the track to help classify it. Yes, I know this is the classical problem of bogus spamming self-declared metadata, but if there's Google-level money in it, you could just as easily, or additionally, mine the referring sites too to extract their keyword blogchalk and then arrive at some consensus whether Ian Charles is country or R&B, and queue his track appropriately.