ABOUT THAT DIGITAL REVOLUTION...

Good news, maybe, from one of the cities where I’ve applied for the manager job. I’m in Tier Two (those are the people who will be considered if the Tier Ones—the people they really want to interview—don’t work out)—and the Tier One candidates mostly haven’t worked out for one reason or another. So I may hear something soon. Or not. I still haven’t applied for any more city manager jobs. I figure there’s no point. I will concentrate on doing something else.

One evening’s practice with Jane, and we’re ready for the Leftovers Day show, I think. One substitution on the setlist (“Can I Have Your Car When the Rapture Comes?” instead of “Take-Out Food”), and we’ll do the “Christmas Roadkill” song in its original key of C. The Arts Center’s 3-channel piano amp will work for a PA; my task between now and Leftovers Day is to see if I can make my little guitar amp function as a monitor. We will need one so we can hear ourselves. I still could use some finger-strengthening opportunities, but don’t think there will be any between now and then. No Tsunami Grill this week—Thursday night is, like, Thanksgiving, to be spent with family and a turkey (or in my case, a fish).

A suggestion from Tunecore—another one of the music marketing Websites I subscribed to but never did anything with—that what’s happening in the Digital Revolution is the elimination of the gatekeepers, the people who stand between you-the-artist (or writer) and that theoretical mob of people out there who want to buy what you’ve got. I’m not sure I agree.

A lot of those folks provide services rather than restricting access; your publisher, for example, is the musical equivalent of the real estate agent, peddling your material on his own nickel to somebody who’ll buy it, in exchange for a percentage. They were filters, spotting talent and exposing it to people who could make money off it (and in the process make money for the “talent”). Those folks have been rendered not so much irrelevant, as less profitable, not by the Digital Revolution but by the refusal of the big record companies to accept any outside material. One can argue that the Digital Revolution exists in part because people closed off by the record companies from any access to the record companies were forced to devise an alternative way to get their material to market.

And the New Business Model, whatever form it takes, is going to need filters, too. Right now, we can get our material directly to the public, thanks to that Digital Revolution, but we can’t reach very many people. The consumer has trouble finding good material because there’s a cacophony out there. I’ve likened it to searching for diamonds in a sewer plant; you know they’re out there, but you have to sift through a lot of sewage to find them. We need Digital Revolution versions of Alan Freed, Bill Graham, Colonel Potter, and the like. And there needs to be a way for them to make money so that us-the-talent can make money. That, like Madonna said, may be performance. The record labels don’t control that. They also don’t control the Internet—but that’s so anarchic it may be useful primarily for exposure.

Could I do that? (I’m still trying to find a niche in the music business.) Not yet; I know how it works, I think, and I can produce: I can put lyricists together with composers, and singers, and musicians, and recording studios, and the graphic designers (one of which is me), and I know how and where to get CDs and other “merch” manufactured inexpensively. The marketing? Not so much: that depends on contacts, and I do not know—yet—enough people who could do an independent writer or artist any good. I am at present just another of that cacophony of voices clamoring for attention.

Joe