Alex's Reflections on DKD & Seligman

Dan Seligman and Donald K Donald together provided a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Both provided a perspective of having thrived immediately in the music business, certainly in different ways, by hitting a key break early on with limited experience and knowledge.

This got me thinking first about the luck required to make it “big” in music, which seems to be very high initially, and quickly drops off after your “break.” This is when your brand starts to self-perpetuate and the influence of viral marketing gives you a boost, assuming you don’t do anything to screw it up. In that way, Tuesday’s analogy to a “labour of love” is appropriate for the reason that success in music is like falling in love – you have to reap the fruits of the relationship without trying too hard to control it (because music will always refuse to be controlled) and, above all, without screwing it up. Don’t we all know that creativity, like love, is imprecise?

In today’s fragmented music market, Donald sees the subscription model as reigning supreme at some point in the future. How I would love to see Sandy Pearlman’s response to this – the cloud versus the paradise of infinite storage. I see the point in Donald’s perspective, and a certain degree of wishful thinking that consumers might stop caring about their ability to “own” music as property, or that a first-world democratic government would cede to industry lobbyists – presumably against the will of many of its people – on the legalization of a tax/levy model for internet file sharing. This seems to be a denial of the fact that industries, no matter how great their glory days gone by, can and do collapse from time to time. As a renewable cultural derivative, music will additionally probably go through it again at some point in the future. That is, when the whole world stops heaping money on an industry, entropy takes over and the collapse self-perpetuating until the industry develops new modalities. Is the Phoenix yet in sight, say, in the form of iTunes, or a subscription service? We won’t know until one of these still better captures the world’s attention.

What Donald does capture well is the desirability right now for an “all-you-can-eat” model of distribution. Free downloading is what gives people the means to own a lot of music, and the popularity of this leads me to speculate that people may enjoy “owning” music even more than they like listening to it. That’s part of the reason I’m not an iTunes user – I’m a collector and my illegitimate habit would be far too costly to legitimize. To illustrate, the value of my music collection (at $0.99/track) is on four orders of magnitude, and maybe only 1/3 of it comes from CDs that have actually been purchased. If I’ve been collecting music online for 10 years (since my first 64MB Rio MP3 player) and continue at my present (fairly low) rate of acquisition, I should have expected to spend another $30,000 on music downloads, not accounting for inflation (or deflation) in the next 40 years.

What Seligman shows by contrast is growth of independent artists rising from the ashes of Music Industry 1.0. In fact, I would like to think that the “old” or “conventional” music industry which had it’s greatest hurrahs in the 1980’s was like a non-committal beta version of an industry whose greatest use now is to demonstrate the market potential – or the essentialness – of music. People’s interests since then haven’t changed – they’ll find the commodities they want to satisfy them. In the meantime, CBC Radio 3 (independent music) has more registered users than the populations of several Canadian capitals, and New Music Canada is approaching 20,000 registered bands in a country of just over 30M. The old industry’s collapse will have its share of victors and victims, but has ultimately pushed people to work harder and more creatively for a completely new set of success-benchmarks based on measurable benchmarks of popularity and not just on album sales.