The New Way

Everyone that's paying attention knows that the old mode of selling music is gone. Long gone. This is old news. It's about word of mouth, recommendations from trusted sources and authentic relationships between artists and fans.

What concerns me is that many very thoughtful people who are genuinely concerned with the state of the music industry (as opposed to the record industry) all seem to be headed in the same direction.

We study and listen and talk. We read Seth Godin and what his disruptive notion of permission marketing has inspired. We study the latest trends in D2F (direct to fan) platforms and the financial advantages produced by product bundling (Nine Inch Nails, Metric, etc..) There are some very smart people leading conversations and some innovative platforms in the market or coming to the market place shortly.

But if the smartest and brightest amongst us are all traversing the same path (more or less) will we all arrive at the same place at the same time only to realize there's a finite amount of everything sans bandwidth? Does it matter to be an early adopter when the time line in The Everett Rogers Diffusion of innovations theory / rate of diffusion is now so compressed.

The thought that keeps rising to the top of my mind is this: if most everyone is focused on genuine relationships, direct to fan sales, permission marketing, web metrics and the like how will anyone differentiate themselves from anyone else? The music lover only has so many hours in each day, only so much disposable income although some would argue that getting the fans attention is far more important than getting their money, or that the former leads to the latter.

Perhaps I'm missing the point, and the tools that I mention above will serve the smartest few with additional tools to achieve what we currently see as the real way forward: genuine contact, life long fans, true fans. Fans for life. 1,000 (or 10,000) true fans.

Everyone has access to twitter and facebook but only a few use those tools effectively.