Andrew Dubber - Music in The Digital Age

Music in the Digital Age
Making sense of the commerce & culture

of popular music
2011 - 2012 Andrew Dubber
is version was published on 2012-05-19
is is a Leanpub book, for sale at:

http://leanpub.com/dubber
Leanpub helps authors to self-publish in-progress ebooks. We
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Contents
About this updated version
Introductory note
Understanding Music in the Digital Age
is is a conversation
Music
11
e Digital Age
18
e Internet explained
31
A short explanatory note on Mediation
43
e 20 ings Revisited
46
01 Dont Believe the Hype
51
02 Hear / Like / Buy
58
03 Opinion Leaders Rule
63
i
CONTENTS
ii
04 Customise
67
05 e Long Tail
73
06 Web 2.0
77
07 Connect
81
08 Cross-promote
84
09 Fewer clis
88
10 Professionalism
91
11 e Death of Scarcity
96
12 Distributed identity
105
13 SEO
109
14 Permission and Personalisation
111
15 RSS
113
16 Accessibility
115
17 Reward & Incentivise
118
CONTENTS
iii
18 Frequency is everything
121
19 Make it viral
124
20 Forget Product - Sell Relationship
126
Where to from here?
129
Lots more to come
130
e thank you page
132
Further Reading
133
About this updated

version
What youre reading right now is the mid-April 2012 version of
Music in the Digital Age. It is by no means the nal version
of this book. eres a lot more researing and writing to be
done yet - but of course, all updates to you will always be free
- whether you paid for this book or not. Looks like Im going to
be working on this for most of the rest of the year.
In this version of the book, I have (nally) completed the section
that revisits and updates my original e 20 ings You Must
Know About Music Online, and addresses ea one of the points
it raises. Hopefully, I can now put that one to bed and move
forward with this new book, developing the ideas about Music
in the Digital Age with case studies, examples and some useful,
practical tips.
Next, Ill be working on a section about Music as Culture,
whi will cover things like localism, arives, internet culture,
professionalism and work, music as a tool for social ange and
the ways in whi public policy aects music in the digital age.
Im also releasing the Spanish version of this book this week
(while Im in Venezuela, whi is a happy coincidence).
In other words, lots to do. So glad youre along for the ride - and
I hope youre enjoying it.
All the best,
Dubber
http://leanpub.com/20things
Introductory note
Hi. anks for downloading this ebook. What youre reading is
a work in progress. Its not a short book, or an unnished book,
but an incomplete one. Knowing that you already have this book
is part of my motivation for making sure a) that its good, and b)
that it gets nished. Im aiming to complete it this year.
Youll get regular (but not too frequent) updates as I nish major
sections of the book, and youll receive those automatically and
always for free. I look forward to any feedba, corrections or
comments you may have that might help me improve it as well.
anks for reading - whether you paid or not (but special bonus
thanks if you did) - and if you nd it interesting or helpful, please
feel free to share it with your friends.
is book is released under a Creative Commons licence. at
means that you CANNOT pirate it. Not that you mustnt pirate
it - but that you wont be able to. You can copy it, give it away,
sti it up on torrent sites - whatever. Its all fair game, and its
not piracy. Go ahead - kno yourself out. Youd be doing me a
huge favour.
e only way you could actually contravene copyright laws is if
you tried to sell this yourself - as if it was your work. Dont do
that, okay? At least - not without us having a at and coming
to some agreement rst.
Otherwise - this is your book. So do whatever you like with it.
Read, share, enjoy.
Understanding Music
in the Digital Age
This is a conversation
Ive been trying to write this book for about four years.
When I ran New Music Strategies as a blog about independent
music business in the digital age, I released an ebook that had a
degree of success for whi Im very grateful. Not that I made
any money from it, as I gave it away for free, but I did make
some money because of it, whi is a dierent thing, but equally
appreciated. It also took me to some fantastic and interesting
places around the world and allowed me to meet and work with
some really talented and amazing people - several of whom are
now the other members of the New Music Strategies team.
New Music Strategies is now something quite dierent. What
that something is, is something thats still up for grabs. We do
things that we think are interesting about music in the digital
age. ings that are about participation, about community,
about music as a tool for social ange and about more music,
by more people in more places. But thats a prey broad brief.
Prey mu the only things were not interested in working on
are Can you help make my 13 year-old niece a famous popstar?
and Were seing up a website to make the music business more
like the sto market.
In both instances, were likely to not only say no, thats not what
we do but also we wish you every failure in your endeavour for reasons that I hope will become clear as you read this book.
In my job as Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University, and running the MA in Music Industries,
http://newmusicstrategies.com
a lot of what I do involves stepping ba from the debates

about music online, the anges to the music business and the
arguments about copyright and tenology as it relates to music
business, and just examine what it is thats going on. How does
it all work, and why do people say what they say about it? Im
interested in analysing and understanding the music industries
and popular music culture in the digital age more than I am
interested in telling people how to run their businesses.
at said, this book does have helpful marketing strategy ideas
in it that will help you bring your music to a wider audience
if thats what you wish, and it will help you nd ways of using
the internet that are manageable and productive for independent
music business. Most likely, thats why youve downloaded it.
But I hope some of the other things I have to say will be both
interesting and useful as well. Or at least not boring.
But allow me the indulgence of going ba over that earlier book
and hopefully, in my long-winded and meandering manner, that
will lead us to the point of this book.
At the beginning of 2007, I wrote an e-book called e 20 ings
You Must Know About Music Online. I hadnt planned to write
that book - it just came out of a conversation. I was at a seminar
alongside some notable local music industry types. Id been
asked to say a few things about the internet for music business,
and so I had prepared a few notes. e notes were on cards, and
ea card had a topic wrien down on it. My idea was that I
would say a few simple things about ea topic, and then move
on to the next one. ere were about twenty- ve cards all up,
and I had about an hour to talk. I made it through three of them.
In the question and answer session aerwards, some people
asked me to briey summarise the main point of the rest of the
cards. At the time, I couldnt really do that. I didnt know

how to condense those main issues into a single idea. To me,
these were all separate issues that needed unpiing. Ea one
was an important idea that needed discussion, explanation and
clarication.
So instead, I oered to write a blog post about ea one, then
post it up on my website. Over drinks, someone suggested that it
would be handy if they were all bundled up together into a single
work, and I thought that was a good idea too. So I went away and
turned those cards into a series of related blog posts. I narrowed
the topics down to a nice round twenty (thereby geing rid of
some repetition and overlap), and then I combined those blog
posts into a book. By the time Id nished, it was the middle of
2007.
I put the PDF up on my website for free. Its still there. Help
yourself. Its still good and relevant, and it has some useful stu
in there you may wish to implement.
You dont have to give me your email address or jump through
any hoops to get it. If youre so inclined, you can also give it
away for free from your own website or email it to everyone
youve ever met. Kno yourself out. Its a totally free e-book
containing what was, at the time, a distillation of my thoughts
about the online music environment.
My best guess is that the 96-page 20 ings e-book has now
been shared, downloaded, given away and distributed in excess
of 300,000 times. at number is conservative, and its possibly
mu higher. But if Id asked for so mu as an email address,
that number would probably have had several fewer zeroes on
the end of it. If Id asked for money, Id have been luy to sell a
single copy, and - if you ask me - rightly so. Apart from anything
else, the whole thing was already available as individual blog

posts on my website.
But whats interesting to me is that since May 2007, every single
one of the people who have invited me to all sorts of amazing
places around the world, and who have found money for me to
talk to their students, sta members, clients, friends and fellow
musicians all have one thing in common: theyd read the book.
I suspect theres a lesson in that, but you can make your own
conclusions.
e thing is the internet moves really quily, and that was
over four years ago. When I wrote that 20 ings e-book, and
put it online, I was aware that Id probably have to constantly
update it. I certainly wasnt expecting this many people to have
it or know about it, but I was prey sure Id need to revisit it
prey regularly. Aer all, new tenologies come along all the
time.
Unexpected and disruptive platforms mean that the main ways
in whi we consume music may be dierent at any moment;
massively increased download speeds and storage space alter our
online practices beyond recognition; new services come along
that make the old way in whi we did things - just last week,
even - positively quaint. Hell, it even has references to MySpace
in it. Who uses MySpace?
So, since around November 2007, Ive been trying to work on a
re-write of e 20 ings You Must Know About Music Online.
A second, revised and updated edition.
Ive tried to get it done quily, by just tweaking and modifying
bits and pieces here and there, and Ive also tried completely
dierent approaes to the same material.
One version turned the things into specic strategies - and

aempted to give a step by step how to guide to independent
music online. While su a thing might sound incredibly helpful
at face value, I realised almost immediately that su a book
would be prey mu useless, for reasons that will become
apparent as you read this.
But at any rate, ea time Ive come up with a new way of
revising the book, Ive made it about halfway through, and ea
time it hasnt felt quite right - and so I stopped.
Of course, there are lots of simple lile things that could be
anged.
ere are, to my knowledge, four typographical errors in the
original ebook. Two of them, naturally, occur in the section
where I talk about how important it is to be careful about spelling
and professional presentation. I did receive a few emails about
that.
Moreover, theres no need to be talking about the Arctic Monkeys
or Lily Allen in this context these days. eyve moved on and
so have we.
But these are the sorts of lile things that would need constant
tweaking if I just anged and updated those bits. And so Ive
been stu, and Ive le it. And any time the e-book has come
up in conversation, Ive felt a weird mix of nostalgia, pride and
embarrassment. I cant help but be reminded that its not what
I want it to be anymore - but nor did I know what I did want it
to be.
I havent been promoting it, particularly - and nor have I been
bringing it up in conversation recently - but it seems to have a
life of its own, and people keep passing it around and linking to
it, whi is nice, of course. And while helpful volunteers have

kindly been translating it into dierent languages, making free
(and very professional) audiobooks out of it and circulating it to
more and more people throughout the world - Ive been becoming increasingly uneasy about the books continued relevance.
Its not wrong as su - its just not as current as it could be.
And one week in June 2009, I found myself in Groningen, in
the north of the Netherlands. I was doing what I like to call
an Unconsultancy - whi is simply me turning up and being
as helpful (and aordable) as I can be to as many independent
music people as possible in a short space of time - as opposed to a
traditional consultancy, whi is a more intensive, single-client
aair.
Its an interesting approa, because it makes the sort of thing
I do mu more readily available to a mu wider group of
musicians and music businesses that could really do with a few
pointers to get them unstu and move them forward on their
path - but arent the kind of people who can generally hire
consultants.
Anyway, over lun, I was talking to one su person - who
asked the question:
What would be dierent about the 20 ings book if you
were to write it now?
And thats a very dierent question to the one Id been asking
myself, whi was: How should I update the ebook?
So I gave it some serious thought. And I came up with what I
think is the best answer I could:
ere wouldnt be 20 ings. eres really only ONE.
at is to say: ere is just ONE thing you must know about

Music (and, come to think of it, everything else) in the Digital
Age - and all else follows from that.
And if you really understand that principle and apply it to what
you do as an independent musician, or an entrepreneurial music
business, then everything will follow from that. Every decision
you make about the online environment, every digital marketing
strategy you come up with, and everything you say, make and
do on the internet will be guided by this single, simple idea.
It is the one thing that updates, encapsulates and contextualises
everything Ive wrien online at New Music Strategies - and its
the one single realisation about the online environment that I
believe solves internet strategy.
Best of all its something that can be summed up extremely
simply - but its extraordinarily ri, nuanced and complex.
is is a conversation. Its human beings, communicating with
ea other.
ats it. e whole message in a nutshell: is is a conversation.
And by this, I mean the whole thing - the music, the medium,
the marketing, the tenology, the relationship with fans, the
branding, the community music workshops, the recordings, the
live concerts, the social media prole pages, the improvisations,
the downloads, the t-shirts, the BitTorrents, the ringtones, the
status updates, the copyright laws, the CDs, the vinyl, the day to
day work of being a musician, the inspired musical expression.
Its human beings doing what people do: Communicating.
Expressing. Sharing. Relating.
10
Culture is simply whatever people say, make and do. Music is

Culture.
Music in the Digital Age is the creation and propagation of
culture within a particular media context. A contemporary
media environment. I think its important to understand what
that means, why its dierent and why thats important before
you can start implementing strategies - whether its to make a
sustainable career as a virtuoso nose bagpipist, to help kids to
play Baa Baa Bla Sheep on the piano, to start an online service
that lets people listen to their favourite music whenever and
wherever they want to, or to inspire political ange through
song.
We need to think about what music is. We need to think about
what it means to be in the Digital Age. We need to put those
things together and explore the implications of that. Because
the simple fact is that it IS the digital age.
If youre just strumming a nylon string guitar in your bedroom,
you are making music in the digital age, even if your computer
isnt swited on.
I believe thats signicant, and warrants investigation.
Music
In order to talk about Music in the Digital Age, its probably
helpful to actually start from the beginning and consider what
those two concepts mean (Music and the Digital Age), both
separately, and when put together.
I have no intention of trying to dene music. You probably
already know what it is when you encounter it. I could say
something about it having melody, harmony and rhythm, but
actually, a lot of my favourite music has none of those things.
I could say intentional sound, but then that would deny the
musicality of ance acoustic events. I could go into a bit of
a ri about perception and the rather interesting truth that the
human mind creates sound aer the fact of its reception by the
ears as simply moving columns of air. You dont hear music
as mu as your brain actually constructs it from the input from
your auditory sense. And yeah, that means if a tree falls in a
forest, it makes vibrations in the air, but unless theres an ear
and a brain in the vicinity - no sound.
Hell, even a series of dots on a piece of paper can be called
music.
Christopher Small (1998) suggests we drop the idea of music
as a noun, and rather discuss the notion of musiing - a verb.
Musics not a thing we can hold in our hands, or own. We can
own a piece of paper, or a plastic disc, but those things arent
music - and nor is, ultimately, what comes out of the speakers or
emanates from the piano when the dots on the page are played
by a pianist. Music is an activity that people do - and oen its
something that people do together.
11
Music
12
Its a social and cultural activity, more than it is a commodity.

And he kind of has a point. Far more music is made for social and
cultural reasons than for reasons of commodication. We sing
Happy Birthday to ea other. We sing songs to our ildren to
help them learn. We engage in music for celebrations, religious
ceremonies and rituals.
Denitions of music are problematic at best, and need to factor
in aesthetic, social, artistic, communicative, anthropological,
philosophical and physical understandings of the phenomenon.
Precise denitions of music are not the point when were trying
to deal with the rst principles that are important to us here.
But we do need to know what it is were talking about when we
discuss this stu.
Your music is commercial

For the sake of simplicity, and because its the bit youre no doubt
most interested in, Im going to be entirely culturally reductive
here and simply talk about whats confusingly known as Popular
Music. e term Popular Music does not mean music that is
popular or even pop music, but instead refers to those types of
music that are created, performed or produced in relation to the
kinds of cultural exange that are, in essence, commercial.
I know, I know - the term commercial has all sorts of negative
connotations. Im not talking about the commercialisation of
independent, folk or other musical forms, but about the simple
fact that prey mu all music we listen to is inextricably linked
with commerce. As Simon Frith (1988) points out, without Music
Business, no music.
Music
13
e industrialization of music cannot be understood as something whi happens to music, since it describes a process in
whi music itself is made - a process, that is, whi fuses (and
confuses) capital, tenical and musical arguments.
Of course, youre thinking but what about people who just learn
an instrument for fun, and only play for their friends? - to whi
the answer is that the music that they play - its form, structure
and derivations - all stems from a kind of music that was
designed to be played and performed in a commercial seing. I
include classical music and jazz in this context. Most folk music
too (I say most, because many folk musics are purely cultural and
communicative expressions that exist to perform social functions
independent of a performer/audience relationship where value is
being exanged).
eres this widely held idea that music is this pure and natural expression that happens creatively and artistically among
human beings, and then commerce comes along and corrupts it
all. I say thats obvious nonsense. Music and Commerce arent
individual concepts or entities that exist over there, separate
from People. Music and Commerce are both ings at People
Do.
Sure, some music is ruined by aempts to reshape it for greater
commercial acceptance, but in fact the more fundamental truth is
without commerce, no music. If there were not concerts, records,
marketing, patronage, equipment sellers, promoters, retailers,
managers, professional teaers, venues, publishers and music
press, there would prey mu be no music as we know it. At its
simplest level, whos going to form a band if we have no cultural
reference for what a band is and what its for? Barring those
musics that exist purely for tribal and community social function
Music
14
- and even these are dwindling as World Music is captured and

commodied for a willing commercial marketplace - music and
commerce are inextricably linked.
So why, if these things are simply part of the same phenomenon,
do we have this ongoing tension between the art of music and
the commerce of music? Because clearly, there is a tension. e
simplest way to explain it away is that people are a problem.
Musicians are selsh and precious. Record companies are greedy
and corrupt. Audiences are thieves. Promoters are crooks.
Publishers are parasites. Retailers are unimaginative. e
Music Press either regurgitates PR bollos or has completely
disappeared up its own arse.
We oen rely on these simplications and stereotypes to make
sense of the fact that being in music (and, therefore, in the music
business) is hard. Harder than it probably should be.
Your music is media

Instead of considering musicians as gied and talented artistes
(or self-obsessed primadonnas), and the music business people
they have to contend with leees (or tragically inept but lovable
enthusiasts), I prefer to consider music and its business as Media
forms.
Let me explain.
We think we understand media. We are completely immersed
in it and it inscribes our daily lives. We have a fair idea of how
newspapers and magazines work. We get that television operates
in a certain way, and that radio is kind of similar. Film we have
a prey good sense of too. ese things are clearly media. But
Music
15
we struggle to think of popular music, as Ive described it above,

as being part of that same media family.
But in fact, all popular music is mediated. And in fact, Id go
a step further - Id say that all popular music is a process of
mediation of what Small calls Musiing. Whether we have
a CD, a DVD, a download, a stadium concert tiet, a magazine
article, or front row seats at a small venue - there is a process of
mediation at work.
Heres one way to think about it:
Consider a TV Show. Lets take the Sopranos as a case in point.
If we think about it, we can see prey clearly how a programme
like that comes to be. Someone comes up with it. Someone writes
it. Some people act in it, and other people direct it. Someone
edits it and someone else distributes it. Somebody promotes it to
the correct audience. It gets broadcast, and some people consume
it by way of an electronic appliance in their home. is is, of
course, a complete oversimplication, but in a nutshell, thats
the ain of events.
Even more simply put, Id break that down into some main
stages: theres a Composition step, a Performance step, a Production step, a Distribution step, a Promotional step and a
Consumption step. Map a Coldplay album onto that same ain,
and you can begin to see why I think of popular music as media.
But you see, the thing with media is that ea of those steps is
aware of, and takes into consideration the needs and parameters
of ea of the other steps in the ain. e writer of the Sopranos
is no more going to write a 25-minute third act than the director
is going to shoot on 70mm IMAX lm, or than a publicist is going
to target it at pre-teens. e whole Sopranos phenomenon, as a
TV show, is made up of the sum of its parts, it ts into generally
Music
16
understood categories and fullls certain tenical and structural

criteria so that it works as a media artefact.
is may be a controversial thing to say, but if you have ideas
to engage in your bit of the music media ain that resolutely
ignores all of the other bits, then youre going to encounter
tensions. ese tensions might come when a recording artist
wants to make a ve-album song cycle as a rst release, or when
a publicist wants to get a political punk band to pose for a Smash
Hits! magazine foldout. In other words, misunderstanding the
cultural and commercial parameters of any of the other parts of
the ain causes the problems. inking of music as the art (or
the product to be exploited), and commerce as the necessary
evil (or the whole point of the exercise) automatically starts
things o on the wrong foot.
But when you think of Popular Music Media as a single phenomenon, you can start to arrange the parts in a holistic and
intelligent way, in whi all of the parts are compatible, and can
both understand and deal with all the other pieces of that same
thing.
Perhaps most importantly, media tends to factor its audience into
the design, all along the ain. Of course, there are television
programmes that are made simply to amuse or allenge the
writers of the show, and a group of people who happen to think
along those same lines may discover and appreciate them, and
form its small audience. ere are television programmes that
are completely constructed to appeal to as many lowest common
denominator viewers as they can nd. And there are television
programmes that respect and allenge an intelligent audience,
but completely understand the parameters of the media business
and consumer relationship they form part of.
Music
17
I think there are helpful parallels that illuminate the condition

of popular music in there. Chances are, what you personally
happen to do in all this falls somewhere in the Composition,
Performance, Production, Distribution, Promotional and Consumption parts of the media equation. You may even take care
of a few or even all of those bits yourself. Personally, Im down
here at the end of the ain, listening to, collecting and loving
the music. But although you have to think about us, you also
have to think about the whole media ecology youre part of.
So, when I talk about Music Online, thats what I mean by the
Music bit.
The Digital Age

We are living in what I would call the h media age (and just
to underline how important I think that is, lets capitalise it: e
Fih Media Age).
In order to understand what I mean by e Fih Media Age and why thats signicant to someone who just wants to make
a living playing music and is reading this book for clues - let me
take you through the ve ages so you can step ba for a minute
and see whats really going on.
For this, I take a leaf out of the work of Herbert Marshall
McLuhan. In his books in particular, e Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962) and Understanding Media (1964) McLuhan talks about
dierent periods of history as they relate to the primary media
forms that aracterise them. He speaks about these as if they
are evolutionary phases: for instance, he talks about the age
of the printing press as being a specic period of humankinds
development Typographic Man.
McLuhan died in 1980. He didnt, as some people suggest,
predict the Internet. However, one of the things he did do was
to provide a useful framework for thinking about ways in whi
our media environment anges the way that we think and also
has a profound impact upon the ways in whi we communicate
and express ourselves.
The Five Ages of Media

e central premise of this is that media are environments. at
is, we dont consume media - we inhabit them. at sounds a
18
e Digital Age
19
lile needlessly obtuse, but its really quite simple: throughout

history, we have lived in a world saturated by one media form
or another, and that anges over time. And by media form I
mean the main way in whi we take in our information.
Our brains get information about the world through our senses.
Our senses are connected to whatever the main media happen
to be at the time. And when those media ange, we ange.
And like a frog slowly boiling, we generally dont realise its
happening to us while its happening.
We have been through ve main ages of media, ea with its own
unique aracteristics. As we move from one age to another, the
media environment alters, and the organism of our brain has to
adapt to its new environment. It evolves. Not metaphorically
- it actually anges. Our wiring is dierent in response to the
dierent tenological context we nd ourselves in.
is isnt complex, but it is important - in particular when it
comes to everything I have to say about music and the Internet
but also in general. It aects culture, society, law, politics, art,
commerce and our own fragile psyologies.
Ill take you through it.
1) The Oral Age

Human beings are hardwired for narrative. Always have been.
As soon as we gured out how to make words, weve been
telling ea other stories - and some of our most compelling and
enduring myths come to us from the Oral age.
e medium was spee. It was the campre storytale. e
oratory of Homer. e story was present before us, and we could
e Digital Age
20
interrogate it as it played out.

And in the oral age, the main way in whi music happened was
communally. As part of celebration or mourning, gathering or
ritual. In this context, musics an extension of spee. In many
oral societies, there are actually no musicians, because music is
just something everyone does. Its not a profession.
Now, thats not universally true for all cultures, of course, and
over time, there are some oral cultures that turn music making
into something else. ey are the troubadours and buskers. ey
show up and they entertain with songs and stories from their
travels - and they are rewarded for their cra.
e oral age prey mu starts at the dawn of human civilisation,
and unless you want to make the case for a gestural age before it
(grunting and pointing to communicate), it marks the rst media
age. e rst period through whi human beings had a means
by whi they tended to communicate, and take in information
and form an understanding of the world in whi they lived.
e Oral Age lasted, to make it a crudely round gure, about
10,000 years.
2) The Scribal Age

And then we invent writing. Writings great. We can now take
those stories, and we can preserve them. No longer do they have
to be passed down from generation to generation by painstaking
repetition and rote learning. Now they can be captured in a
permanent form and recalled at will - brought ba to life from
the page.
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21
Writing was more complicated than mere spee though. For

a start, it required the skill of literacy, and that wasnt evenly
distributed for the most part. Besides, there were very few texts.
In order for a copy of a text to be made, what would ordinarily
happen is that some scribes and monks from my monastery
would come and visit your monastery in a dierent part of the
world. It would take them months to travel there, they would
copy a book by hand - aracter by aracter, line by line - and
then theyd make the journey ba to my monastery where it
would sit in my library, where only my monks were allowed to
read it. And only the important ones at that.
Sadly, when texts are so precious and rare, sometimes great
calamities can befall them. Like the re that wiped out the
Alexandrian Library, taking hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable scrolls containing a large unk of all recorded human
knowledge with it.
But writing allowed for stories to be captured, studied and
repeated faithfully in one telling to the next. e guy with
the literacy could stand up the front and read in sermons to a
congregation of illiterate and accepting aendees. Aer all, you
cant question a text. It says what it says.
And there were, of course, musicians who not only possessed
this skill of literacy, but were able to compose and create works
by making marks on paper. And so the profession of composer
emerges - and before long a man named Ba is making copies of
his works, handing them out to his assembled team of musicians,
and they would perform for the entertainment and dancing of
the guests at the party of Mr Bas ri patron.
Roughly speaking again, the Scribal Age lasted around 1,500
e Digital Age
22
years - depending on whi continent you happen to live.
3) The Print Age

So, along comes this Gutenberg guy and makes a maine that
uses the concept of movable type (hundreds of years aer the
Chinese rst think of it, as it happens) and before long, hes massproducing books.
is turns out to be the biggest revolution in human history since
the development of writing. Because not only can spee be
captured in text on a page, its now almost a trivial exercise to
make and distribute multiple copies of that knowledge.
Now everyone can have their own Bible. Everyone can come
to have a personal relationship with their saviour - or print and
distribute leaets suggesting that perhaps they dont need one
or that the saving that needs doing is one of political reform, or
an intellectual and cultural enlightenment project.
At any rate - the message is now in everyones hands. Literacy
spreads like wildre. Before long, people are nailing their edicts
to ur doors, or siing in private taking in information at
their own pace - the words going into their brains like beads on
a string.
Our brains ange radically. We develop an unprecedented
sense of the individual. We discover sequential logic and crossreferencing. And with meanical reproduction, we invent the
industrial age.
Music, as a business, of course, ourishes - and before long there
is a real industry. e industry is called music publishing - and
the main way in whi money is made from music is through the
e Digital Age
23
creation, distribution and retail of dots on pages. People can go

into a shop, buy a famous song, take it home, and play it badly
on the piano in the parlour.
e Print Age lasted a good 500 years. Youll notice that number
keeps geing smaller.
4) The Electric Age

en suddenly - Bam! Marconi, Edison, Franklin, Faraday, Volta,
Tesla, Morse and Bell ange the world again with their magnets
and sparks and whatnot.
Not only can culture be mass-produced, it can now be captured
as audio or images - and mass broadcast. Its one thing to read
a book that someone else is also reading and be able to have
a conversation about it. Its something quite dierent again to
simultaneously witness man seing foot on the moon along with
millions of other people all across the globe.
e radical shi in media environment that the Electric Age
brings about is what exercises McLuhan the most. e eect
of that media shi on our minds is something that he is now
perhaps best known for: e Global Village - whi is not, as
you might think, some sort of caring, sharing hands across the
water thing (villages can be quite problematic and claustrophobic collections of people).
At any rate, the Electric Age completely transforms our media
environment again. e main way in whi our brains take in
information about the world in whi we live and how we can
make sense of it is fundamentally altered.
e Digital Age
24
And for music - with electricity, of course, comes recording.

Now you can not only have a famous song in your living room
on a piece of paper - you can have an idealised performance of
that song, by an international artist and unlike the piano in
your parlour, it will sound the same every single time you play
it.
Of course, this was a massive allenge to the music industry
that came before it. e sheet music publishers WERE the
music industry - and these recording companies threatened their
livelihoods. Besides, how were local musicians going to make
any money in concert halls if a single artist in another country
could record one performance of a song and sell it all over the
world?
And the answer is - prey mu everyone had to adapt. e old
sheet music industry fought the recorded music industry tooth
and nail. Hell, the recorded music industry even fought radio.
Who was going to buy records if people could hear them for
nothing on the wireless?
But just as the previous models of music business had survived
in some marginalised form from one age to the next, its still
possible to buy sheet music today - and its still possible to make
money making and selling it. Its just not the main way that
happens anymore.
e Electric Age is aracterised by TV shows, radio airplay,
records, tapes, CDs, retail stores with display shelves, top 40
arts, superstars, the dream of being signed to a major label
and the album and single as the main ways in whi music is
produced and consumed.
e Electric Age lasted for about 100 years. Its over. We think
e Digital Age
25
its still the main thing, but its not. Were in a new age now.
5) The Digital Age

Were in the Digital Age now. is is an epoal ange, just as
the other ages represented fundamental dierences in our media
environment and - more importantly - who we were as human
beings.
We cant see how dierent it is yet, because of what McLuhan
called the Rear View Mirror eect. We always look at our
media environment in reverse - and certainly in the early days.
We see where weve come from - and not where were going, or
even where we are.
e content of any new medium is its predecessor. We might
think were wating TV online, listening to Internet radio or
reading newspapers on the web. ats not what were doing.
Were on the Internet and thats dierent. More on this soon.
A shifting of ratios
You could ll another book - even a whole shelf (or e-book
reader) full of them - with all thats dierent about the media
environment in the digital age. It so profoundly and radically
impacts upon everything we do that its once again anging
our brains.
e ways in whi we take in information and how we make
sense of the world around us is increasingly digital, rather than
broadcast or print. Its quite literally reshaping us and rewiring
our brains.
e Digital Age
26
From mobile phones to laptops, sat navs to digital cameras,

YouTube to Skype, iPods to USB keys - what we surround
ourselves with - the media environment were immersed in - has
fundamentally anged.
And while the record industry, the lm industry and the publishing industry remind us that we are consumers and they are
the content providers - we have the opportunity to remember
that it wasnt always this way, and it neednt be a aracteristic
of the Digital Age. In fact, it probably cant be.
Like sheet music when recordings came along - recordings are
now becoming marginalised. CD sales are not declining because
of piracy, but because CDs are the last hurrah of the electric age.
But dont forget: you can still walk into a shop and buy sheet
music - its just not the main way in whi music is produced
and consumed anymore. is is a shiing of ratios, not a death
of anything. Not even CDs.
I saw data last week that showed that the record industry now
represents the economic value of just less than a third of the
music industry overall. And thats the countable and counted
music industry, whi is far from the full picture.
But we have a oice. Despite the fact that it seems Im saying
that tenology makes us what we are - in fact, if we understand
the process, we can oose the adaptations that we make, rather
than simply have them happen to us. is is not an entirely
deterministic process.
ats a mu longer discussion. e point Im trying to make
here is that digital is dierent. Its as revolutionary and game
anging as writing, print, or the discovery of electricity.
e Digital Age
27
e Internet is not a marketing platform for bands and nor

is it merely a marketplace for content. Its the current media
environment.
e way to make meaningful musical content in the 21st century
is not simply to make records and then point the internet at them
- any more than you would put on a play in a theatre, point
cameras at it, and call it a TV show.
Of course, people still want recordings of music. People still
want broadcasting. People still want sheet music. Its just
not the main way in whi music is produced and consumed
anymore - and increasingly so. Make an album, by all means
- but do consider the fact that youre deciding to operate in an
increasingly shallow end of the pool, economically - and even
culturally - speaking.
Weve been in the digital age for about 20 years. Our media
ages are geing shorter. Historys speeding up. So whatever it is
youre going to do to adapt to the Digital Age - do it now.
Ive said it before, but its worth repeating - the shi to the
online environment is not a shi in format. is is not like
the ange between vinyl and CD. Its more like the shi from
printed sheet music to recordings and broadcasting. is is a
complete transformation of the media environment, and of the
ways in whi people behave, adapt and operate in that media
environment.
And this new media environment is not set up in a broadcast,
mass production paradigm. is is not a one-to-many medium,
like radio, television, newspapers and so-called traditional
music distribution.
e Digital Age
28
An evolutionary process
Our brains are evolving again. As our new environment envelops us, we become involved in the biggest conversation our
world has ever known. ats dierent and it radically anges
who we are, and what we say, make and do.
ere are only two types of content of any value online: conversation, and the things about whi the conversation takes place.
Stop making Electric Age media - start doing Digital Age stu.
Stop making records, start having conversations.
Im convinced that were living in a Digital Age, in the same way
we were living in an Electric Age, and before that, in a Print Age.
We were once in a Scribal Age, and before that - an Oral Age.
I believe that this dominant form of communication absolutely
shapes the way in whi we understand the world around us.
I know that we are not uniformly living in this Digital Age, and
that there are economic and social barriers to it. Im also aware
that the benets of that age are not evenly distributed. However,
digital tenology - both online and o - are increasingly the
dominant modes of communication.
Dominant modes of communication shape the ways in whi we
think. In a literate society, we read books. We learn to apprehend
the world in a linear, logical and sequential fashion. rough the
printed alphabetic language, we take in information one word at
a time, like beads on a string - rather than in the surrounding
all-at-once fashion that oral cultures are immersed in.
e way in whi we get information, culture and media completely transforms the way in whi we experience the world.
Media are, as McLuhan put it, extensions of the senses. e fact
e Digital Age
29
that online (digital) media are dierent from electric (analogue)

media doesnt just ange those media artefacts - it anges us.
Because we only experience the world through the information
that comes in through our senses, the input to those senses visual, sonic, etc. - completely inscribe our world. Changing
the nature of those inputs anges the nature of our experience,
and thereby our selves.
And its for that reason that the tenological shi encountered
by the music industry is signicant. Changes to our media
environment dont just ange the economic, legal, social and
consumption aspects of our lives. ey ange us.
But as McLuhan pointed out, we have diculty seeing our
current environment for what it is. In fact, we seem to always act
as if were living in the previous media environment (seeing the
world through a rear-view mirror) - and this causes problems.
By acting as if we should conform to the rules of the electric,
broadcast, mass-production, analogue media world - even in the
face of radical tenological and environmental transformation
- we fool ourselves into thinking the world should be other than
it so plainly is. And this causes tension, lawsuits and confusion.
To me, the digital world is the online world. It has aracteristics
that Ill explore in more depth as we go along. Some of
these processes are clear and obvious, some are obscured and
unexpected. But all of them shape the new media environment,
and allenge our ability to adapt and evolve.
By understanding these shis and accepting them for what they
are, we are oered new opportunities to specialise and thrive,
rather than pretend that the world continues to be, or should act
as if it still is the way it was in the previous media environment.
e Digital Age
30
So, when I say Online, I mean connected, digital, discrete,

abstractly mathematical (rather than concretely physical) and
environmentally transformative. Where music is media, online music suggests a profound shi in terms of what music is,
how it is composed, performed, produced, distributed, promoted
and consumed.
I realise that this seems all very theoretical and abstract, but by
following this mu of the argument, you can begin to see how
and where very practical and pragmatic new strategies can be
developed and deployed to take advantage of the aracteristics
of this new environment. And thats what were working
towards here.
The Internet explained

Apologies if this section seems a bit rudimentary. Even today,
not everyone is immediately at home online, so I think its useful
to just start with a few basics and work from there. You may not
need to read this section. But if its helpful, here you go.
Welcome to the Internet. Its a network of computers, allowing
people all over the world to communicate, share text, audio and
images as digital les and connect in ways that had previously
been impossible.
Im not going to describe the specic methods by whi those
computers connect together, and nor am I going to go into any
tenical detail about the protocols that they use to send data other than just to briey mention one interesting and, I think,
important aspect of it: paet switing.
e network of computers, servers and connectors that make up
the internet are not connected in a linear fashion. e World
Wide Web is aptly named - its web-like. ere are so many
connecting threads and pathways, and there are so many places
in whi the information can be stored and through whi the
information can move, that it is essentially disasterproof.
Note that the Internet and the Web are not synonymous. ats
something well return to - but for now, its a useful analogy.
When the network protocol that was later to become the basis of
the Internet as we know it today was originally being developed
at DARPA (the Defence Advanced Resear Projects Agency part of the United States Department of Defence), the idea was
that important military information should be able to be shared
31
32
across the network, but that no node in the network should be

critical to the survival of that network.
So, hypothetically, if the Pentagon was to be destroyed by a
nuclear bomb, the intention was that commands and crucial
information should not be shut down. e annels of communication remain open. e data must ow.
As a result, the network is decentralised, and data that gets sent
around the internet is divided up into pieces called paets.
ose paets move from their source to their destination by
whatever method is best, fastest and most operational. Like
water, the information ows around obstacles and diverts when
the way is bloed.
e small paets of data arrive independently of ea other,
and will have traveled in many dierent ways in order to arrive
at their destination. ey are then assembled according to instructions contained within those paets, and then the resulting
information, data, media or other digital content appears exactly
as sent.
is is not simply a (somewhat over-simplied) explanation of
how things actually work online, its also a useful metaphor for
the Internet - and for digital culture as a whole. Whatever the
obstacles, somehow, the data nds a way.
Stewart Brand is credited with phrase information wants to be
free - and this is sometimes misinterpreted as asserting that
digital content should be without cost. And while Brand was
referring to the ever-lowering cost of distribution, the tendency
of information toward a state of freedom describes this inherent
activity of paet switing. Free as in liberated.
One of the side eects of making a robust, aa-proof system in
33
whi information can re-route and ow without interruption is

an intrinsic quality of open-ness. is will be worth remembering at later stages, when we come to talk about the dierences
between older, centralised, control-based forms of media - and
online media.
Whats on the internet?

Youll no doubt be familiar with web pages and email, whi
form the majority of internet use, and you may have heard of
peer-to-peer lesharing tenologies like BitTorrent and Limewire,
whi account for a signicant proportion of the data trac
on the internet. en there are other applications like instant
messaging soware su as Live Messenger or Google Chat,
programmes that let you talk over the internet or have video calls
su as Skype or FaceTime, and internet-capable media players
like iTunes, WinAmp and lots of others, some of whi allow
you to not just play music, but also purase it over the internet.
But theres lots more going on via the internet than you might at
rst suspect. For a start, most of those apps on your smartphone
are using internet connectivity to do what they do. Most of the
soware on your computer uses the internet these days, even if
its just for updates and registration.
To list all of the sites, services, tenologies and tools that make
up an ordinary users online experience would be a massive
undertaking, and far beyond the scope of this book. But listing
the specic practices, tools and sites is not as important as
paying aention to just how ordinary the web and other internet
tenologies are.
Internet connectivity is uerly mundane today. Most people
34
you know have email addresses. Lots of people use services like
Facebook, iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, eBay and so on. We dont
think of these things as going on the internet most of the time.
Were just eing our email, shopping, listening to music or
wating videos. Were not using tenology - were just doing
stu.
Like learning to drive

When you start writing with pen and paper, your rst eorts are
always about making sure that the leers are the correct shape,
that youre holding the pen in the right way, and that youve
spelled your words correctly. Its all about using the tools in
the service of making marks on paper. Once youve internalised
that, and you have your own handwriting, no further thought is
given to the tenology of pen and paper (until you run out of
ink).
You stop seeing the tools and start focusing only on the thing
youre trying to capture or communicate. Youre not using a
pen, youre taking notes in class or leaving a note for Dave.
At a somewhat more advanced level, when you rst start driving,
its all a complicated process of levers and steering wheels, rules
and obstacles. But once you really know how to drive, its about
the journey - and making sure you get to your destination. You
dont think about handbrake, ignition, clut, gear, rear-view
mirror, indicator, accelerator you just drive to your friends
house.
When you learn a musical instrument, your thoughts are rst
about where to put your ngers, how to blow correctly, or the
complex coordination of limbs in meaningful rhythmic paerns.
35
But when youve mastered your instrument, you see through the
meanics and simply play the music.
Likewise personal computing and the internet.
When you rst get online, its all about the tenology. In the
beginning, its that very rudimentary stu like learning to use
a mouse, discovering the dierence between CC and BCC in
emails, guring out how to sign up to Facebook and so on.
But once youre there, and it becomes the environment within
whi you work, rather than the work itself, then the tenology
melts away, and you start to notice that this is all just human
beings talking to ea other. Or even if thats not what you
notice, then by and large, thats still how you use it on a day
to day basis.
at is to say, your general, everyday internet use is an ongoing
discussion - and once youve mastered the tools, you automatically tend to use the medium on its own terms. You dont have
to decide to use the web conversationally, or any of the other
internet-enabled tools you use. Its actually instinctive.
Email, instant messaging, blogs and webpages, social networks,
message boards, news feeds, photo and video sharing sites,
online collaboration - its not tenology. Its people aing,
discussing, sharing and communicating. is is part of how
we talk now, and the tenology is not the interesting bit. You
wouldnt return from a daytrip to the seaside, and when asked
about it reply, it was great - we were in a car all the way there
and ba.
As a colleague of mine pointed out, itll be great when peoples
social media strategy gets beyond We will use Facebook and
36
Twier, because thats a bit like having a direct mail strategy

that says We will use pieces of paper and stamps.
And when you get that, you begin to think about the way in
whi communicative exanges take place, and youre able to
pay aention to the kinds of exanges that people prefer to
have in the online environment. e internet, like every other
medium before it, tends to favour certain types of exange over
others.
Its not broadcasting. Its not doing a presentation or making
a broure. Its not direct mail marketing. Its all just conversation. And everything you want to do online will work - or
at least, it will work beer - proportionate to the degree you
understand and act upon that knowledge.
It sounds too simple doesnt it? Too obvious. Essentialist. But
its not: its complex, ri, fraught with diculties and allows for
su specicity that its possible to make decisions about prey
mu everything you do online on that basis. Because once you
unpi what it means that this is a conversation, then everything
else follows from there.
What this conversation is about

ite oen when people start talking about Internet tenologies, the conversation they most want to have is about morality.
Lets not have that conversation right now.
At least for the purposes of this section, we are not interested in
whether people who download music are pirates or thieves
and nor are we particularly interested in whether major
corporations lo down culture, impoverish the public domain
37
or use their immense lobbying power to sway public policy in

what they think is their favour with regard to digital media
tenologies and, in particular, copyright enforcement.
Instead, just for the moment, lets leave this conversation as
being just about the tenology and while a conversation about
tenology will oen have an ethical dimension to it, for the
moment what we are interested in are the nuts and bolts of the
tenology itself. We can come ba to the other stu later.
I point this out now, because so oen the morality conversation gets in the way of our understanding of the tenological
environment. It does this, because we have entrened positions
and strong emotional aaments to those positions. So lets put
those aside for the moment and just look at what the Internet is,
and what it does.
e internet transforms its content, and the way in whi that
content is distributed and consumed. at transformation happens because of the Internets massive connectivity, that paet
switing thing I mentioned, and the fact that everything on it
is digital.
And thats the most important bit. Digital is dierent. Digital
media have dierent aracteristics to analogue media.
On and o switches
Digital media is made out of ones and zeros. Its all data. To
a computer, these 1s and 0s represent the On or O state in
the microscopic transistors that go to make up the computers
circuitry. e circuit is either open or closed. On or o. One or
zero.
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Whether its a recipe for soup, an email to your mother, a home

movie, a Hollywood blobuster, a new hit record or your bands
demo - as far as the Internet is concerned, and to any of the
computers that deal with it, it will look something like this:
1101100011 0100110111 0001101001 1111011011 0010111101 1011011011
0000101100 0111011001 0111011000 1001100101 1101100011 0100110100
1000010110 1111011011 0010111111 0011001111 0000101100 0111011011
0011011011 0001101001 1111011011 1001011110 1101101101 1000010110
0011101100 1001110110 0010011001 0101101100 0110100110 1001000010
1101111011 0110010111 1110011001 1110000101 1000111011 0110011011
0110001101 0011111011 0110010111 1011011011 0110000101 1000111011
0010011101 1000100110 0101011011 0001101001 1010010000 1011011110
1101100101 1111100110 0111100001 0110001110 1101100110 1101101001
1001010101 1001011100 1101001000 0101101111 0111001100 1100110011
0011110000 1010110011 0011110011 0110110100 1101110001 1010010111
0011010010 0001011011 0110110011 0011011001 1000100111 0110011001
1001111000
and so on. And on, and on.
is is important for a number of reasons.
First, it means that any data online - including your music - is
subject to mathematical processing. By doing clever mathematical stu, you can ange, edit, remix and process it. is is
all that programmes like Logic, ProTools, Photoshop, Final Cut,
and Word are doing when they manipulate media les its
all essentially a series of mathematical functions with a userfriendly front end. So anyone can ange any piece of media.
Including your recording of your music.
Second, it means that your music - and any other media - is
endlessly replicable. If I was making an analogue recording of
39
your music, it would be a degraded copy of the original. If Im

copying the ones and zeroes, then the recording is not a copy its another original. ey are identical in every respect.
ird, it means that copying is the easiest thing in the world to
do. In fact, you cant avoid it. Just by reading my website, you
make a copy on several computers in dierent places all over the
world. eres a copy on your own hard drive - and all you were
doing was looking.
So - its a world of communication, connectedness and copying.
ats just the way that it is.
The Online Medium

e other thing to know about the internet is that its a medium.
But its a medium that includes and swallows other media.
Radio, television, print and all other media - including music
media - become content online. ey cease to be things in
themselves and become just part of the whole online experience.
e analogy I oen nd myself using is that its like theatre on
television. eatre is a wonderful thing. But if you wat it
on television, its a very dierent thing. Pointing cameras at
plays can be interesting on television, but a far more reliable
and successful approa to televised drama is to approa the
medium on its own terms - and make TV shows.
Does that mean that I think you should stop making records and
start making internet? Actually, yes it kind of does. ats
exactly what it means.
ats not to say I think you should stop being a musician (or a
music industry entrepreneur). Just that the medium of music, as
40
it has existed for around sixty years, is not the natural condition
of music business. ese things are articial constructs that can
and do ange over time. is one just happens to be a biggie.
e skills you have in making the art (or business) that you make
will still come into play, just as someone who used to be a theatre
director - but who has moved over to television - will still make
dramatic productions using the deep understanding they have of
things like narrative, aracter, pace and dramatic tension. But,
in mu the same way, there has been a distinctive break in the
way in whi they operate.
Making a living online

People will probably tell you that around 80% of recorded music
purases are still in CD form. I have that conversation a lot.
When they tell you this, theyre anowledging that the internet
is signicant, but making the assertion that its not where the
real action is - and that focusing on it to the exclusion of the
real music business misses the point.
But when they make that observation, what they dont notice (or
if they do, they dont say it) is that at the same time, the overall
amount of recorded music purasing is declining rapidly - and
the price of those CDs is also dramatically lower than it used be
(thanks largely to the major supermarkets of the world). So its
80% of a mu smaller number.
Its like pointing out that 80% of sheet music sales are books.
at may well be true - but that doesnt mean that the best path
to music business success is to be found in the creation of books.
Or any other kind of sheet music, for that maer.
41
For the big picture, just look where the money is. At an industrial
scale, the major record labels are frequently posting multimillion dollar losses quarter aer quarter and they are valued at
substantially less than many of the major players in what might
be called the online industry. Now, of course, Im not suggesting
that you need to act like either of those types of organisation.
Were just noticing where the money is at this point.
But that suggests that to thrive in the contemporary music
economy, it would pay to make a decisive break with what we
might call the old way of doing things - and instead aempt to
go native in the new online environment. at doesnt mean
you have to ange your profession particularly - and it might
not even mean that you should stop making recordings - but it
does mean that it would pay to approa the new medium on its
own terms.
I dont care whether youre a solo singer-songwriter or a big
record label. is applies.
But just as our theatre director doesnt actually need to know
how television transmission works nor even how to operate
a camera you dont have to worry particularly if youre not
tenical. ere are all sorts of ways around that. You almost
certainly wont be called upon to write code - even though its
an incredibly useful skill to possess these days. You just have
to worry about what the parameters and conditions of the new
medium are, and bear in mind the expectations your audience is
likely to have in this new world. Were going to talk about both
of those things in a lot more detail.
So its not really about learning new skills. Its about understanding a dierent world. Some of us are o to a ying start
and others are standing at the brink of it looking at a confusing
42
and slightly scary landscape. Dont be put o its not the Wild
West and its not riddled with con artists, pirates and gangsters
- no maer what you might read in the press.
Its ne, its exciting, its completely within your grasp and its
where your best ance of making a living from music lies. And
best of all, you can put it together in any way that suits you, your
audience and your music. Weve got a new culture, and there are
some new rules and new ways of operating within that culture
as a result of its dominant medium. ats all Im saying.
Im not here to tell you how to make music. My job, as I imagine
it, is to try and put into words the ways in whi this kind of
understanding can be helpful to someone who wants to start
or continue to make a living from music given that both the
environment and the people in it are now dierent, and still
anging.
And my rst tip? Stop pretending that theyre not.
A short explanatory note

on Mediation
Ive talked a lot so far in this book about media and mediation.
Its probably worth spending just a lile bit of time here explaining in a bit more detail just what I mean when I use those words.
When I talk about media, I am not simply talking about broadcasting and publishing, and nor am I only talking about CDs and
other formats. In fact, I have a very broad denition of media
and as my use of the word has raised some questions, I should
probably be a lile more clear in my denition.
Media is the plural of medium. A medium is a context. Mediation is the process of being contextualised.
Now, when you think of mediation you might think of those
people brought in to resolve disputes. We think of what those
people do as being the means through whi the other parties
communicate, and that is a very simplistic way of thinking
about other types of media as well. We might think of radio
being the means through whi one person communicates with
lots of other people, or the telephone as a medium through
whi two people can have a conversation. And that is a very
useful way of thinking about media: as the means through
whi communication takes place. But that is an incomplete
understanding of the process of mediation.
I used the word context. at person who comes in to resolve
a dispute the mediator is not just a annel through whi
one person can say the things that they want to say to another
person, but instead, they provide the environment within whi
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44
a dierent type of communication can take place. Likewise, radio

provides an environment for a dierent type of communication.
Likewise, telephones.
So to me, any communicative context is a medium - and any
process of communicating within that context is a process of
mediation.
Tenology is a word taken from the ancient Greek word
tene, meaning both tools and teniques. All of our tenologies are media - because all human-made tools and teniques
are ways in whi we express something. ey are, as McLuhan
puts it, extensions of ourselves.
Radio extends the ear - taking our hearing to places it can not
otherwise rea. e wheel extends the foot and so on. And
all of our tenologies communicate. Nothing says I hate you
quite like a bomb. But more than just an extension, mediation
is also a process of translation. It converts the communication
from one form to another. For instance, the Olympic Games
are mediated through television. at process of mediation is a
complex series of professional, tenical and cultural processes
that anges those events from one form (competition on a eld)
to another (a television programme).
Professor Lance Strate, founder of the Media Ecology Association, describes a medium as a substance that surrounds or
pervades; that goes between two points not by drawing a straight
line between them, but by drawing a circle around them. And
while a medium denitely has eects, he says that a medium is
not like a billiard ball, producing its eects by striking another
ball. Rather, it is more like the table on whi the game is played.
If you think about that analogy, you begin to see how a dierent
45
medium will shape the rules of the game. By anging the

shape and contour of the table (that is, the aracteristics of the
medium) dierent sorts of things will tend to happen, dierent
strategies will be more successful than other strategies, and some
approaes that were incredibly eective on dierently shaped
billiard tables will not be so successful on this one. Its not that
billiard balls are any dierent than they were particularly, and
nor does gravity work any dierently - were just playing on a
dierent table - and this one has fewer large bumps in it than the
one we were used to.
So the point of this is that when the medium anges, you have
to ange how you play the game, because the results you get in
the new environment by doing things the way you used to do
them in the old will be very dierent. ats true of any content.
Its the medium that really maers. As McLuhan puts it - the
medium is the message. Or as Lance Strate explained it, its the
medium, stupid.
Hopefully, three things are becoming clear here:
1) What I mean when I say medium; 2) Why I think the media
environment is important; and 3) Why some people seem to be
having so lile lu in the Digital Age aieving all the things
they used to be able to aieve by doing the same things they
used to do in the Electric Age.
The 20 Things
Revisited
I mentioned in the introduction that this book started life as an
aempt to bring the 20 ings ebook up to date. So I thought
it would be useful to at least revisit that book and provide some
commentary on it. If youre not familiar with it, e 20 ings
You Must Know about Music Online was (still is) a free PDF
e-book I put out some years ba.
Since the book is available elsewhere for free, I gure theres
lile point in simply duplicating and tweaking the content of
that book, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss the
issues it raises, and the anges that have taken place since it
was released. It was originally wrien in the early part of 2007,
so its no surprise to nd that things have moved on a lile since
then. What is surprising, perhaps, is the fact that so mu of it
has remained relevant.
Ba when I wrote the 20 ings, I had in mind the idea of simply
making a list of simple concepts that could be applied generally
by people who were either independent musicians, independent
music workers (managers, record labels, promoters, etc) or other
http://newmusicstrategies.com/ebook
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creative people.
At the time, my primary focus was on demonstrating not only
that the Internet was potentially a very helpful tool for these sorts
of people but also by approaing the medium on its own terms,
new and innovative ways of communicating with an audience
could be developed that could potentially help an entire sector
of the music business that has always struggled to be viable, let
alone sustainable in perhaps the only time in history where
the dominant tenology has favoured them, rather than the
incumbent corporate producers.
Over the past ve years, Ive had time to think about what it
was about these tips and teniques that made the ideas not only
useful but more or less perennial. I dont think I realised this at
the time, or at least I wasnt able to articulate it in this way, but
the reason e 20 ings You Must Know about Music Online
is still even remotely useful is that it is all based on one very
simple premise: that the Internet is not a broadcast medium, but
a conversational one.
If you understand that this is a conversation rather than a marketplace or a means by whi an audience can be collected and
addressed, then it is possible to arrive at ea of the conclusions
contained within the book by a simple process of deduction.
Moreover, the rules wont need further updating because the
principle itself applies. at is to say, once you understand the
internet, you dont need to be told its rules. Even as it anges,
the appropriate thing to do will always seem self-evident.
Im interested in the concept of medium-appropriate mediation. Ive pointed out at some length already that the Internet
is dierent. e digital age is as dierent from the electric age
as the electric age was from the print age. And in order to truly
48
understand what that means for music industries requires either
a concentrated eort of will or the kind of intuition that comes
from prolonged immersion within the media environment.
Im luy enough to have been working in the online environment for over 20 years. I say luy, because on paper I am
not the correct age to be what is commonly known as a Digital
Native. But its as a result of this immersion that I was able to at
least identify what I thought to be some commonsense practices
that are outlined in e 20 ings You Must Know about Music
Online. My hope was that these practices, when laid out before
an audience that was coming to the online environment more
recently than I was would also appear as common sense to the
reader.
Of course, its only aer quite some signicant reection that I
understand that these observations were largely ukes. I knew
that the ideas were solid, but I couldnt really explain why. Now I
can. For the past ve years, I have been researing and teaing
in this area, and in so doing it has (rather embarrassingly slowly)
dawned on me that the reason I was able to formulate these
principles was because I had come to understand some basic
truths about the Internet over time.
Im qui to point out again that this is not because of any
particular skill or virtue on my part, but rather the simple
fact that if you soak in something long enough, and - more
importantly - you start to pay deliberate aention to it, you
should be able to start to get to grips with how it works just
a lile. And by how it works I dont mean the tenological
specicities and code behind it, but rather what its rules are and
how it functions.
So, to reiterate, this is a conversational medium.
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Youre going to notice me saying that a lot. Its more apparent
now as we come to be more familiar with social networks, the
idea of sharing media (su as YouTube videos) and increasingly
using Internet tenologies to talk to ea other on Skype,
FaceTime, via e-mail, on twier, instant messaging and so on. In
fact, in what was becoming known ve years ago as Web 2.0,
it started to be more obvious even on webpages that this was
an environment within whi human beings did things together
and spoke to ea other. It was not simply a repository of
documents or a centralised source of content.
Now, this should seem entirely obvious. In all fairness, I should
have been able to point this out in 2007.
In my defence, I would suggest it was a lile less obvious at the
time that I wrote the 20 ings book. But it does provide me
with a framework within whi I can readdress that book, talk a
lile about ea of the things, relate them to the central idea of
the Internet as a social medium and conversational environment,
and bring one or two things up-to-date.
So, to refresh your memory (or to introduce you to the 20 ings
if you never encountered them in the rst place), here was my
list as it stood in 2007.
1) Dont Believe the Hype
2) Hear/Like/Buy
3) Opinion Leaders Rule
4) Customise
5) e Long Tail
6) Web 2.0
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7) Connect
8) Cross-Promote
9) Fewer Clis
10) Professionalism
11) the Death of Scarcity
12) Distributed Identity
13) SEO (Includes My Top 10 Tips)
14) Permission and Personalisation
15) RSS
16) Accessibility
17) Reward and Incentivise
18) Frequency Is Everything
19) Make It Viral
20) Forget Product Sell Relationship
My intention is to talk you through ea of those points, adding
further clarication, making corrections, bringing examples upto-date, and generally commenting on the ways in whi those
pieces of advice adhere to some principles drawn from this more
recent, and frankly more consistent observation of the ways in
whi the online environment provides a space within whi
music industries, music workers, and especially musicians can
innovate, survive and even thrive.
So lets start with the rst one.

In the original document, I said that there is a great deal of
discussion about music online in the mainstream press and that
there are a couple of predominant threads to that coverage: a
sense of tenological determinism; and a tendency to falsehood.
is absolutely applies 100% today and shows no sign of anging. People ascribe an incredible amount of agency to what are
essentially inanimate objects. e Internet makes us do, think,
behave, and respond in all sorts of alarming and interesting
ways. It can be blamed for the death of the music industry
and it can be heralded as the saviour of independent music
but in fact, neither of these things are literally true.
Of course new tenologies oer us new ways of doing things,
opportunities that were previously unavailable to us, and present
allenges that had never before existed (or at least not in this
form), but they do not make us anything.
But the simplest story for a journalist to tell is either one of
progress or decline. ese are very straightforward narratives
(or metanarratives) that help us avoid the complexities and the
necessity to explain baground and the nuances of the situation.
While this is very handy when youre trying to write 500 words
in a newspaper to a deadline, it very seldom represents anything
approaing the truth.
At the time of writing, the Arctic Monkeys, Sandi om, and Lily
Allen were topical. e narrative was that in dierent ways, the
Internet had made these artists.
In fact, if you were hearing about them on the radio, reading
about them in the newspaper, or even simply encountering
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52
them through word-of-mouth, ances were good (one might be

tempted to say a certainty) that there was professional marketing
and public relations going on behind the scenes. is was not
the case of artists being directly connected to the masses, nor
were they unmediated (or worse, disintermediated) and
nor was this a signal that we have entered an age of unltered
meritocracy, in whi artists simply become famous through
unparalleled talent and the power of the crowd.
e idea that the Internet is a democratising force is one for
whi I have a good deal of sympathy, but it is not an unproblematic concept. And nor are things ever as simple as they appear,
and especially when it comes to famous pop stars.
By the same token, the Internet is also blamed (probably more
frequently than it is praised) for the collapse of the music
industries, the death of the CD, and all manner of illicit,
illegal, antisocial and otherwise unwelcome behaviour engaged
in by errant music fans, whi has (apparently) caused all of the
economic diculty facing the major record labels in particular,
but the wider industries to a greater or lesser extent.
Once again, this is an oversimplication not to mention a
falsehood. If we step ba for a moment and consider the
complexities, it is easy to see that the Internet is a convenient
scapegoat for an industry struggling to come to terms with an
entirely anged media environment.
ere are all sorts of counter-arguments to be made when
presented with the narrative of blame when it comes to the
internet. If people dont buy records any more, then explain
Lady Gaga (well over 20 million albums and rising). If its piracy
is killing the music business, does that mean that the massive
increase in spend in computer games, DVDs and Blu-Ray is
53
having no eect on peoples disposable income? If mp3s are

ruining peoples ability to appreciate decent sound quality, then
why are 24-bit lossless les becoming popular?
ats not to say youre wrong and heres why but to make
the observation that its complicated - and to suggest that the
Internet makes us criminals or is responsible for the demise of
an industry is once again to ascribe an awful lot of power and
agency to what is essentially an inanimate object.
Could it be instead that lots of things anged, and the people
trying to make money didnt?
Of course, as a media environment, the Internet aords certain
kinds of behaviours that were previously more dicult (or were
not presented as options to the mainstream consumer), and that
certainly goes both ways. To experience the tenology as
nothing more than a threat to ones livelihood is to overlook
the ways in whi one might adapt to and innovate within
that space. It also conveniently overlooks all of the benets
brought about by Internet-enabled tenologies (su as e-mail,
for instance) without whi many of the activities they go on
within a contemporary corporate media conglomerate would
simply not be able to take place.
Im not saying that record labels should take piracy on the in
because now they can send messages to ea other quily, but
rather that the reality is that we live in an age aracterised
by communication using Internet tenologies. And to act as
if living in that age is the problem, rather than face the reality
of that fact seems - well, delusional. Its like trying to uninvent
broadcasting because it messes with the dots-on-paper business.
As Lawrence Lessig points out in his book Code 2.0: Code is
54
law. at is to say, the ways in whi soware is built, and

the rules that are woven into its aritecture are things that
we as a culture, a society, and as, lets face it, the people who
actually make the tenology, have the opportunity to dene and
ange. What that means is, rather than experiencing soware,
websites, and Internet tenologies as the enemy, we have the
opportunity to really understand what they are capable of, and
nd ways for ourselves to set things up so that we can win
the game (whatever winning the game might be from your
position).
Marshall McLuhan said we shape our tools and then they shape
us. He gets quoted frequently on this point, particularly by those
who ascribe to a kind of tenological determinism. See? they
shriek, they SHAPE us! conveniently overlooking the rst
half of the quote.
e other thing that I said in this section about not believing the
hype was that people tend to lie. And by lying I specically
mean that they tell the story that suits their own particular ends.
Best estimates have it that at least 70% of what makes it to the
mainstream media started life as a press release. Common sense
and healthy skepticism suggests its probably mu more.
And while these press releases might not contain factual inaccuracies per se (though of course, oen they do), they will always
be sure to tell the story that is advantageous to the person telling
it, and will leave out any information that does not support this
story.
So one should always assume when hearing about whats happening in the world of music online, that the information being
spread serves a particular position.
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Normally, most of us are quite good at spoing bias in news

articles. However, we seem to have a few blindspots. Tenology
reporting appears to be one of those blindspots. And public relations plays a hugely signicant role in the dominant discourse
particularly when it comes to music in the digital age.
For instance, without thinking, most of us refer to the major
record labels as e Music Industry. In fact, economically
speaking, the record labels are the second if not the third biggest
part of the music industry, behind live music and publishing
(whi includes music in lms, games, television shows, and so
on). I like to say that calling the record labels the music industry
is like calling the lions the zoo. ey may be the loudest bit with
the sharpest teeth, but there is plenty of other interesting stu
going on.
But theres a reason that we use the phrase e Music Industry
to describe the major record labels. For decades, the PR put out
by the lobby groups dominated by the major record labels has
deliberately used this phrase, and it has been repeated uncritically within press, television and radio reports. And because we
use this phrase in ordinary conversation when talking about just
that small part of the music industry, we come to think of it, over
time, as being the entirety of the music industry.
So when we have conversations about whats good for the
music industry what we are oen thinking about is simply that
particular manifestation of music industry. In fact, whats good
for the music industry might not actually be good for the major
record labels at all. ats not the point that Im making here,
Im just simply pointing out that the discourse is as a result of
a deliberate framing of language on the part of people whose
commercial position is beneted by our general consideration of
56
facts from a particular perspective.

So, as I say in the original document, if you want to make any
headway in the music business in this day and age, you cannot
be relying upon a magical MySpace success story (remember,
this was originally wrien as a time when puing the word
MySpace and the word success in the same sentence was not
so deeply ironic), and nor can you fear the dangers of a hostile
environment liered with thieves and lost sales. Beer to
distrust the stories about online success and calamity, and simply
view the new tenologies as a range of tools that you can adopt,
and a series of anges, allenges and opportunities within the
business environment to whi you can adapt.
One more thing. Because of this dominant discourse, every
time we want to have a conversation about music and digital
tenologies, that conversation immediately seems to become a
conversation about either copyright or morality. While these
conversations are both very important topics, they have succeeded in derailing serious analysis and consideration of how
the tenologies work and what that means for people trying to
make money from music.
If all we can think about is whether lesharers are bad people, or
whether corporations are intrinsically evil, then we stop thinking
clearly about what the tenologies actually do and how we
can make use of them. And it seems to me a lost opportunity.
Moreover, because we all have our own entrened positions
about things like morality, it means that we cant think rationally
or openly about the tenologies without bringing our own
presuppositions to the table.
Its hard to leave these things aside, but its important. So when
you read stories about the music industries (or individual artists)
57
and how they are faring with respect to the Internet, bear in
mind that someone, somewhere wants you to think about this
in a particular way. As soon as youre aware of that, you start
to see the teniques and strategies that are used to lead you to
those conclusions.
And then you start to be able to think more clearly about what
it is YOU can do on the internet. And thats what were aiming
for here.

Five years ago, when I wrote the original e-book, it seemed to
me that there was one important, fundamental truth about the
way in whi people engage with music as a commodity. I still
think that in most (but not all) instances, this is broadly true. e
exceptions, in fact, are so specic and narrow that they almost
prove the rule.
People hear music, then they like music, then they buy music.
In that order.
Note that I didnt say recordings of music. Its oen true that
they do purase recordings of music of course, but separating
the commodity from the experience is probably a good starting
point for thinking about this with a bit of clarity.
Mike Masni from Tedirt puts it a slightly dierent way. He
says the tri is to connect with fans, and then give them a reason
to buy (abbreviated to CwF+RtB).
e best way to connect with fans is through the process of
what Christoper Small calls Musiing. Musiing is that set
of activities carried out between people, that results in a musical
experience. Sometimes that result is a recording - but remember
that this is not the only thing of value that musicians create.
Spending a month in a darkened room creating idealised versions
of your bands repertoire is a wonderful and important thing to
do, but on the grand seme of things, its (generally speaking)
only a small proportion of what musicians spend their time
doing.
http://techdirt.com
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And the thing that you give them a reason to buy might not
necessarily be what youd expect. It might be, but it neednt be.
One of the things that we have the opportunity to do in this age
of conversational media is customisation. More on this soon. But
remember that were in the digital age, and recordings might not
necessarily be the thing that is for sale or generates revenue. It
could be lots of dierent things, and oen is.
For the word buy, substitute the phrase engage in an economic
relationship with. In whi case, imagining that the nished
album is the only thing that the fans that you connect with
will want to give you money for seems like a bit of a missed
opportunity.
But engage through Musiing / build familiarity, enthusiasm
and gratitude / establish an economic relationship doesnt have
quite the same ring to it as Hear / Like / Buy, does it?
Incidentally, the amount of money they give you, wherever
possible, should be up to them. Im a big believer in variable
pricing. Leing fans oose what they want to give you.
Sometimes it will be nothing. Oen it will be more than you
anticipated. But theres a good economic argument in favour
of this approa. And that is the fact that the digital le itself
is essentially worthless (on whi, more soon). And there is no
supply and demand issue (likewise). So the price is whatever the
market will pay.
Id take it a step further than Masni does: dont just give them
a reason to buy; give them every opportunity to do so. But the
reason is important.
And as Steve Lawson points out, gratitude is the best reason of
http://stevelawson.net
60
all. Far beer than you cant listen to this unless you give me
money. eres plenty of other stu to listen to, and because I
said so isnt a great motivator, in the grand seme of things.
But really, this is just how capitalism works. At least it is in a
sense. You dont get to decide what constitutes value, the market
does. You dont get to determine the price, the market does. All
you can do is focus on what youre best at: creating value for
people. Connecting with fans. Connecting fans with ea other.
Creating value. Generating compelling reasons. And then get
out of the way and let them give you money.
And of course, this works for recordings.
Let me tell you about Bandcamp

ese days, Im on the board of advisers for Bandcamp. Bandcamp operates on the principle that if you let people hear music,
you give them a ance to grow to like the music, then there is
a signicant ance that they may well buy the music.
On the website, artists are encouraged to put entire albums
online for people to stream from the site. Not 30-second samples,
and not deliberately poor quality audio, but perfectly listenable
streams of the recordings in their entirety. e conversion rate
on this practice is extremely positive.
But Bandcamp also does the variable pricing thing, should you
wish to try this theory out. But the thing that Bandcamp adds
into the mix, that I hadnt even considered ve years ago (but
whi seems to be a very successful strategy), is to combine xed
pricing and variable pricing. Its not a oice between its $10
http://bandcamp.com
61
and Pay What You Want - but the rather clever alternative: a
minimum price or more.
eres no right answer here, and Id encourage you to experiment. I happen to think that theres a sweet spot for most albums
at around the US$5 / UK3 mark, whi encourages people to
contribute because its a small price to ask. e price of a beer,
more or less - or one of those fancy hot coee milkshakes youd
nd at Starbus and the like. So its a small hurdle to get over
for most people that want to take your music away to listen
(remember, they can still listen to the whole album in its entirety
on the site) - and an invitation for people to contribute more
should they feel its appropriate - and they oen do.
On Bandcamp, weve observed that with name-your-price
albums - not only do more people buy, but fans also pay an
average of 50% more than the minimum (and in case you think
the albums dead: albums outsell individual tras 5 to 1).
Im not shilling for Bandcamp here (well, I am a lile bit - but
only because I genuinely think its awesome) - but it does place
the argument if they can hear it on the website for free, why
would they give you money? rmly into the myth buet next
to if they can hear it on the radio for free, why would they give
you money?.
Its complicated
eres more to this Hear / Like /Buy idea - and you can read
about it in the original (free) e-book should you wish to do so.
When I wrote the book, there was no Bandcamp. Mike Masni
was, I believe, still yet to coin the CwF+RtB formula, and I hadnt
62
yet encountered Steve Lawsons rather lovely (and convincing)

assertion that people get value from music, and express their
gratitude in (among others) monetary terms.
But the observation I want to add to this is that in a conversational medium, there is also a social dimension to the purasing
of music. e opportunity to act as a good fan, to be the person
to encourage friends to discover and value new music, or to
engage directly with the artist are all gratications that result
from the Hear / Like /Buy formula.
As with all of these things, of course, its more complicated than
this. Some fans will buy music unheard from artists that they
already love or have some meaningful connection to. But if were
talking about strategies, Id suggest that leing people hear your
music, and giving them a decent ance to like your music is
probably a beer approa than loing your music away and
insisting on payment before you let anyone hear anything.

I could, theoretically, leave this one untoued. eres nothing
wrong with the original here, as far as I can see, other than a few
anaronisms (theres that MySpace thing again for a start).
I still think this principle is broadly true. And while certain radio
DJs, magazine journalists and mainstream electric age media
tastemakers are still important, the big takeaway point here is
that theyre far from the only ones any more.
Everyones an inuencer. In a networked society, everybodys a
node. Or, put in a slightly less clinical and far more accurate and
nuanced way, people have friends and associates, and they have
conversations with them.
Sometimes what they talk about is music. Giving them an opportunity to do that about your music seems a sensible approa.
But something thats new to my thinking since I wrote this - and
its something that not only makes a lot of sense to me, but also
forms a key ingredient to all of my resear and experiments in
this area these days. Its entirely obvious once you hear it, but its
one of those key insights that had to be explained to me before I
got it:
People dont just connect with ea other. ey connect ABOUT
things.
e things about whi they connect, are social objects.
Jyri Engestrom, the founder of Jaiku, wrote a blog post about
this way ba in 2005, called Why some social networks work
http://jaiku.com
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and others dont - Or: the case for object-centred sociality.

In it, he argues that social networks that are centred on just
the connections between people are meaningless - but in the
social media spaces where people can share digital media, su
as photos, videos - even status updates - theres more reason to
connect.
Its how socialising happens.
In other words, we dont just talk to ea other - we talk about
stu.
In that context, what maers is whats interesting. Interestingness is what works on the internet.
We share things with ea other and discuss stu that we nd
relevant, surprising or worth discussing.
Opinion leaders are important - because they are the route to
large numbers of people within a community of interest - and
when were trying to encourage people to buy our stu, its good
to connect with those communities that have built up trust in the
opinion of a tastemaker who reliably nds whats of interest and
shares it. And that tastemaker is generally the best route to that
community.
But interestingness is what will get your music talked about. In
the context of marketing online, it doesnt maer if your music is
good. It maers if its interesting. Good wont get it listened to.
Interesting will. And simply asserting that your music is good
isnt interesting.
As Steve Lawson says: On the internet, everything is brilliant
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65
until you hear it.

So you denitely want to get it heard (see ing two) - and you
also want it to be the interesting thing that the Opinion Leaders
talk about. ose are good and helpful things to want.
But heres the thing - you dont always get to oose whats
interesting. You can plant some seeds, but ultimately, people
will talk about what they nd interesting. Frustrating, perhaps but true nevertheless.
is is dierent to the broadcasting environment, when the
source of the information will set the agenda, and tell the story
in a planned way, from a centralised position of power, and
in a primarily one-way communication system in what can
only be described as an asymmetric power relationship with an
audience.
In a conversational medium, things work dierently. If I share
a photo of a dog on Facebook, and say look at this dog, people
might want to talk about the dog. But equally, they could decide
to have a conversation about the grati on the wall behind the
dog, the kind of lens used to take the photo of the dog, or the
particular brand of knied scarf that the dog is wearing.
e important thing is not the photo of the dog, nor even what
the conversation has ended up being about - but the fact that
these particular people are having a conversation. e purpose
of social objects is sociality. Commerce may be a side benet
(sales of pygmy dasunds could conceivably increase as a result
of my interesting photo, for instance), but a social object is
not an advertisement for a product, and there is no direct and
predictable correlation between interesting and sales.
But that doesnt ange the formula. It just means that shouting
66
doesnt help: Your job is to be interesting - and connect with the

people who connect with people.
04 Customise
One of the things I wanted to be really clear about when I wrote
the 20 ings e-book was that the sear for a new model of
music business was a red herring. In the electric age, and in the
print age before it, it was generally understood that there was a
way in whi music makes money, and that success in the music
industry (at least from the point of view of the people who ran
it) was linked to the successful application of that formula.
However, at the time I wrote it, it seemed to me that there was
no apparent new model, and that this was a feature of the new
environment rather than a problem that required solving. Now,
ve years later, Im even more convinced of that.
We have an opportunity in the digital age to absolutely customise, with the tools available to us, a way of doing music
business that is unique in ea instance. While there will be
similarities, ea artist, ea label, ea promoter, ea venue
and so on can start from a point of view that considers the culture
and the meanings that they create and represent, the audiences
and fans that they aract, and the opportunities that exist to
connect those things together.
In other words, the way to make money in the music industries
in the digital age is to simply do what works. And what works
depends on who you are, what you do, what sort of music you
make, your audiences, what they like to do, and so on. It is
not only necessary to understand the parameters of the online
environment, but it is also necessary to understand the culture
that surrounds your music.
With that in mind, its possible to be strategic and develop
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solutions that are right for you. And what the strategies are
might ange over time. e point is to think about what it is
you want to aieve, and then to draw upon the resources and
opportunities that are available to you.
Its important not to underestimate what this means.
Its fair to say that this makes things harder rather than easier
from the point of view of developing a strategy.
25 years ago, it was simply a maer of following the rulebook,
understanding release sedules, using a predictable marketing
campaign and touring plan, knowing whi radio stations would
be likely to play whi songs, and so on. It might not have been
an ideal world (nor an easy one to break into) but essentially
it followed a simple paern with limited scope for variation
usually dependent on genre.
It would be tempting to say that now the rules dont work. But
sometimes they do. However, even though the predictability of
a hit was never an exact science, and on average only about one
in 20 actually paid o, its fair to say that there are now very
few formulas that continue to provide anything like consistent
results.
For independent music, this is fantastic news. Even though it
might be simpler to have a template, there was always a serious
economic hurdle to overcome in order to use the template. ere
have always been maveris and do-it-yourselfers (well, at least
since punk) who have messed with the system, devised their own
rules and reaed their own audience in their own way. Now this
is the norm.
Innovation is the key. Creativity is your best ally. e best thing
that you can do when thinking about bringing your music to
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market (if thats what you want to do) is to get out a big piece of
paper and start puing as many ideas as you can on it.
is is how I work when I consult with a band, a label, a
collective, a music retailer or similar. On one side of the page, we
start with all the things that we know are true about the music
entity in question: what they do, whats important to them, what
assets and opportunities they have access to and so on. On the
other side of the page, we put down things that are true about the
audience, customers, or at least potential customers. And then
what we try to do is ll the page with as many ways we can
think of that connect those things together. Its a good exercise
to do, and I can thoroughly recommend it.
What will surprise you, I think, is how many things that you
can think of that connects your music with your audience (or
rather, your musiing with your audience) in ways that
simply werent available to you before the digital age.
But were not just talking about tenologies here. is is not
about seing up a Facebook page, an e-mail list, a twier account
and so on. is is about the things that you do and the ways
in whi you communicate using those tenologies. What
interesting things can you do and what interesting things can
you say that will motivate engagement?
Again, this is not about focusing on whi levers to pull or
buons to press in order to make the car move but about going
for a drive.
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70
The customised web

When I talked about customisation in the original e-book, what I
was specically referring to was the customisation of the bands
web presence. My argument was that simply having a standard
page with About Us, Videos, Contact and other links would
not suciently distinguish who you are and what you do from
any of the millions of other music webpages on the Internet.
However, what I may have underplayed is the usefulness of
consistency. Its important that when people visit your website,
they dont have to learn to use your website.
Conventions of web design exist for a reason - and they have
now become so mu a part of how we read the web that we
dont even notice that they do exist. ings like sidebars, top
navigation, the knowledge that we can cli on the logo at the
top le of the website and end up ba on the homepage are
incredibly useful standardised features.
So when I say you should customise your website, I dont
mean that you should reinvent what website means. But I
do think that you should customise. As I said in the original,
its important that people can nd exactly what they are looking
for when they come to you. If you run a venue, it might be
tempting to put the history of the venue front and centre on the
website. But actually, the most likely reason for people to visit
your website is to nd out whats on tonight, or what time the
band goes on.
Customisation can have its drawbas of course. Not everybody
is a graphic designer. Fortunately, there are lots of templates
available for web platforms su as WordPress, and these are often tweak-able to allow you to add components without breaking
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71
the design. One of the many problems with MySpace was exactly
in the extent to whi the pages were customisable. e amount
of bands who managed to make their page entirely unreadable
was impressive. ats harder to get quite so badly wrong these
days.
As I indicated on the original, there are lots of things that you
can use or incorporate into your website that might be helpful
in the service of connecting what you do with your audience.
You can bring in RSS feeds, embed Google maps and YouTube
videos, display your twier stream and put a Facebook like
buon on every post, and mu more besides. But be wary of
the temptation to oer too mu oice.
When you are designing and customising your online presence,
the thing that should be uppermost in your mind is What should
people do?
at can be a combination of what you think they would like to
do, and what you think you would like them to do, but if you
oer too many oices, the most likely thing they will do is go
elsewhere.
So when youre building your kitset Web presence, simplicity
can be a virtue. Dont just think about what you can include
think about what you can leave out as well.
In the end, the most important thing is not the website, nor the
selection of social media platforms that you use, but the quality
of the conversations that surround the social objects that you
share through a process of making music and puing it out into
the world.
Customisation is important, but dont let it become the whole
point. Ultimately, the important thing for you to be doing is
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72
making music and connecting with people not decorating the

room in whi you hope to one day be having those conversations.
05 The Long Tail

Chris Andersons e Long Tail is now su an established
part of the dialogue about music online, and online retail, that
it almost seems redundant to revisit it eight years aer it rst
appeared in an article he wrote for Wired magazine.
It has been the subject of critique some of whi missed his
entire point, and some of whi raised legitimate objections.
e argument about whether online retail follows a powerdistribution curve or a normal-distribution curve is, in theory,
a signicant one - given the perspective of an organisation in a
position to aggregate enormous amounts of content. It is perhaps
still interesting, though less signicant, to individuals who create
content that is intended to be aggregated. at is to say, e
Long Tail is far more important in your day-to-day life if you
happen to be Amazon.com than if you happen to be a singersongwriter with an EP to release.
In the original 20 ings e-book, I explained in brief the fact
that e Long Tail was an economic principle that aempts to
describe the phenomenon of virtually limitless sto of virtually
limitless items in outlets that are not bound by the tyranny
of shelf space. at is to say, whereas a physical record store
would have to make certain oices about what it could and
couldnt sto, an online service like iTunes can theoretically
make available for sale all music (in fact, iTunes stos nothing
like all music, but its catalogue is still vast).
In that context of vast catalogues, Anderson argues that consumers are collectively likely to e out and purase items
http://thelongtail.com
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05 e Long Tail
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that are not hits and that they are likely to do so not only
in signicant numbers, but in su signicant numbers that the
overall value of the very large quantity of these less popular
items sold will, in aggregate, outperform the small number of
very popular items.
Of course, this doesnt mean that unsuccessful artists will now
be able to become wealthy from their music simply because they
form part of this Long Tail. Some artists will be able to sell
one or two items when previously they were unable to sell any
- and some people will continue to sell no copies of anything
(not even to their own mothers), despite widespread availability.
But what it does mean is that potentially, the more items you
have available for sale, the more opportunities there are to sell
very small numbers of large amounts of items without the kinds
of prohibitive costs and restrictions that physical retail would
introduce in those circumstances.
Its worth saying that there is one thing that I think Chris Anderson called completely wrong, and I kind of nd it encouraging
that he did.
One of the assertions that he makes in the book is that while
there will still be very popular items, the age of the mega hit
is over. I am automatically inclined to distrust anything that
smas of futurology or prediction based on trends, and this falls
squarely under that category as far as Im concerned. In fact,
in response to some similar music industry predictions made
elsewhere around the same time, I objected that we have no way
of knowing whether future artists would be massively successful
based on declining trends in CD sales. To underline this point,
I said that I wouldnt be at all surprised if we had not yet seen
the biggest-selling album of all time by the biggest-selling artist
05 e Long Tail
75
of all time.
Since then, the world has been introduced to Justin Bieber, Lady
Gaga, Adele and others, all of whom have smashed previous
records not just for numbers of albums sold, but signicantly
for numbers of CDs sold. Whi doesnt mean that my predictions were proved correct - because I dont make predictions.
It proves that the people who do make predictions were wrong,
as they usually are - and that pleases me, because I like the fact
that we live in a world that can constantly surprise us.
However, what Anderson has given us in e Long Tail is a
useful idea that draws aention to the large numbers of nonhits that populate the world of music. And by non-hits, I dont
mean unsuccessful - I mean that they do not occupy the loerywinning top 0.0001% of artists who make music products that sell
millions of copies. e important lesson here is that all of those
things that arent million-sellers are, in aggregate, economically
massive. is has given rise to a number of services that
cater specically to long-tail and nie interests, and that have
in many cases been able to make sustainable entrepreneurial
businesses out of them - and some of them are very, very good
indeed.
And there is also a political point to be made here: the vast majority of independent, grass-roots and even middle-tier recording
artists, musicians and music workers tend not to be counted
toward valuations of the creative sector in government policy
documents and in strategy briefs from the lobbying organisations (e.g. RIAA, BPI, IFPI) that represent the interests of
traditional hit-making corporations. And yet, collectively, those
smaller earners, all bundled together, are a massive economic
force. Potentially, if Andersons rule of thumb holds up, they
05 e Long Tail
76
make up a larger economic force than the one that gets heard at
the highest levels of policy-making - and that seems important.
But in fact, it doesnt maer whether Anderson is strictly correct
or not - the idea itself is a really useful one. Even if a lot of lile
numbers dont add up to a greater gure than a small number of
very big ones, they still add up to a large sum.
06 Web 2.0
One of the things that immediately dates e 20 ings You Must
Know About Music Online is any reference to MySpace. Its a
great lesson in the shiing sands of the internet to think that even
just a few years ago, it was almost unthinkable that you could
be a serious, professional musician without a MySpace page.
ese days I actively encourage people to delete their MySpace
account. Its entirely possible (however unlikely it may seem)
that MySpace may make up an important component of an
online portfolio for artists in the future. In the meantime, having
a MySpace account is actively damaging your online presence,
spoiling your sear engine results and, if they ever visit it,
crashing your (potential) fans browsers.
at said, the general principle behind the discussion of whats
referred to here as Web 2.0 (though the term now seems quaint)
remains an important one: that the web is not simply a place
to read documents, listen to audio les, wat videos or follow
links. Its now more commonly a place where people do things.
at is to say, the web is now more of an environment that people
inhabit than it is a repository of information and whats more,
that environment is a social one.
e fact that notions su as user-generated content, social
interaction and participation are now so commonplace on the
web that we no longer distinguish those features as being 2.0
is signicant in terms of the development of the Internet. Ive
already mentioned that I consider the Web to be a conversational
medium. Ill be speaking in greater detail later about the idea of
social objects and the ways in whi people share and connect
online however, for now it is worth mentioning that the long
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list of Web 2.0 services that I mention in the original e-book has
anged quite radically.
What hasnt anged, however, is the fact that its possible to
use the web in a kitset fashion (as I mention above), taking
pieces from dierent services, integrating RSS feeds, connecting
dierent components together and creating a far more dynamic
and customised online experience for visitors to your website.
I am assuming for the purpose of this conversation that you do
have a website If you are an independent artist intending to
take seriously the promotion, distribution and online prole of
your music, and you wish to have a serious engagement with
your fans, relying on a prole on some other service (rather than
having your own site with your own URL) signicantly reduces
your opportunities to do so. is was, in fact, one of the biggest
problems with MySpace: a lot of bands assumed that because
they had a MySpace page, seing up their own website (and even
their own mailing list) was an unnecessary distraction. In fact,
it was the most important thing they could have done in that
context.
Increasingly, its becoming important to ensure that you own
your own data. As services come and go, and businesses ange
the terms and conditions under whi they house your data,
being loed into a single service (particularly without baup)
becomes seriously problematic. While its great to be able to
use a range of dierent services, engage with your audience and
convert fans and customers using a range of dierent online
tools, perhaps the dark side of Web 2.0 is that these are oen
spaces that you do not actually own or control. Whats more,
the information that you gather using those tools is not really
yours either. is is particularly true of Facebook. Anything you
06 Web 2.0
79
add or upload to Facebook, the connections you make and the

conversations you have - those eectively belong to Facebook,
rather than to you.
Of course, seing up your own versions of popular online
tools would be prohibitively expensive, unnecessarily complex
and, most likely, entirely unsuccessful. ats not what Im
recommending here. However, it is worth making sure that
youre in a position with your data that if any of the services
that you currently use suddenly went away, you would not lose
anything, and you could easily migrate to another service.
On a more positive note, the sheer range and breadth of services
available to artists, independent record labels, promoters, managers, venues and so on whether administrative or specically
to do with moving les around, having conversations with
audiences or establishing e-commerce capabilities means that
there is no shortage of tools for the independent music sector.
Tools that you can use to create your own environment within
whi social, cultural and economic practices related to your
own music endeavours can take place.
Since writing the original e-book, a number of hugely signicant
services have emerged and have proven themselves virtually
indispensable within the independent music sector: in particular,
Bandcamp and Soundcloud have become increasingly popular,
and for good reason. In addition, crowdfunding services su
as Pledge Music (though there are, of course, others) provide
the tools to not only engage with fans in connection with the
release of a recording, but also use it as a way of generating
resources with whi recordings and other products might be
made possible.
e point is really that the tenology itself and the services that
06 Web 2.0
80
you use are secondary to the connection made between artist and
audience. e success of services that help make that connection
possible is most oen tied to the ways in whi they make that
process easier and more accessible, rather than more complex.
Its understandable that some people might feel overwhelmed
and oppressed by the sheer number and variety of Web 2.0
tools that can be used in the service of music industries. e
way around this is not to think of all of the possibilities that
are available, but rather to consider what it is you are trying
to aieve, what problems you are trying to solve, and then
investigating the services that address these.
Of course, the great thing is that it is usually free to try some
of these things out, and you can pi up tools and drop them as
they seem interesting or unnecessary as you go along.
07 Connect
ere is very lile in the original document that needs amending or updating with respect to my encouragement for you to
connect online. What I mean in this context is to plug your web
page or online presence into other things - in the same way that
you might plug your keyboard or electric guitar into other things
in order to amplify them.
I used the analogy of writing a book and puing it in a library,
then coming ba a year later only to nd that nobody had
eed it out. ats essentially what some people do when they
make the mistake of thinking that their website is a promotional
strategy rather than, as is actually the case, that their website
needs a promotional strategy.
I go into more detail in the original 20 ings e-book, so if
you feel you need more clarication, you could always go and
download it for free here (see what I did there?).
However, what the original doesnt warn you against, and I think
its something that should really be raised, is the danger of overconnecting. at is to say, its really important to walk the
line between not saying enough - and being spammy. If, for
instance you have an album available for sale, or a video on
YouTube, and you dont tell anybody about it, you almost might
as well not have bothered. However, the more common problem
these days is that bands tend to link to their own stu absolutely
compulsively. eir Twier feed and their Facebook page are a
constant (and entirely dull) stream of e out my stu! posts
with a link. Its the opposite of engaging.
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07 Connect
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is comes ba to my earlier central point that the Internet is a

conversational medium. If you think about what you do online
as conversation then youll avoid this problem entirely. Lets say
you were to walk into a bar and didnt say anything to anybody.
You didnt introduce yourself, make friends, talk about what you
do or anything like that. You arrived, had a drink and went home
again. Generally speaking, your visit would have remained more
or less entirely unnoticed, whi is not what were going for here.
But in contrast, if you walk into a bar, stand on a table and shout
incessantly about how great you are and how everyone should
e out your album, nobody will be interested in what you do
or what you have to say.
So if you think of connecting online in the same way that you
would connect in a social situation like a bar, youre probably on
the right tra. Because its a lot like that. e internet is not a
promotional platform or a marketplace. Its a communications
medium. is is especially true of social media. Its human
beings talking to ea other in a social context - just like a bar.
For now, the main point is that if you have a website, and a
Facebook page, and a Twier account, and your music is up on
Bandcamp and you dont link to ea of them on all of them, then
theres a missed opportunity and you should probably address
that. Conversely, if all you do on your social networks is talk
about your website and your Bandcamp page then this makes
you very, very boring.
If youre looking for a rule of thumb, try 90/10: that is to say, 90%
of everything you talk about on the Internet should probably be
about something other than your new blog post, your video, your
album, your upcoming gig and so on. Find something else to talk
about. One suggestion would be to recommend other peoples
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music that you like. In so doing, not only are you helping music
commerce on the whole, but youre also positioning your music
within a context that helps people associate meaning with what
you do.
Because, as we will discuss in more depth later, music makes
meaning for people and it is this fact that drives music
commerce not the other way around.
But if youre really stu for something to say - wat what other
people are talking about, and then join in as appropriate when
you have something to contribute. And dont skip out when its
your round.
08 Cross-promote
Reading ba over the 20 ings e-book is an interesting exercise
for me, particularly where I feel I got it right but had no real
clue as to the reasons why I got it right.
I said in that book: Your online stu is not a replacement for
your oine stu, and nor does it exist independently of it. Figure
out how to make the two genuinely intersect.
Now, at the time, I would put that idea down to simple common
sense. If, as we learned in the previous section, that its important
to connect one thing to another online, then its probably true for
everything else as well. It would probably suce to leave it at
that, but I think its interesting to explore the reasons why this
idea does strike us as being intuitively correct because there is
a reason.
Youll recall that at the beginning of this book I made a point
of dening what we do as making media and how popular
music and web communication were both media forms. ats
a signicant idea in this context, because what were talking
about is linking and connecting as many types of media as
we can. With electric age tenologies, we see this happening
all the time. Radio stations talk about television programmes,
celebrities go on TV shows to speak about their new movies, and
so on. At its simplest, this is what we mean by cross-promotion.
But what we need to understand about media in this context is
that they are simply ways in whi human beings communicate
with ea other. It so happens that the electric age tenologies
(particularly those that wed aracterise as being mass media
tenologies) are more or less shut o to the vast majority of
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08 Cross-promote
85
us. We are encouraged to participate only as passive recipients

(or purasers of advertising); we do not, typically, communicate
with ea other via television or radio.
However, what we need to remember is that this phase of media
history is essentially a blip in the story of human communication. Spee, writing, and even to a certain extent print
media allow for large numbers of people to freely communicate
their thoughts, their ideas, and information - even promotional
information - about their commercial, social and cultural activities. And just as spee, writing and print are all ways of
connecting with other people and communicating about things
that are important to us, so too is the web a communications tool
that we can use to discuss our music activities. Given that fact,
it would make sense to make the most of it.
But importantly, we can connect those dierent media forms to
ea other in the same way that the world of radio and television
appear to be connected to ea other. In its simplest form, this
means that printing a yer about your band performing a concert
should also involve including a link to your website; standing on
a stage talking to an audience of people who like your music
should include mention of your Bandcamp releases or a new
video on YouTube. More importantly, this needs to work the
other way as well: your website needs to integrate and actively
include things that you do and say that do not take place on the
Internet. We sometimes forget to do that.
Well generally tweet a link to our new blog post, or put something on Facebook that we found interesting or helpful on a web
page - but oen well neglect to talk about the world outside
of that online environment (I wont say real world because,
contrary to popular belief, were still real when were using
08 Cross-promote
86
computers).
I mentioned that this sounds almost too obvious to have to point
out, but as with the original document in whi I listed a few
ways in whi you might be entrepreneurial or innovative in
terms of the kinds of cross promotion you do, asking yourself
the question how should we cross promote? provides a simple
provocation that may help you come up with some good ideas
of your own.
One more thing that occurs to me: in the original 20 ings
e-book, I made a distinction between passive and active
cross-promotional strategies. If this distinction is useful to you,
then perhaps you could use that as a frame through whi you
could think about and develop strategies of your own that apply
to your specic music business. However, I now think that
the distinction is probably fairly arbitrary. In fact, all crosspromotional strategies are, in a sense, active ones and if we
remember that whiever media environment we happen to
be using needs to shape the way in whi we engage in this
communication, we dont really need to be making distinctions
like that.
In other words, we know who our target audience is and what
language to use when we write a yer or press release. We
know what sort of words and phrases and delivery styles feel
appropriate when were on the stage in front of an audience.
What we need to remember (and the example of the bar that
I gave in the last section is a good guideline to this) is that the
same thing applies in the context of the web. Its a conversational
medium: its only natural to have conversations about the other
media creativity that youre involved in even if you cant
simply link to it like you could to another web page.
08 Cross-promote
87
e point is to remember this and have the kinds of conversations

that naturally connect to the things that you make in other media
contexts and to remember to cross-promote from those things
ba to the places where youre having those conversations
online.
Again, dont be boring or spammy about it, but dont be secretive
either. Im going to assume, for the purposes of this book, that
your musics amazing and that people will appreciate having the
opportunity of hearing it.
09 Fewer clicks
is might actually be the section of the original e-book that
Im most pleased with - because something actually happened
that addressed the issue it raises. ere are two parts to it: a
general argument in favour of simplicity, and (essentially) a plea
for somebody to hurry up and invent Bandcamp.
e argument in favour of simplicity was really the overaring
theme of the Fewer Clis message. In fact, I would go
further now and suggest that the principle of minimalism is a
fantastic guide for online communication. Aim for total web
zen. Anything that could be considered cluer should probably
go.
As far as Im concerned, that goes for all of the social media
buons that you have in a cluster on your blog, the multiple
columns with dierent sections, banner ads, large numbers of
navigation oices and other things that might seem to give you
some sort of advantage in terms of oering ways in whi your
audience can respond and explore but whi in actual fact just
look like a bit of a mess.
Its not just fewer clis were looking for its fewer everything.
When youre building your webpage, redesigning it, or even just
freshening it up - the best question you can ask is what can I
take out?. Regardless of your genre of music or the graphical
style that best encapsulates the mood of your album, giving
your websites visitors some visual space to breathe makes for
a mu more pleasing experience and leads to far more return
visits (and eventual purases) than your current confusing and
overly busy site.
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09 Fewer clis
89
And I hope I dont have to tell you that anything that auto-plays
when your website opens should be disabled immediately. In
fact, go and x that right now. Most people will instinctively
and immediately close a site with auto-playing audio or video
media as soon as it makes a sound - and they will never return.
Im guessing thats not what you were going for.
And while some of the issues have been addressed, the problem
of too mu is greater today than it was when I made the plea
for less in the original e-book.
Ba in 2007, I focused more on the ridiculous number of steps
that it took to successfully engage in an economic transaction
with most artists online at the time. Everybody wanted you to
sign up, ll in your name, address, and nancial details, then
theyd send you a conrmation e-mail, whi youd have to
locate and retrieve from your Spam folder, and then youd have
to login, enter your details again, divide it all by the number you
rst thought of and so on.
Nowadays, independent online music retail has, as far as Im
concerned, more or less been solved. I may be biased - I do some
work for them as an adviser and as an occasional contributor of
editorial content - but I genuinely believe that if your question is
how can I sell my music online?, then the answer is probably
going to be Bandcamp.
e fewer clis for music retail issue has been taken care of for
you.
But because of the proliferation of social networking services,
bookmarking sites, recommendation platforms and other su
wonders, there has emerged a phenomenon of what I would call
buon creep: ever more icons, links, widgets and embeddable
09 Fewer clis
90
options crowding out the content that your visitors actually came
for in the rst place.
You dont need an e-mail this article link on your page. People
understand copy and paste. e Tweet this buon is almost
going a bit too far.
at said, the Facebook Like buon seems to be quite useful,
and has been shown to be a generator of trac in lots of
instances. Ive done some experiments using Google Analytics
to see what people cli on my various blogs and sites - and the
results were prey compelling: they clied on the Facebook
Like buon and nothing else. So I removed everything else.
Now they spend more time on my site, they read more articles
and they recommend things to their friends more oen because
they dont feel like theyre sending them to a junk-riddled
cluerfest.
One caveat: this is just how things stand here at the beginning
of 2012. Who knows - these references to Facebook might well
soon be as out-of-date and irrelevant as my 2007 references to
MySpace in the 20 ings e-book are now. Lets hope so.
But in the meantime, you dont need to cover all your bases as
far as social networks are concerned. Chances are, youre going
to get most of the people just with Facebook and most of the
rest of them with Twier.
Minimalism. Zen. Simplicity. Make those your website watwords.
10 Professionalism
Earlier, I talked about dierent communicative contexts. e
way you would communicate with somebody in one environment (say, a bar) might be dierent from the way in whi you
would communicate in another (for instance, from the stage).
However, if youve decided that the way in whi you want to
make your living is in the music industries, and especially if
youre a musician, then one of the contextual elements that you
need to bear in mind is the fact that a lot of the time even
when you are in bars, you are also at work.
is is true both online and o (and frankly, whether you
think its okay to get drunk or stoned while youre at work is
your business, though Id suggest that its something that you
should probably decide deliberately rather than just not give any
thought to), but what I want to talk about here is specically
how you communicate in a professional manner in the online
environment.
Of course, by being professional I dont mean being formal
unless of course that goes along with the particular culture
of the music that you make (for instance, if you run a amber
orestra for corporate events). You can be as informal as you
feel is appropriate given the specic target audience that youre
speaking with, the cultural norms of your musical context and
so on. But what Im specically saying is that its important that
youre not UN-professional.
So to communicate professionally in the context of, say, being
in a band, probably means things like being friendly and polite,
responding to peoples e-mails and other messages as appro91
10 Professionalism
92
priate, and generally not being a noxious, egocentric, lazy and

unreliable asshole.
But it also means making professional media.
Youll recall that I said earlier in the book that the music
industries are in the business of media production. at means
that you are in the business of media production. at doesnt
necessarily mean that you have to know how to make television
programmes, radio shows, music videos, magazines or lms
and nor does that mean that you have to be a journalist,
photographer, web designer, press agent, videographer, sound
engineer, graphic designer or games developer. It does mean,
however, that you are essentially in the same sector as people
who do have those jobs, and their business is as related to yours
as yours is to theirs.
So when you think about your online presence, what you need
to consider is the fact that this forms part of an overall piece
of media communication, some of whi could benet from
expertise in some of those elds that I mentioned. at does not
mean that you have to automatically employ a graphic designer,
hire a photographer, organise a professional video shoot, or even
get a professional web developer to make your website. But what
it does mean is that you have to anowledge that, in some small
way, aspects of those skill bases will be useful to you.
e good news is that you probably know somebody already
who can do some of those things. In fact, if youre in a band,
ances are that your drummer is capable of all sorts of smart
stu that you had no idea about, that your keyboard players
sister is a budding photographer, and that the guy who xes your
amps happens to be rather handy with Photoshop - or something
like that. Not only that, but should you deem it worth your while
10 Professionalism
93
to develop some of these skills yourself, the good news is that

there is no shortage of expert help, tuition and tutorial content
available online mu of it free.
If you nd yourself saying, in defence of some shoddy paaging,
some somewhat less than professional design elements, or some
sub-par web content, that its not important because the music
speaks for itself what you have to understand is that nobody
is fooled. It just looks like amateur hour. If you want to be taken
seriously, it pays to think of the music as part of a larger whole.
ats important. What Im saying is that playing a violin or saxophone or a guitar is what makes you a musician but deciding
to be a musician for a living makes you a professional media
producer. Some of that media production will be recordings and
albums. Some of it might be stage shows and concerts. Some
of it will revolve around making online content - including the
conversations you have with others on social media platforms.
All of the elements are important and geing all of it right is what
allows you to be a successful media producer and musician.
eres all sorts of stu you can do for yourself, of course, lots
that you can ask for help with, more that you can learn as you
go, and some stu you might want to get some outside help with.
But whats important is that you get to make something thats as
professional as it can possibly be for whatever suits your budget
and even if your budget is absolutely zero, you can still be
prey professional.
In the original article on professionalism in the 20 ings You
Must Know about Music Online, I spoke about the importance
of having your own web space that was separate from the social
networking services that you use. ats still important. But
10 Professionalism
94
equally important is to be professional about the ways in whi

you use those social media services as well.
However, theres one important point I want to make here, and
again its about context and conversation.
I cant stress strongly enough the fact that on the one hand,
you need to be professional (or at least, not unprofessional)
and on the other hand, you need to remember that the web is a
conversational medium. Social networking in particular and
especially Facebook and Twier are places where you need
to be a human being and not the voice of a business, band, or
corporation. Its far beer to speak as Dave, the singer out of
Karl Marx and the New Tenologies than it is for the band to
have one single social media voice. Dave the singer is far more
likely to have conversations with people about things of shared
interest (including the band) whereas the ocial Twier
account of Karl Marx and the New Tenologies is far more likely
to simply urn out updates about releases, upcoming gigs and
promotional material. We call that shovelware - and it gets really
boring really quily, no maer how big a fan of Karl Marx and
the New Tenologies you might be.
is is a rule of thumb rather than the law of social media.
ere are examples of what I call corporate band accounts that
are engaging, interesting and worth connecting with online (or
at least, more so than individual members of that band might be).
However, its hard to have conversations with you or engage in
any meaningful way if the entire purpose of you speaking online
is to say buy our stu. is is not a marketplace, its not a
broadcasting medium and - importantly - its not all about you.
But one last thing: I said it in the original document, but Ill say
it here again: Spelling is important.
10 Professionalism
95
Ironically, the section of the e-book in whi I stressed that

spelling is important contained a typo. Id like to be able to say
that this was a deliberate move on my part just to see if people
were paying aention. It wasnt. It was an error of proong on
my part but it certainly proved a point. People notice. People
really notice.
While its perhaps unreasonable to ask you to be grammatically
perfect and error-free in all instances, its not unreasonable to
expect a level of communication that suggests that some care
and thought has gone into what you make as a music industries
media producing professional.
Again, let me stress that what were looking for is appropriate
communication and not formal communication but if you
could take one message away from this particular section of
this book let it be this: if youre acting in your capacity as a
band member, recording artist, label manager, booking agent,
musician, promoter, music teaer, or whatever it is you do in
this sector whether or not you make money at it yet, youre at
work.
11 The Death of Scarcity

is is the apter of the 20 ings e-book that I get the most
criticism for. Its also the apter that gets the most positive
response. And while I think its both my weakest area (I am,
as I explain in the book, quite emphatically not an economist)
and my best (I was particularly pleased with the magic paet
of cornakes example, whi still makes me smile), these are
not really the things that tend get pied up in the discussion. So
its interesting to me that this apter divides its readership so
strongly, because on the whole, neither side seems particularly
interested in the points that I actually raise.
So, just for the sake of clarity, here are three things that apter
doesnt say about the economics of music online:
1) File-sharing has a positive eect on the sale of recorded music;
2) File-sharing has a negative eect on the sale of recorded music;
3) File-sharing has no eect on the sale of recorded music.
ose are the things that I am both criticised and praised for with
respect to that apter and none of them are suggested, mu
less asserted. People tend to comment on the book that they read,
not the book that I wrote. at might not necessarily be the same
thing.
However, the economics of abundance (whi is what I like to
call it) is one of those things that people use as an opportunity
to have a conversation about some things that they think are
important. Generally speaking, the conversation they like to
have is about morality and blame on one hand, and tenoutopianism on the other.
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97
ats not the conversation that I really intend to have here,

though of course far be it from me to stop people having
whatever conversation they want to have (mu more on whose
conversation this is in a section later about social objects). Just
remember, when people are being angry and taking sides about
whether digital abundance is a good thing or a bad thing, and
whether people behaving themselves in a particular way with
respect to that abundance online is evidence of an increase in
democracy or a decline in ethics - that this is not something
Im trying to make a point about here. Im far more interested
in understanding and explaining the facts of the situation and
what that means. What we do with that knowledge, and what
sort of value we aa to it is something that can be worked out
elsewhere.
So, what Im interested in here are the following sorts of questions:
1) What actually happens from the perspective of economics,
availability of products and the nature of music recordings as
commodities in the digital age?
2) What opportunities exist as a result of those anges, and
specically, what strategies can independent musicians and
music businesses use, based on a beer and more nuanced
understanding of what happens to economics in the digital age?
3) What possibilities are there for innovation that might lead to
new and entrepreneurial businesses, a fairer degree of access and
economic advantage within the music business space; for the
development of useful social enterprises that are made possible
because of these anges; for an increase in the positive value
of music in culture that take advantage of an understanding of
what happens to economics in the digital age?
98
Simply put - whats going on, what does it mean, and how can
we use it?
In other words, Im not interested in whether le sharing and
downloading is the single and direct cause of the decline in
fortunes of record labels large or small (it isnt) - other than to
the extent that we recognise the reality that the environment has
profoundly anged in whi these sorts of businesses operate.
is, we must accept, causes great diculties for many of these
sorts of businesses. Nobody disputes that being an economically
viable record label is problematic. It always was - but when
the rules appear to be anging, that can be particularly tough.
Certainty can be hard to come by. But given that fact, Id
make the rather mundane observation that adapting your own
business models in response to a anging world is probably a
more successful strategy than trying to put the world ba the
way it was.
I happen to think that lots of other things (some of them related,
some of them completely incidental) have also happened that
ange the environment within whi music business takes
place, and I will be speaking about a lot of these things as the
book progresses. Most of them have to do with the anging
environment from one aracterised by the predominance of
electric tenologies, to one aracterised by the predominance
of digital tenologies. But of course, political, social, cultural
and other anges have taken place as well many of these
connected to anges in tenology, some in response to them,
and others in spite of them.
In other words, its way more interesting and complicated than
baddies, thieves and pirates makes it sound. And its also far
more allenging than democratisation, frictionless capitalism
99
and transparent society makes it sound.

So what did I actually say in that apter?
What I was talking about was the nature of digital goods. Digital
goods are, as Niolas Negroponte points out in his 1995 (yes,
1995!) book Being Digital, items that are made out of binary
digits or bits. In contrast, physical goods are items that are
made out of atoms. ings that are made out of bits have
dierent aracteristics than things that are made out of atoms.
For instance, things that are made out of atoms deteriorate over
time. ey are not easily replicable. If you take the thing that
I have that was made out of atoms, then you have it and I do
not. By contrast, things that are made out of bits tend to remain
exactly as they are. ey do not have a lovely smell when they
are new, and nor do they become dusty or tay as they get older.
Any time you try to do anything at all with something made out
of bits, that activity tends to make a copy of the thing. If you
take the thing that I have that was made out of bits, then we
both have it.
In that respect, things that are made out of bits are more like ideas
than they are like commodities, in terms of the way in whi it
can be shared. To think of it another way, a digital le has more
in common with a story than it does with a book.
So heres what Id ange about that apter if I was to go ba
and write it again: I would not mention the death of anything.
While its a useful rhetorical device at times to talk about the
sheer magnitude and profundity of the ange thats going on,
the problem is that people tend to take the death of quite
literally to mean theres no su thing anymore.
Obviously, when it comes to scarcity, plenty of things are still
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scarce. But digital les are not. ey are the magic paet of
cornakes in the supermarket. eres only ever one in sto,
but every time you take it o the shelf and put it in your trolley,
there it is still on the shelf. It doesnt maer whether one person
downloads a song from iTunes or a million people download
that song - theyre never going to have to reorder another copy
from the warehouse. Once one has been made - supply can be
innite with virtually no marginal cost associated. No storage,
no shipping, no paaging, no manufacturing. And when
goods are in innite supply - uerly abundant - pricing based
on scarcity principles makes very lile sense - and imposing
articial scarcity seems a rather awed endeavour.
at does not mean music has been devalued - a poisonous
concept that is so uerly wrong its beneath contempt. Music
is more highly valued in our culture today than it ever has been
at any point in human history. It just doesnt cost as mu. But
that doesnt mean that you cant make money from it.
Remember that theres a dierence between music and recordings of music. You can actually make money from music
without making any money from recordings of music if you
want to. Im not saying thats the new business model (there
isnt one), but rather Im making the point that those two things
are separate. Recordings of music are, aer all, part of the media
production process that makes up the business that youre in.
Make whatever media products you want, or that you think will
make you money - but you dont have the right to make money
from your music - only the opportunity.
Let me say that again so it sinks in:
You dont have the right to make money from your music - only
the opportunity.
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And that opportunity is, I would argue, greater than its ever
been before - because you have at your disposal something that
you can make freely available so that people get the opportunity
to hear, like and then buy your music (as described in ing 2
above).
Mike Masni of TeDirt aracterises a strategy that musicians and independent labels can use whi leverages this fact
in the following way: Connect with Fans, and then give them
a Reason to Buy (or, as he abbreviates it, CwF+RtB). e thing
that they buy is usually something that has some kind of scarcity
value aaed to it (vinyl, tiets, experiences, physical products,
merandise), though this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes
the thing that they buy is the thing that they could just as easily
get for free if they wish. Give people a good enough reason, and
theyll pay money for things that they dont even have to.
Steve Lawson talks about gratitude as being the best reason of
all (I talk about creating meaning for people - but were more or
less in the same ball park), and oen the fact that the product can
be obtained freely does not deter people from their willingness
to pay if the opportunity to do so is made available and just as
easy.
In fact, the book youre reading now is just as readily available
for free as it is for money, and many people (perhaps youre
even one of them) have osen to pay. Some who originally
downloaded for free have already gone ba to pay money. eir
reasons for doing so are their own. All I can do is try and make
this as good as it can be - by way of providing a reason, creating
meaning (or cultivating gratitude, perhaps) - and then provide
http://techdirt.com
102
people with the opportunity to pay should they wish to do so.

However, the fact that it costs me nothing (in terms of marginal
costs) for this book to be free to whomever is even vaguely
curious means that people can e it out without risk. e
fact that there is no barrier to entry also means that they can
recommend it to their friends without feeling as if they are
necessarily commiing them to a nancial outlay.
It seems to me that the people to whom this digital book is worth
money will pay (or have paid) for it, to the extent that they feel
they would like to. Others will oose not to.
However - and this is important - Im uerly convinced that
the number of people who do pay is far greater than it would
otherwise be, because of the mu bigger number who do not.
Had I arged a straight $5 for this book with no option to get
it for free, I am entirely convinced that fewer, not more people
would have paid that amount.
Its hard to design a scientic study that demonstrates that,
because the control group would necessarily be a dierent book
or in a dierent context - but Im prepared to take that at face
value because its both intuitively correct - and consistent with
many other values and aracteristics of the online environment
- and because its an economics Im far more comfortable with,
given that the alternative would be that youre not allowed to
read this unless you give me money. Whi would, to me, be
nonsense - since Im writing it anyway.
I have a job. e need to make an income from a digital book
is not my motivation to write it. For some people, that is a
problematic position, as they think I am advocating that others
should also make their work freely available, even if they do
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not have the security (su as it is) of a university position.

ats not what Im saying. Rather, I am taking advantage of
the opportunities inherent in the fact that this is an environment
within whi things tend to be freely available. Others have the
same opportunities - and there are other opportunities out there.
e important thing to remember is that it is not the job of the
internet to provide people with an income. ats not what its
for. Its a means of communication between human beings not a marketplace. e fact that it can be used for commerce
does not dictate the parameters of that communication so that it
favours commercial operators. As Ive said before - the internet
is a conversational medium. e best you can hope for is that
your work becomes part of that conversation in a meaningful
way. en you have the ance to gain some economic benet
from that.
So while there has been no death of scarcity, we do now have
scarcity-free zones. And e-books come from su places, as do
mp3 les.
In Chris Andersons book Free, he outlines a range of ways in
whi businesses can be developed and business models can be
constructed on the basis of abundant resources and free products
from these scarcity-free environments. However, free is not
in itself a business model. at is to say, the economics of the
music business (in this case) are not predicated on the exange
of free goods and services, but rather free goods and services
are a meanism by whi businesses can develop strategies in
whi money anges hands (see, for instance, Mike Masnis
approa above).
However, whats perhaps most signicant and most overlooked
in an examination of the music industries in the digital age from
104
an economic perspective is that not as mu money needs to

ange hands as it did before. eres an awful lot within the
music industries that used to be very expensive indeed, whi
is no longer expensive at all. In fact, a lot of it is free or very,
very eap. ats another eect of digital tenology on music
industries. Some things just dont need to cost tens of thousands
of pounds, dollars or euros any more.
So quite oen a beer question than how can we make more
money in the music industry? is how can we spend less money
in the music industry?
I say beer question because its oen easier to answer, fulls
the same ultimate objective and is generally a less wasteful and
more consumer and planet friendly way to go about your business. eres a rather extreme and incredibly inspiring version
of this going on in Brazil right now - in whi the independent
music industries have become sustainable and protable through
collaboration, cooperation and resourcefulness.
Im going to devote a whole section of the book to the Fora
do Eixo (say for-a-doe-AY-show), the network of collectives
within the Brazilian independent music sector. eres a lot to
learn here. For now, let me just say that theyve dealt with this
anging economics of the digital age thing head on, and have
built their own economy. With its own currency. Beat that.
e basics of this apter in the original e-book are prey good.
It makes sense to have a central place where people can nd
your stu. A domain of your own. Social networks are all ne
and good, but they are social places, rather than places in whi
you can do business. e metaphor of MySpace as a pub that
I used ve years ago could apply to some extent to Twier and
Facebook today. Its a place where you meet up with people,
at, start to get to know them - but if you want to do business,
best to head ba to your oce.
Of course, that metaphor is limited, but its one to bear in mind and also should contribute to the way in whi you think about
social media use. Retweeting praise is like standing on a air
in a crowded bar and shouting Hey, did you hear the nice thing
this person said about me? He reons Im awesome. Hear that?
Im awesome.
But having a scaer-shot approa to social media and online
proles can be counterproductive, and it might be possible for
someone reading that particular thing in my old book to make
the mistake of thinking that the message is to have as many
online personae as possible, with them all pointing ba to the
one place - so if people do happen to stumble across you on their
preferred social media domain, then youll have lured them ba
to you lair.
ats not what Im trying to suggest. And this is why selectivity
about the networks you do engage with will be important. Youre
going to need to spend some time in ea of the social networks
you oose for yourself.
105
106
Manageability will be a useful watword here, and you should

be selective about where you do and dont have proles - and
for what reason. Its also not a bad idea to think about the
context within whi youre puing your messages and having
your conversations. You might want to tell people about your
music, but you might prefer to do that in cafe than in a strip
club, for instance.
Tenologies may be amoral (guns dont kill people, people do) but theyre not neutral (a gun will kill people more readily than
will a kazoo). Some people are perfectly happy holding a gun
in the knowledge that they wont point it at something alive.
Others are not happy with what they symbolically represent,
regardless of intention.
My point is, we should use our media thoughtfully and deliberately, and not simply default to signing up to everything going
on. And, more specically, we should probably think about the
wider and deeper meanings of where our messages end up, rather
than just the eectiveness of those messages. Everyones level
of comfort varies from one platform to another, and over time as
well.
Im someone who tends to give this more thought than most
people (other people have other things to worry about), and Ive
come to some conclusions about my own online social network
proles that others may not have come to.
At the time of writing, I have osen not to be a member of
Facebook. Im not comfortable with some of the terms and
conditions and the ways in whi Facebook use the data we
provide. Im not a big fan of most instances of corporate
behaviour, and I tend to go out of my way to avoid advertising
where possible.
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In fact, one critique I have of MySpace and Facebook alike is that

they think in a broadcasting framework. An electric-age way of
earning money. Like radio and television, their job is to build an
audience. e website is not their product, you are. And you are
what they sell to their customers, the advertisers.
And while I managed to nd away around all the ugliness and
cluer of Facebook by using something called Social Fixer
(originally Beer Facebook until the lawyers got involved), it
occurred to me that the way in whi I used that site was more
time-consuming and frustrating than it was productive.
ats me. Not you. Im not advocating that you dont use
Facebook - merely illustrating that we can pi and oose the
tenologies that we are comfortable with and that we nd to be
useful.
ats a decision I made: I was on Facebook for a while, but now
Im not.
Spreading the word

As was the case ve years ago, the email signature is still a good
idea. Most people dont read email signatures, but they do take
them in - and, more importantly, they do occasionally look to
them for contact details. Dont think of it as an advertisement,
since typically your emails will generally not be promotional
communications. ink of the email signature as an invitation
to further or deeper engagement.
But more importantly (and this will be a recurring theme) be interesting, and engage in conversations. Whether its on
Twier, in the comments on blog posts, on Facebook pages or
108
anywhere you might nd publicly accessible discussions, geing

involved in the conversation is usually a good idea.
Whats not a good idea is being spammy. A barrage of tweets
that essentially say look at me! buy my stu! go wat my
video! here is a link to something I did! come to my gig! is a
sure re way to get bloed or ignored. is is not a marketing
platform, but a conversational medium.
You wouldnt phone all your friends and, when they answered,
simply say Im awesome - give me money, but thats essentially
what people are doing on Twier - and its beyond bizarre.
Ultimately, theres a balance between having your identity spread
across multiple places online (distributed identity) and understanding the dierence between the conversational modes of
ea individual online community context.
is is the reason that autoposting is seldom a good idea. If
youve plugged your Tumblr into your Twier whi autoposts
to your Facebook (and so on) then youre not engaging particularly well on any of them - youre simply shouting into the void
in the hopes that some of it stis, rather than geing involved
in any of the conversations that are already going on, or starting
any new ones in any meaningful ways.
If your goal is to simply do a piece of marketing (say, for a record
release or a series of upcoming concerts) then I would argue that
youre still beer o having conversations with people than you
are simply advertising your stu. In fact, as a rule of thumb, if
youre not talking about something other than yourself and the
things that youre selling at least 80% of the time, then youre
probably coming o as self-obsessed, spammy and, ultimately,
missing the whole point of the exercise.
13 SEO
Most of what I know about SEO (Sear Engine Optimisation)
is reasonably well summarised in that original apter of the
20 ings e-book. You should know about meta tags, headers,
inbound link text, ALT tags, keywords, regular content updates,
the searability of your site by text-based webcrawlers, and the
importance of your domain name and URL links.
at stu is still important if you want people to be able to nd
your stu on the internet when they sear for the things that
you do and the places that you are.
More sophisticated analyses of SEO are available at a price - time
spent reading books and blog posts, or money spent on geing
experts to mess with your site so that your Google ranking on
certain keywords goes through the roof. But honestly, unless
you have thousands lying around in SPARE MONEY that you
dont know what to do with, I suggest you use it for groceries
and treats instead.
Until youre operating at corporate levels, where tiny fractional
shis in your boom line make major dierences to your net
prots - then I wouldnt spend too mu time and energy on the
problem of SEO.
What Id think about instead, if you want people to be able to
nd you and what you do, is to do all the stu I suggested in
the previous section: that is, have conversations. You can buy
Sear Engine Optimisation, but you can also grow it yourself
organically over time by simply creating meaningful online
activity.
Organic content (ie: stu that you talked about because its
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13 SEO
110
relevant and interesting rather than because you managed to

use it to insert a dozen dierent synonyms as keywords into the
text) is more powerful because its real, its consistent and its of
interest.
If you sear on the phrase Music in the Digital Age on Google,
youll nd this book at or near the top. ats not because Ive
used lots of SEO tris to try and get top ranking - but because
music in the digital age is something I happen to talk about a lot
- and has been for some years.
at might not sound like the best advice for a new artist whos
keen to get known, to make a splash and to promote a concert,
sell a recording and make money - but in all honesty, shortcuts to
that stu are expensive (in all sorts of ways). is might sound
like a recipe for frustration and inertia, but paying your dues is
kind of underrated.
Spend some time being interesting, relevant, linkable and worthy
of nding - rather than focusing all of your aention on laying
traps for potential audience members that might bring them
to your door if they happen to type in some vaguely related
keywords.
In other words - beer than being searable is being shareable.
More on this shortly.
14 Permission and
Personalisation
In the 20 ings e-book, this section was about permission
marketing - and again, the message remains the same. Dont
spam - and by that I simply mean dont send out messages
that people did not ask for. Even if you think itll be relevant
and interesting to them, youll do more damage more oen by
sending out unsolicited mail than you will gain by encountering
the odd person who appreciates the message you sent them.
All of the beer mailing list services insist that everyone you
send to has opted into your mailing list - and there should always
be a clear, simple and obvious way to opt out at a later stage.
Anything else in the world of bulk email messaging is not only
incredibly irritating, counterproductive and unethical - its now
also illegal in many parts of the world.
e personal mode of communication outlined in that section
of the book was also useful. Talk to one person. Talk conversationally. Youre not making an announcement - its not that
kind of medium. Nor is it a good place to dump a whole lot of
information. If you think it will be useful to provide a long list
of dates and venues for your tour, then put it on a web page, and
provide a link to it so people can e it out if they wish.
But since I wrote that book, other ways of communicating have
become commonplace. Twier is a really good example of this.
Your ance for personalised and invited conversation is the
@ reply message. If someone has said something to you, not
replying would be a strange response. Replying with a yer
for your gig would be equally strange. Fortunately, the way in
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14 Permission and Personalisation
112
whi the aritecture of that kind of communicative framework

is set up means that most people do this bit well intuitively.
As soon as someone says something to us conversationally, the
natural response is to respond in kind. e same is true of
other social networks and contexts. Replying personally and
conversationally to people who voluntarily engage with you
is an opportunity to form a connection. Its the best kind of
customer service, and its also just a civil and decent thing to do.
While it might seem like a lot of work to reply to every single
message you get - and that your inbound messages from fans
are overwhelming (what a great problem to have) - time spent
in this area, responding one at a time to people who are already
predisposed to liking your stu, is a far beer investment in your
time than focusing only on converting new listeners. It takes less
time, the rewards are greater - and if you do it right, your fans
will go and do most of the converting for you.
On the ip side - the way in whi you deal with criticism in
this sphere is crucial. If people like the way that you deal with
them and the work that you do - then theyll tell a few friends.
If they dont like the way that you deal with them - theyll tell
everybody. One of the side eects of massively scaled public
social networking is that complaints - especially legitimate ones
- get amplied.
e single best public relations exercise you can do is very
simple: dont be a di.
15 RSS
In many ways, RSS is not quite as important as it was when I
wrote the original ebook - and I suspect if I was writing that
book again today, it might not get the same prominence as it did
- though it would certainly rate a mention.
As a tenology its every bit as pervasive now as it was then - if
not more so. And while it became more commonly understood
and more mainstream than it was ve years ago, it didnt
quite make the same leap into public consciousness as did, for
instance, email - but not through any failing of its own as a
tenology - but because in many ways it was leapfrogged by
other tenologies (many of whi use it as an engine).
For instance, its possible to follow updates of dierent Tumblr
and Posterous blogs simply by going and signing into your
account. e function of RSS is replicated, without there having
to be a deep awareness of the process, or a specic activity
associated with subscribing to a feed in a separate reader.
Likewise, many smartphone and tablet apps automatically update the content within them without you having to do anything
other than simply opening them. ey are context specic,
rather than universal in the way that an RSS feed reader is but they perform a comparable function in many instances.
In other words, RSS has, to a large extent, been leapfrogged
by other things that seem less tenically intimidating than the
(largely transparently) code-based nature of RSS tenology.
at said, there are still many ways in whi RSS is useful and
can be deployed in the service of your online music ambitions.
Its still a great way to stay abreast of a range of topics, simply
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15 RSS
114
by subscribing to relevant blogs, news sources, sear terms

and information sites. Its still a great way to incorporate live
and timely information within the context of your own website
should you be inclined to do that. Its still a great way for people
to stay up to date with the goings on at your own blog - and
while not everyone uses RSS, many people do - and catering for
them is a good idea.
RSS is, in fact, a great example of the phenomenon of tenological specialism. While most futurists and writers about trends in
tenology will talk about what most people do or use as if they
are all that anyone does or uses - the more interesting activities
take place in the margins - and the margins are vast.
Ive heard people say nobody uses RSS anymore (by whi they
mean I dont use RSS any more and, as far as I know, most of my
friends behave in a similar fashion to me) - but just as nobody
uses MySpace anymore, everybody is on Facebook, nobody has
a phone that can only text and call, and everybody wates XFactor its generally prey safe to say that nobody represents quite a large number of people.
And with something as useful as RSS, it makes sense to provide
it as an option, just as its sensible to provide updates via email
from your website. A lot of people use that too.
16 Accessibility
Issues of accessibility remain almost entirely unanged since
the original book was wrien. Its important that when you
create for the web, you consider not only people who might
not have the latest equipment or a particular set of soware
and hardware congurations, but also people who might have
disabilities that may aect the way that they experience your
online content. As I said in the 20 ings book, dont put a rope
ladder where your wheelair ramp should be.
What has anged quite dramatically since that book was written is the proportion of people likely to be experiencing your
content on mobile devices or on tablets like the iPad. As a
result, making mobile-accessible versions of your site can be
an important consideration - or, at the very least, making sure
that your site displays correctly across a wide range of dierent
platforms - and not just on a range of dierent browsers and
desktop operating systems.
And while I dont want to particularly single out a piece of
soware or tenology that you should specically avoid, I
mentioned Adobe Flash as a problematic tool in that, while its
possible to make beautiful and impressive animated graphics for
your website using that system, many screen readers for blind
people and those with impaired vision cannot access the content
on Flash pages - nor navigate using them. e fact that Apples
iOS devices (iPhone, iPod, iPad) do not support Flash is yet
perhaps another good reason to consider alternatives - and su
alternatives do exist.
at said, its also increasingly common that people will use
services that have pre-made templates, rather than design their
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16 Accessibility
116
own website or have it built for them to their specications. You

may not have to think about the tenical details of your website
or online presence in the way that you might have had to even
ve years ago, as services like Flavors.me, Onesheet.com and
others do the work of bringing together all of the online services
that you may use as a music professional (Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Twier, Facebook, Vimeo, Instagram, Flir, YouTube and
so on) and arrange them into an easily navigable and mobilecompatible format that you can customise without aecting the
accessibility of the site. Likewise, hosted blogging services su
as Posterous and Tumblr allow you to oose templates that suit
your musics style, but take care of most of the detail about how
the content is displayed and presented online.
In addition, Wordpress templates and other self-hosted platforms
have had ve years of further development and there are now
many free and premium themes that can be downloaded to give
you a mu ner degree of control over the way in whi your
website operates and is experienced by visitors - while still taking
care of many of the issues around accessible web development.
In fact, its fair to say that most independent musicians and music
businesses do not require the services of a web developer these
days. at does not necessarily mean they dont require the
services of a designer - but the hard coding work of building
a website from scrat is a problem that, for all but the most
demanding of clients with specic requirements, has more or
less been solved.
All the same, do bear in mind when you make things for the
internet - whether its a web page or a piece of video content, a
download or a method of site navigation, not everybody is using
the same tenology as you, not everyone shares your physical
16 Accessibility
117
abilities in the same way, and not everybody has the same
access to fast broadband and unlimited data that you might. e
internet might be accessed by more and more people around the
world every day - but their experience of it diers profoundly,
and it pays to remember that when youre making stu in that
media environment.

is section of the 20 ings book was essentially a pragmatic
piece of marketing advice: Dont assume that youre the only
game in town, and do ensure that people nd what theyre
looking for when they come to your site. Basic customer service
stu. Reward people for oosing you when they could have
osen any other post-polka accordion-core thrash house band
and then give them reasons to come ba and bring their friends.
ankfully, the days of the 30-second music sample are now well
and truly over - or at least, they are for independent music.
On Bandcamp, artists routinely place their entire albums for
audiences to stream so that they may get to hear it, like it and
then buy it. e idea that you might go to somebodys website
with the intention of eing out their music and nding that
its been eectively held to ransom, and that you cant listen
until you purase is now positively quaint. It still happens, but
when you encounter it, its like stumbling into ye olde internet.
But theres a larger point here. Generosity and good customer
service neednt cost you anything online. Allowing people to
download or hear your stu for nothing is not a lost sale - and
if your business model is predicated on the idea that people will
buy your stu because they cant get it any other way, then you
dont have a business model. is book is a prime example, of
course. Anyone can take and read this book for whatever they
want to pay for it. Approximately a quarter of them (slightly
more, actually) voluntarily pay for it. e size of that quarter,
and the income that results from it, is undoubtedly larger than
it would be if nobody was allowed to read it unless they paid.
eres no question about it.
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119
ere are other interesting developments going on in the world

of rewards and incentives however. e phenomenon of crowdfunding is an interesting development - and sites su as Kistarter and Pledge Music allow artists to solicit dierent levels
of payment from their fans in exange for dierent tiers of
reward at dierent price points. When a pre-set target is hit usually the amount that makes the project viable - the people
who have pledged their money are arged and the artist creates
and delivers the promised rewards: conventional merandise
su as CDs, vinyl, t-shirts and posters - as well as personalised
experiences and more unconventional goods and services. While
this is, in many respects, simply inverting the process of making
something then trying to sell it, it does also encourage the
artist to think in quite a useful focused way about rewards and
incentives - and the ways in whi their audiences might wish to
express their fandom by engaging economically with the artist.
Creating value from the meanings that you create for your audience goes beyond simply recording and releasing your record.
In fact, in most cases, people arent giving you money for your
music, but because of it (and because of everything that goes
along with it that gives it rier and deeper meaning).
I reference this a lot - mostly because its so succinctly and
clearly expressed - but Mike Masni of Tedirt probably puts
it best: Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy
(CwF+RtB). e danger here, perhaps, is to give the impression
that this formula works in a way that is formulaic. In fact, its a
allenge to you to think of the ways in whi your fans do make
meaning from your music, the reasons you could give them to
buy things from you - and the sorts of things that theyre likely
to want to give you money for. e answer is never exactly the
120
same from one person to the next - and nor should it be.
In my own experience, experimentation pays o. As part of the
process of writing this book and making it available for sale as its
being wrien, I have tried some dierent ways of incentivising
and rewarding readers. I have already abandoned some things
that didnt work for me, for this book or for the specic people
for whom this book was wrien. at does not mean that those
strategies dont work - only that they didnt in this instance.
ere isnt a recipe - only an approa to geing the balance
right. Listening to your audience really helps in this respect.
Remember how I said this is a conversational medium? In a
conversation, youll want to be listening at least as mu as you
are talking. is is not broadcasting, advertising or any other
manifestation of one to many communication. Its a dialogue and an ongoing one at that.
But heres the key: the people youre having an ongoing dialogue
with are not your customers your audience, your tribe or your
1000 true fans. eyre not your anything. To continue that
engagement in a meaningful way (and especially in an economic
way) its your job to keep nding more rewards, more incentives,
more reasons. Simply being a musician is not enough. You have
the opportunity to make money - not the right. e best way to
make the most of that opportunity is to understand what people
want - even if they dont know it themselves.
e simplest way to reect upon ing 18 of e 20 ings You
Must Know About Music Online is just to say that frequency
is still everything. If youre busy rewarding and incentivising,
thats absolutely ne - but unless theres ange and growth,
people are going to get si of coming ba to the same old stu,
no maer how great it is.
But the point of this section is not just to say that you should keep
making and releasing more stu - but rather that you should keep
the conversation going, and you should do what you can to keep
it interesting. Your narrative needs to be a dynamic one, and
not merely a static biography. is is why blogging - as well as
lifestream tools su as Twier, Instagram and Diaspora - are
so useful: your story simply unfolds as it happens to you - and,
more importantly, as you make it happen.
Its worth remembering that your journey as a creative person
is interesting to people and that many of what seem to be the
mundane, day to day happenings that you might think are best
hidden from view or are insuciently glamorous are the very
things that ll out the story.
But theres a ipside. Living in public - even if its a small
public - can be quite a good motivator for doing things that
are noteworthy and interesting. If you are thinking of yourself
as a aracter in a story, then you are more likely to give that
aracter things to do that are worth telling.
However, for many people this causes a serious problem - and
its this:
What if I dont want to be open and public about my life? What
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122
if I want to be enigmatic, unapproaable and aloof? What if,

frankly, Im shy?
Its entirely possible to have a music business career and let the
music speak for itself. Its perfectly feasible to disengage from
the conversation, remove yourself from the public gaze and still
make money from music.
Its just not at all common - and its certainly not a good strategy.
e simple fact is that conversational media favour those who
engage. Its not necessary to be extroverted - and its certainly
unhelpful to be boastful and egocentric - but youre at an advantage if talking with people about what you do is not something
that lls you with dread. ats just the way it is.
A lot of people criticise the internet as a platform for the music
industries for exactly this reason: that it demands constant
feeding and ongoing engagement, favours the gregarious and
de-professionalises the relationship between artist and audience.
But that misunderstands the online environment. Its not the
internets job to work for the music industries. e internet
is just a way in whi human beings communicate with ea
other. To that end, asking what your internet strategy is, is like
asking what your telephone strategy is. e people asking how
the internet can save the music industry might just as well be
asking how pen and paper can save the music industry.
e web is not a marketplace, a platform for music commerce
nor a retail environment any more than a party or a pub is.
ats not what its for - but it can be used in that way, if you
operate according to the communicative aritecture it has as its
infrastructure. In other words, having friends can be a marketing
strategy - and your friends are likely to want to hear and buy
123
your music. But if theyre only a marketing strategy - then

theyre not going to be your friends for very long.
Ultimately, the core value in a conversational medium is interestingness - and even more valuable than interestingness is ongoing
interestingness. Keep doing things, keep being interesting, and
keep having the conversation. Frequency is everything.
19 Make it viral
In an age in whi YouTube clips can be circulated and spread
worldwide - because theyre interesting, funny, surprising or
wonderful - theres something entirely hubristic about the digital
marketing company that claims to make virals. What they
make is videos. ose videos might be shared virally. ey may
indeed have some expertise that makes those videos more likely
to be disseminated in that way. But they do not make virals in the same way that bands do not make hit records - but rather,
they make records that become hits.
at said, the quality of shareability is something that is worth
thinking about and investing time in craing when it comes to
making online media - especially for the purposes of promotion.
Fortunately, a lot of that shareability is now hard-wired into the
tools that we use. e Facebook Like buon, for instance, is
an engine for sharing - as is the reblog function in Tumblr or
retweets in Twier. Social media platforms are designed for
people to share things with their friends. ings that they nd
surprising, interesting, funny or wonderful.
So the meanisms of sharing are not the problem. For the most
part, this has been taken care of for us. Its the reason to share
that we need to give our thought to.
And thats where the idea of narrative and social objects come
in. Im going to be devoting a whole section to this later in
the book, but human beings are storytelling creatures. is is
how they make meaning, and its how they connect with others.
People dont just socialise in a meanistic, join-the-dots way.
ey socialise about things. ey dont just talk, they talk about
things. And the kinds of things they like to share are the ones
124
19 Make it viral
125
around whi they can tell their own stories and have their own
conversations.
Your links are not interesting because of you, theyre interesting
because of the dynamic between the teller and the hearer of the
tale. I dont retweet your funny one-liner, your music video or
the link to your album because of you. I do it because of me.
Its a way in whi I can meaningfully connect with my people.
What you have provided me with is a social object that I can use
as a context for engagement and sociality.
e strong subtext of the phrase e this out is lets talk
about this. So when you decide to make a viral (in whatever
way you wish to interpret that), the questions you need to be
asking yourself are how can people connect this to their lives?;
what sort of conversations do I want to start?; what is it that
will engage people in a manner that goes beyond simply huh?
In other words - whats the bigger picture? and ultimately to
what end? ose are good questions to ask - and while the
instant gratication of dumb fun might be more likely to result
in things that are shared virally, the combination of remarkable
and meaningful will have a mu deeper impact - both on the
lives of the people who share those social objects and on your
own music business online strategy.
But Please RT and Like this to win are not reasons to share.
People remark on things that are remarkable.
20 Forget Product - Sell

Relationship
is nal thing in e 20 ings You Must Know About Music
Online was the point at whi I began to glimpse this idea
about the internet as a conversational medium - the one thing
about music online from whi all of the others (and many more
besides) could be deduced. If you start to comprehend the ways
in whi this is a conversation is a guiding principle for music
(and everything else) online, then you dont really need the other
19 things. ey become entirely obvious and intuitive.
But I didnt express it as this is a conversation - but rather
forget product, sell relationship, whi as a piece of rhetoric
has quite a dierent intended eect. Of course, my intention
was not to encourage you to give up selling people things that
they might want to buy - but instead to think about your story,
your connection with people and the ongoing engagement that
you might have with them as the thing that is of value.
People dont give you money because they want a t-shirt with
that design on it, or because they want to be able to hear your
music. People can already hear your music. ey want to give
you money because of the connection that they have with you
and your music, and with the meanings that those things are
part of in their lives. ose products are simply the meanisms
by whi they express that value and connection in a monetary
way.
And relationships are dicult to price. e language is all wrong
about this stu and I dont think weve yet found the right words
for it. When you ask people to pay a xed price for your stu,
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127
you are selling them a product that has a purely economic value
based on supply and demand, cost of manufacture, opportunity
cost and perhaps the price of convenience. It might be simple
and pragmatic (this record costs $10. e end.), but it reduces
the exange to a single transaction rather than an ongoing one.
You have nished with that person as soon as you have their
money. Hit the bell on the desk and yell Next!
When you ask them to pay what they want, conict arises
between frugality, generosity, current means and a whole range
of other intangible factors. When you ask them to pay what they
think its worth, you open a whole can of worms about how they
value the meaning that your music represents for them.
I guess the phrase you oose what to pay neatly avoids the
problem, and sidesteps the issue of providing the basis on whi
that economic decision should be made. You oose what to pay,
you oose how to pay, you oose when to pay, and you oose
who to pay.
But more importantly, paying becomes part of the ongoing
dialogue within the conversation, whi is its own end. e
relationship is not the means by whi you drag the fan to
the eout - but money becomes one of the things that are
exanged as markers of value (in the sense of valuing ones
friendship, rather than in the sense of valuing an antique).
Money becomes discursive in this context. Its part of the
conversation, not the end of it.
Forget product, sell relationship means stop thinking about the
wrong stu. Recordings, t-shirts, posters and experiences are
not your products, but your by-products. ey are, of course,
an important way in whi the commerce of what we do takes
place - but that commerce exists within the context of culture,
128
meaning, connection and expression. Focus on doing those bits

right, and the commerce side of things will more or less take care
of itself.
Be interesting, be relevant, be connected and be meaningful. is
is a conversation.
Where to from here?
129
Lots more to come

anks so mu for reading Music in the Digital Age. Its not
over yet. Im still writing and theres a lot more to come. I hope
youre nding it interesting and helpful. And if you are - please
share the Leanpub link with as many people as you think might
nd it useful.
e book is available as a Pay What You ink Its Worth
download.
You may have got the book for nothing. You may have paid a
lile something. I dont know. ey dont tell me these things.
But now is the moment that you get to consider what its was
worth to you - and what it will be worth to you as it develops and
grows. If you can pay something, it would be hugely appreciated
- and would really help motivate my writing and focus my
aention on making this as good as it can possibly be.
If the book was of value to you, Im glad. If you oose to reward
that value, Im grateful.
Ive come up with some extra incentives and gis for people
who pay too - including hard copies of the nished book printed
on genuine paper, an audiobook version, a personal Skype
consultancy with me - and a at over a pint sometime about
whatever you fancy.
To make that work, Ive come up with e Cool Slidey ing
that you can use to pay whenever you like - even long aer
youve downloaded this book. It lets you select a price and a
http://leanpub.com/dubber
http://andrewdubber.com/pay.html
130
Lots more to come
131
reward that suits, and what you pay goes directly to me. For
whi I am, of course, very grateful.
anks again for eing this out - and Id love to hear what
you think about the book so far. Im @dubber on Twier.
The thank you page

One of the ways in whi Im showing my gratitude to the people
who buy this book is to oer gis and prizes. Bribes, if you like.
If you use e Cool Slidey ing on my website, you can oose
how mu you want to pay, and the rewards and gis that you
can have for paying the dierent amounts.
Anyone who spends $20 or more on this book gets to have their
name on this page - because I am very, very grateful to them.
Heres the list so far:
Jon Wright (@scrat_harris) kirk & wendy aka acl, aka another
cultural landslide (@anothercultland)
And thats the list. Why not add your name to it too?
http://andrewdubber.com/pay.html
132
Further Reading
FRITH, S. (1988) e Industrialization of Music. Music for
pleasure: essays in the sociology of pop. London: Polity.
MCLUHAN, M. (1962) e Gutenberg galaxy; the making of
typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
MCLUHAN, M. (1964) Understanding media; the extensions of
man. (1st Ed.) New York: McGraw-Hill.
SMALL, C. (1998) Musiing : the meanings of performing and
listening. Hanover ; London: University Press of New England.
133

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Music in the Digital Age

Making sense of the commerce & culture

is is a Leanpub book, for sale at:

Understanding Music in the Digital Age

A short explanatory note on Mediation

01 Dont Believe the Hype

02 Hear / Like / Buy

03 Opinion Leaders Rule

14 Permission and Personalisation

17 Reward & Incentivise

20 Forget Product - Sell Relationship

Where to from here?

Lots more to come

e thank you page

About this updated

a lot of what I do involves stepping ba from the debates

cards. At the time, I couldnt really do that. I didnt know

else, the whole thing was already available as individual blog

One version turned the things into specic strategies - and

it, whi is nice, of course. And while helpful volunteers have

at is to say: ere is just ONE thing you must know about

Culture is simply whatever people say, make and do. Music is

Its a social and cultural activity, more than it is a commodity.

Your music is commercial

- and even these are dwindling as World Music is captured and

Your music is media

we struggle to think of popular music, as Ive described it above,

understood categories and fullls certain tenical and structural

I think there are helpful parallels that illuminate the condition

The Digital Age

The Five Ages of Media

lile needlessly obtuse, but its really quite simple: throughout

1) The Oral Age

interrogate it as it played out.

2) The Scribal Age

Writing was more complicated than mere spee though. For

years - depending on whi continent you happen to live.

3) The Print Age

creation, distribution and retail of dots on pages. People can go

4) The Electric Age

And for music - with electricity, of course, comes recording.

5) The Digital Age

From mobile phones to laptops, sat navs to digital cameras,

e Internet is not a marketing platform for bands and nor

that online (digital) media are dierent from electric (analogue)

So, when I say Online, I mean connected, digital, discrete,

The Internet explained

across the network, but that no node in the network should be

whi information can re-route and ow without interruption is

Whats on the internet?

Like learning to drive

Twier, because thats a bit like having a direct mail strategy

What this conversation is about

or use their immense lobbying power to sway public policy in

Whether its a recipe for soup, an email to your mother, a home

your music, it would be a degraded copy of the original. If Im

The Online Medium

Making a living online

A short explanatory note

A short explanatory note on Mediation

a dierent type of communication can take place. Likewise, radio

A short explanatory note on Mediation

medium will shape the rules of the game. By anging the