VC Blogger Tim Oren has been prodding me on this End of the CD issue, and Tim has his own different angle to accomplish the same holy goal, an angle I applaud, but really, any way I cut the data before me, I really can't see Tim's rosy future for the CD.

Can We Throw Away a Mature Market?

Tim points out how CDs are a well understood, routine production technology, and asks why should I want to trade away that potential market? First off, I don't agree that the production is 'routine' -- it may be routine all-in-a-days-work for Quincy Jones, Phil Collins and U2, but all the musicians I know have done it only once, maybe twice, a few rare ones have done it three times; those who retain their sanity have long ago ruled out any prospects of recouping their costs, they see the CD as only "a necessary business expense" because they believe you can't get festival gigs without a CD. I don't buy that.

Can we discard an established and mature distribution channel like the production, manufacturing, transport, promotion and sales engines of the RIAA CD market?

When was the last time you bought a vinyl LP?
When was the last time you bought sheet-music?

True, the sales channel was unaffected by that technology shift between LP and CD (whereas the disc destroyed the once-ubiquitous sheet-music industry), but in that day when all music, CD-length or not, is traded purely electronically, by hook or by crook, what future is there for the traditional HMV record store?

Already I see FM radio annealing to the lowest-common-denominator to try and retain some sort of market to flog to advertisers. They are hurting. When I talk to people who come to our shows, and that ranges from high-school kids at the coffee houses to seniors at the jamborees, all of them say, "There's nothing interesting on the radio." The artistic direction of most rural radio stations is "play the least offensive material" to appease the captive "radio at work" audience.

That's not pop culture, that's a terminal wasting disease.

Tim's plan to interest the existing business minds in the low-run fringe markets does have one ace: Pop-stardom is not a quality of the stars themselves, I believe pop-stardom is a natural cognitive scaffolding erected by the fans out of deep human needs. Their pop-star is only a beacon (hence 'star'), an inanimate place for fans to hang their collective identities, a place to project themselves into the larger world and a vehicle to build their personal birds-of-a-feather network.

Any Ricky Martin (or Elvis or Sinatra or Liszt) fan knows they will have a common topic of conversation with any other Ricky Martin concert attendee, and thus they buy anything with the initials RM on it, clothes, bookbags, jeans, posters, you name it, all of it to shout out to the world, "Is there anybody out there who is like me?"

Pop-stars are all about curing loneliness.

That's a cognitive effect, and it won't go away. Power-laws and all that considered, we will continue to torture those unfortunates by hoisting the image of them to the pedestal to become the coat-rack for our dreams, and Tim's plan would appear a viable path for discovering these same dream-hangers within just about any genre.

When Worlds Collide

My model, Tim's Indie model and the RIAA model all accommodate the pop-star phenomenon, but the CD-production models /require/ it (to fund ever more sensational spectacle productions), whereas mine will also profit from the humble small-scale scaffolding surrounding popular local artists -- when kids in my neighbourhood see a poster for a Ragasi concert, when the seniors see the Beckett's on the bill, they will drive 100 miles to be there, knowing that their destination will be full of folks just like them.

You may not remember the 50's. A scan of old Billboards will show how droll the average offering was in the post-war post-BigBand days, after the musician's strike virtually extinguished the business plan of the touring orchestra, after the organized-crime clamp-down on all the distribution channels. It was bleak: Just look at Pat Boone.

Then along comes the new tape-recording and open-standard disc-lathe technology that makes recording a one-room shot, something just about /anyone/ could do, even installing phone-booth coin-operated recording hotspots. And in that new environment, along comes Sam Phillips with his Sun Records, armed only with a simple studio, often one mic, one take. Sam walks into a network infrastructure of newly national radio syndicates, so he only needs to place a track into a few of the right-hands, and his cost to do so is so small, he can pump out the hot tracks and he change the musical landscape doing it.

Ask anyone, any age, their favourite 50's recording artist. Few will say Pat Boone. Most will say Elvis or any number of the small-shop products. Yet, according to Billboard, it was Pat Boone, it was Jackie Gleason, it was lots of others we don't even talk about anymore. And we can blame that on Sam, but Sam wouldn't have been without the network and the low-tech low-cost startup technologies.

And then there's Berry Gordy ...

Slay Them With Science

Tim describes his plan as a way to remove ideology from the discussion, instead work toward killing the RIAA with business logic and without any technology shift, if I follow his track right, by shifting control from RIAA membership to new business webs of non-member independents. And I'm all for that too. Tim and I have the same goal (get unheard music in the hands of those fans who want it) and the same target (unseat the RIAA members as the sole gatekeepers to stardom) we are just attacking on two different fronts.

It's my observation, though, that true and lasting revolution happens not from political action, but from technological action. England was changed more by the invention of the flush toilet and central heating than by any actions of marching armies, or even armies of lawyers.

Science and Peace will triumph over ignorance and war, nations will unite, not to destroy, but to build, and the future will belong to those who have done the most for suffering humanity. .....Louis Pasteur

But since business logic is logic, it is inescapably, according to Hofsteader, maleable in its result. That sets up endless debates which resemble the popular press ramblings about pros and cons on opensource software -- for a graphic example, we can readily observe how Linux people are completely unabated by this business logic discussion, concentrating instead on improving their technology such that Amazon can report a 25% reduction in technology costs simply by making the switch. Logic is, after all, only a subset of mathematics.

Similarly, my proposed change in the core technology of music distribution, eschewing expensive over-production gotta-be-perfect discs, forgoing the airwaves for purely digital free-exchange, and removing the current obstacles for packaging the artists' message (that need to recoup huge investment costs on the record production) all this seems to me a method that cannot be stopped by debate. It is instead, as some of our investor-inquiries have stated, inevitable.

But also, let's be fair, I don't have the clout or sales strategist's accumin to do what Tim can do on the business consciousness front, all I have is pedantic technology. If Tim can do it, if he can open the minds of the existing sales channel to become aware of the aggregate power of the composite fringe markets, then more power to him.

Those who are not against us ...

Thus I think it's a good thing we are both in this simultaneously, and if Tim can succeed in building the business case for a new guard for the old castle based on bringing in the fringe markets, I imagine both systems could co-exist peacefully, my network making the artists known, and one of the things it might, while the concept still exists, boost is their CD sales.

But I wouldn't know. I haven't bought a CD in over 10 years.
I just get them given to me by fellow artists.