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Today I was driven insane by an article implying that Netflix could serve as a model for the music industry. The article was written by Glenn Peoples, an otherwise upstanding journalist who fell for an associative fallacy that seems to befall everyone when thinking about media. For some reason, when it comes to the monetization of content, a half century or more of media theory discourse seems to not matter, and people feel comfortable applying strategies applicable to one modality of media to all others. Because the modes are similar, so must be the means of monetization.
Wrong.

I could go paragraph by paragraph and pick apart the argument, but that would be needlessly pedantic. I’ll quote one to exemplify what is wrong.

“With Netflix consumers have proven they will rent content – even re-run content – and stream it from the cloud. They will pay for digital content they could get for free through illegal means. They will pay if the service allows streaming through multiple devices – including mobile.”

With Netflix customers have not proven they will rent content. They have proven they will rent visual content. Visual content is a subset of the macro concept of content, and consumer behaviors in relation to such has no intrinsic corollary to aural, printed or other forms of content such as games. To put it another way, in the hierarchy of content, what applies to a sub-type does not necessarily apply to its siblings. This article uses this fallacy as a way to call for emulation of Netflix by music services.

Now, I’m not saying parts of this argument aren’t true. A lot of what Netflix does could be applied to music services. But the argument that because it worked for Netflix it should work for say, Spotify is completely wrong. This is implying that value is universal regardless of the mode of content, which is simply not the case. Value is inversely proportional to the affordance of ubiquity provided by a media.

Visual media is intentionally not ubiquitous. While it has certainly edged toward ambient in terms of its infiltration of the gaze, it is still reliant on the singular mode of spectatorship rather than encompassing ubiquity of representation which audio media can take on. Visual media is rooted firmly in the gaze, a screen lighter than ambient light forcing attention. Value is relational to its forced attraction, as visual media is reliant on the attraction of gaze to ascribe its meaning. By its nature it works through framing, editing, color, etc to maintain this attraction. Mise en scene in even basic forms which work — informed by the mode of representation — to hopefully impart value upon the time, money and/or effort you are putting into viewing.

Audio media however is ubiquitous. It is reliant on a sense which is inherently not dependent on directional attention. It can be everywhere in your home, focused on only yourself through headphones, or background while driving, viewing things online, etc. It is not reliant on the attraction of gaze, spectatorship or other forced concentration of attention. Its very ubiquity lessens its value as it does not monopolize the senses and thereby requires less investment in order to enjoy it. Requiring less investment demands less return and hence, lower value.

So, given the radically disparate notions of spectatorship between audio and visual content, to think that Netflix serves as a model for what an audio “Netflix like” service should be is absurd. It’s like saying Steam is the best model for the music industry to emulate. In fact though, Steam is probably a better model than Netflix, since it is rooted on content which is diachronic and can be valuable even with short duration but frequent investment. But I digress.

The moral of my outrage is thus:

Chasing business models in one media with business models of fundamentally different media is a recipe for disaster. I see this happening continually with newspapers and magazines and the iPad, and I see it happening with the music subscription services. It’s applying an associative fallacy to things that are disparate, and history is littered with the fatalities of these collisions.

Remember: the gaze is important in that it monopolizes attention and demands more return from the investment. It has more value than the ubiquitous. The value of the ubiquitous is when it elevates above the din to become something transcendent for all senses. That is what we should aspire to when trying to create the concept of value in relation to content.

Transcendence is the great equalizer in the content hierarchy.

Just ask anyone that has been to an amazing concert.

Fifteen years ago, a 17 year old me sat down at a computer, pulled up a site and registered a domain name.

Reckoning.com was taken
Murmur.com was taken
Fables.com was taken

Murmurs.com was not.

I registered the domain name and used Microsoft Frontpage to put up a site.

By November of 1996 it looked like this.

Fifteen years is a long time to be committed to anything, much less a fan site. The person I was at 17 is not the person I am now. However, at least in terms of hobbies, being an R.E.M. fan has stayed the same. I still run Murmurs, maybe not with the same level of commitment I did 10 years ago, but its still something I pay for, maintain, post on occasionally and keep going.

But looking back on fifteen years is interesting in the frame of the site.

Fifteen years ago:

• I had just met Michael for the first time after a Patti Smith show (I sat behind him). That is what prompted me to do the site.
• R.E.M. did not have an official website. Warner Bros. Records did, at http://wbr.com/rem but the band did not have remhq.com launched until 1999′s tour
• All music was bought on CD’s. There were no MP3 players, there were no Mp3′s period.
• All my news for Murmurs.com I got through buying magazines, surfing sites, reading newspapers and tips from fans

Thinking back on this, running the site all those years ago was like running a news organization. I played more of a journalist. Now it’s easier for me to scrape the Google News feed for mentions of Michael or the band, syndicate tweets and be down with it. Some of the fun is gone, but sometimes progress negates fun.

Half my life has been tied to this site, and at times I sacrificed things in the sake of keeping it going. Was it worth it? Yes. I have made great friends and I hope it has contributed to peoples lives. It lead to me becoming friends with the band, and every day I’ve admire their generosity, integrity and graciousness.

Sometimes it is easy to look back and imagine a life without Murmurs. To some degree, not having it as a burden in parts of my life would be great. But with so much of myself tied up into its existence I don’t know if in the end it would have been worth it. I’m proud of what it is, and I’m hopeful I can continue to make it something special. I’ll always work to make it something worth being tied to the band R.E.M., and always fall woefully short, but that is OK.

In the end, the act of being a fan is a difficult thing to reconcile with the act of being an individual. When you transcend the notion of idle fanaticism toward something as engaged as running a fan site, it becomes even more difficult to reconcile your role as an individual with your role as the voice of the collective Fan.

With Murmurs now at 15, R.E.M at 31 and me now at 32, I think I’ve figured that out. Not entirely, but enough to get by.

Peter Buck once described R.E.M. as “Part lies, part heart, part truth and part garbage.”

I’ve always thought that is an accurate description of Murmurs, in the best way possible.

This last week my name got dragged into some blogs because of the folding of CIsco’s EOS unit. EOS was a hosted content management and community enablement platform that was adopted by Warner Music Group a few years ago.

At Warner Bros. Records we adopted the Drupal platform over four years ago as our content management and community system. The choice of Drupal came after I spent a weekend duplicating functionality that we were paying a fan club company for on both Joomla and Drupal. Out of this I decided Drupal was our best bet.

Over the last four years the team at WBR has made over 220 artist websites. At the peak of our Drupal operations we were launching nearly four a week. We were heavy open source advocates and very vocal about why we made certain technology choices. My team and I spoke on blogs and at conferences regarding this.

Drupal ended up forming the basis of our technology stack at WBR. This basis extended not just in how we made artist experiences online, but also to the methods by which we applied technology to the business at all levels.

Given the amount of press that went to the death of a music/artist platform last week, and my name getting dragged into it, I wanted to get some stuff about technology off my chest. This is in no way a testament to the success or failure of any platform or approach, just what guided me in my decisions and will so in the future.

Stacks and Platforms

Stack is a term that within computer science defines a linear dependency through layers of operational specialty. The most common use of it is the TCP/IP stack, which depending on the layer routes packets between routers, machines or applications. The important thing about the Stack concept is that layers at the top are dependent on the bottom.

Platforms are similar but more focused on creating an ontological framework for technology use and application. They provide normative processes, constraints and methods to conform to in order to allow the chaotic use of technology in an orderly way within a specific ontology. This is most readily seen on Facebook or in how you program for iOS, Mac OS or Windows, and especially video game platforms.

My approach to technology choices at WBR was oriented toward the application of a holistic stack in order to create a comprehensive platform for innovation..

There ends my diplomacy, here is my statement.

The stack as I defined it at WBR was as such:

Presentation/Interaction (Web, iPhone, etc) —> Drupal, WordPress, some Python (Tornado), iOS
Application Abstraction (authentication, analytics, etc) –> Digital Detail (custom data platform), Python, MongoDB, Janrain
API (third party integration) –> Digital Detail, Python (Tornado)
Data (consumer and operational) –> MongoDB, MySQL, Hive
Media (streaming, download, etc) –> Akamai, Brightcove, etc

Given this stack, which I fought diligently to maintain against the tide of alternatives, here are my loose pronouncements in terms of the application as such in a record company.

1. If your company uses the word “tech” in a pejorative sense, it’s best to pack it up and call it a day

With the use of Drupal initially we had assume tasks related to keeping it running. This extended initially from the server level up to the application, and later more operational to application after we outsourced the hardware. The term “tech” or “techie” or “technologist” was a pejorative, more often applied as such because we as people who had to apply technology also had to conform to its limitations. People don’t like the word “no” quantified by physical limitations (i.e. time, processes, memory, bandwidth).

No one in a modern company, certainly not a media company should ever fear technology or not understand both its limits and capabilities. Technology never belongs as the spoke of an organization. It needs to be the hub on which everything else is built.

If your company relies on technology, everyone is a tech person. The music business has always relied on technology and often was a partner in it (see Phillips, RCA, etc) up until Napster. It is disingenuous to be a music or media company and think you aren’t a technology company.

2. To be a partner means being a player

Technology partnerships should exist not through term sheets and “deals” which carry the political weight of business development and legal careers, but through API keys, loose bindings and open exchanges of ideas from machine to machine, and person to person. I don’t think this needs explanation other than pointing you toward IMeem.

Partnerships need to work on both sides, and be as equally easy to create as to sever. When it comes to pass that doing business with Amazon is easier than with my own company, it can’t be any easier for a third party to do the same. I said at a conference that you can’t make an API for lawyers. Well, you should be able to. Certainly I can spin up thousands of dollars of instances on EC2, setup a shop, make a fortune and sell a company all without ever having to talk to Werner at Amazon, or his legal team.

If you want to be a partner in technology you have to be a player in technology. And conversely, if you want to be a partner with media, be a player with it. The only way to equalize this on both sides is to keep the people out of it and let the machines do the talking.

3. When technology is used as a political tool, and especially as a political weapon, no one wins

Technology choices often extend much further than what is right and proper in terms of the actual technology. I’d wager to guess that every technology decision, whether made by a technologist or a business development person (or a combination thereof) is colored with personal political ramifications, cronyism, and engendered bias. This coupled with how important technology is to the core of running a company, and how important the right decision can be to one’s career creates situations in which technology is made political.

This is not good.

In the end, no one wins when technology is used as a weapon in a political war. Those whom the technology is supposed to serve suffer because more effort is put into justification than innovation. The providers of the technology (whether internal or external) loose because judgements about relative merit are all colored with political subjectivity. You end up with two sides, neither getting innovated fast enough, and only innovating in an arms race against each other, not in a customer focused way.

Fixing this is a systemic issue that comes from the CEO on down. As a CTO you can fix this by not allowing it to ever get to this point. Technology at some point needs one voice with authority, as well as systems that allow options to play out in a customer focused way rather than an internally political way (see 5, 7 and 9).

4. Beware of groundhog day platforms

Bad partner decisions can lead to persistent sunk costs; in which the application of money toward implementation once does little to mitigate subsequent integration and implementation costs. If you find yourself spending anything but run rate money six months into a deal it is time to figure out what exactly you are spending on. Expertise should be inversely proportional to money spent in the long term.

5. Software as Service is a fallacy

The fallacy of software as a service is that it means no implementation costs and only operational costs. There is ALWAYS implementation costs, and you need to choose a SAAS vendor thinking of not the operational cost (you might never reach that state, and it’s always the “attractive” cost), but the integration/implementation cost and the disintegration/deimplementation cost. Think in terms of man hours/days/weeks/months.

If that cost exceeds the savings of the best case operational cost, it’s time to investigate other alternatives:

1) Open source + integration
2) Open source + SAAS (reduced risk, better ejection-seat for reduced disintegration)
3) Open source + custom development
4) Custom development

Rarely is 4 ever done from the ground up. The most common method is 3 and 2. You find 2 in wordpress.com, Acquia Gardens, etc.

6. Beware of misalignment of objectives, especially on a technology and business level

If you run your core business on someone elses infrastructure and systems and their core business is in no way aligned with yours, don’t blame that vendor when things go south. You should have always assumed they would as there is no “best case” scenario and there never has been. In the end, it is a perpetual friction between their business and yours; a push and pull in which no one wins. Does anyone remember Atex? I’m sure a lot of former newspaper employees do.

Loosely bound implementations where the risk doesn’t have to be assumed on either side are the best.

7. Stay nimble

A constant in technology is change. I spend about half my time as a CTO type entity researching what is next while also finding better ways to optimize what is present. There are always ways to keep costs low. Always ways to keep your technology stack more future-proof. Being nimble implies the ability to have low risk shallow investments toward new technologies, and allows you to taste before buying rather than having to buy outright.

I’ve seen, in typical IT based organizations technology choices take years in terms of due diligence, implementation and eventual de-implementation. It shouldn’t be this way. A proper stack in which dependencies are mitigated through standards (i.e., message queues, JSON based serialization, Thrift based RPC, etc) allows experimentation without too much pain.

A huge problem in entrenched technology organizations is the pain of change being more than the pain of the current situation. When it becomes easier to work around the limitations of old or inferior technology than to invest in innovation, you have not been building a nimble stack. You’ve built a prison.

8. Reinvent and reexamine decisions constantly

WBR was heavily wedded to Drupal. We launched well over 220 websites in the time I was there. However, not a week went by when I wasn’t constantly second guessing the decision to use Drupal. I would often, as a point of exercise build a mock artist site in WordPress, Expression Engine, Ning or any of the countless other tools and frameworks that popped up over time. A lot of them no longer exist, which proved the validity of our decision to put investment in Drupal, but some have come into their own as artist site platforms (i.e. WordPress and Tumblr) and are starting to be used since I’ve left.

Related to point number 3: software should never be religion. This applies to why you chose something that in your judgement is superior to others who might have chosen differently. The nature of technology means that there are always a dozen ways of doing any given one thing, just like programming in Ruby.

9. Stay curious

I was recently talking to someone that was employed as a technologist but confessed he spends most of his day in e-mail. That made me sad. Curiosity is what drove most of us toward computers in the first place: the ability to manipulate data, systems, graphics and numbers to our very whim played directly with the god-creation desires that also drove us geeks toward Lego, SimCity and Civilization. To have curiosity subjugated by practicality leads toward a stasis that runs counter to the very core of what technology represents.

Often wanton curiosity might look like a lack of attention and focus, but that is furthest from the truth. Focus is only driven by the elimination of that which can distract. An informed decision on what not to do only comes through examination, trial, error and the lack of concern for failure.

The best way I can put it: if I followed the day by day trends from Hackernews in terms of platforms, languages and technology, I’d get nothing done. If I don’t follow the day to day trends from Hackernews, I’m better off not doing anything in the first place. The balance between the two is informed curiosity and is what keeps you innovative in the long run.

10. Embrace anarchy

Chaos has always been my guiding principle when it comes to managing technology teams. I enjoy the disagreements, the entrenched beliefs and more than anything, people passionate about what they feel and believe is truly right. I especially enjoy it when they are divergent from each other.

The great thing about technology is it’s an equalizer. At some point, no matter how convoluted the closures, how Hungarian the syntax, or how esoteric the language, everything will end up getting reduced some way, some how into assembly for execution. Homogeneity does not belong in technology in any way. That extends from the desks employees choose, the computers they want to work on, the way they arrange their monitors or their development environments.

And it also extends to the choices made as a group. If someone wants to prove why something should be done a particular way, they should. I’d fund it and encourage it. So long as there is momentum in the noise and the anarchy isn’t bound by inertia, progress will always happen. And usually the most interesting stuff is the methods that prompt the “WTF?” reaction.

And there you have it. Any other principles?

Update: As pointed out by former colleague, I should point out that we never conformed 100% to what was outlined here. The platform we built was a mess and chaotic in the best and worse sense, caused by all the things that befall technology: lack of resources primarily. The point was lessons learned, not lessons necessarily implemented. Five years is a long time to make a lot of mistakes and a lot of successes.

Regarding my name in some trade publications this morning. I’ll just refer to this post.

And I’m busy trying to eat my own dog food with Murmurs.

Here is a story:

Back at Warners I was in a meeting about “reintroducing” a band to the market, which basically means the last record was a stiff so we needed to “reboot” them. Not dissimilar to what Hollywood does to franchises.

A lot of ideas were floated around: vinyl singles, etc. My statement was “death to the shiny disc!” Basically, eliminate all physical, and go completely digital. Nothing was to be gained by putting out low margin product. This was four years ago. As you can imagine, that statement was met with some glares. I was pulled aside later and advised that the shiny disk still paid for my shiny servers. I didn’t use that catch phrase again.

And five years ago, I posted about what I would do if I bought a newspaper.

Both that post and the “death to the shiny disc” statement are rooted in one thing. Killing the cows.

The CD and the physical newspaper are now Nero playing the fiddle. They are viewed as the mountains that can’t move on the horizon: omnipresent, and sacred. But they shouldn’t be. The CD and physical retail are often pointed out to be that which props up the willingness and ability for record companies to experiment. But to what expense? And is that really true?

Consider for a moment the amount of supply chain management, staffing and processes in place just to produce a CD and get it out to third party retail. And consider the CD itself: a 74 minute bit conveyance mechanism that is pretty much disposable. They are often used just once: to rip the bits.

So in the end, the CD is this:

A once major source of high margin revenue which is now taking disproportionate back line expense to prop up, in order to justify the size of an industry which does not exist anymore. And even if that expense is not significant in hard numbers, the inertia it creates at the resultant diverted and stifled innovation sure is.

It’s time to kill it. Bring it out back and shoot it. And then really take a look at what is left.

When I look at what is left, I see a positive: the ability to transcend media with music products, no longer limited by the 74 minute disk. The ability to add value through art, through sound quality (vinyl or USB/digital distribution) and through multi-modal experiences. The ability to change the notion of what an album is. I also see a time when success is not judged on how many units were shipped by an artist (and resultant sell through), but rather how much money the artist made in net revenue across media. A world focused on ARPU and CAC rather than third party retail supply chain maintenance. A business in other words, and hopefully one that treats artists fairly through accountable representation.

I don’t think this movement is going to happen by choice either. How many planogram iterations will it take until Best Buy or Target eliminate CD’s all together? Or just keep them as end-caps for NOW compilation and Disney pop hits? Two holiday seasons? One? There are no more record stores anymore, save for Indies, and I argue they still have a place for higher end (non CD) content. There are no more Borders Books and Music. And there is much more money to be made in direct-to-fan/consumer retail than there is in third party, if the companies are oriented toward behaving as retailers in staffing expertise and workflow.

And there in lies the issue: orientation. The music business has often, in the last ten years, not operated as a business. It has operated as a simulation of a business that once existed. The reality is, much as newspapers are having to face the fact that there are digital dimes to physical pennies; music companies are going to have the face the fact that when you stack the dimes, it isn’t going to be the sky scraper it once was. There are valiant efforts toward this future in every major, but not as well staffed or funded or universal as they should be.

The adage of Web 2.0 was that small, nimble and enterprising beats large, inertial and enterprise. Every time a company got too big and couldn’t change rapidly, smaller companies would “disrupt” the space by being able to pivot rapidly and course correct easily. Essentially the current stage in the resurgence of technology innovation is born by companies refusing to believe things were immutable, and instead presupposing that entrenchment has driven stasis. Industries long for the days that once were: 15 billion dollar businesses with high margins off 18 dollar product is one such longing. 85% marketing penetration with little year over year churn was another (for newspapers).

And for a lot of people, longing for a time long gone is more comfortable, and easier, and more profitable in the selfish sense than reducing salary down to a dollar and going for broke to change. It’s much easier to keep the cow alive and fed than to kill it. Killing it is sad, scary and irreversible.

But die it must. And it will be a freeing day once it happens. The music industry won’t be the same and it won’t be as big. Many other sacred cows — label imprints, multiple subsidiary companies with independent staffs, multiple offices, separate A&R staffs, to name but a few — might die. But it will be an industry, and a business and revert back to being about talent and artistry instead of fear. About discovery and passion rather than past tense myopia. An actual business rather than a hollow nostalgic simulation.

I remember vividly the promise that the first CD I bought contained. I remember the metal finish on my Sony Discman, the accouterment products I bought to maintain my CD library. And I remember the thrill, just five years ago of seeing my name in the liner notes of a CD I worked on, of getting the first box of CD’s of a new release in the  WEA box and the thrill of Soundscan on Wednesday as a measure of our success as a company.

I will mourn the shiny disk, but celebrate the elevation and freeing of what it contains when it dies.

Last week marked  the release of an album I have been associated with in some form for two years now. That doesn’t mean that I had anything to do with its creation, just that I was associated with it. To that regard, I was there for mixing, marketing and release. The record is from a group of people collectively known as R.E.M.

I predict it is the last “Album” they will release.

In fact, I predict that 2011 is the last year of the Album (capital A).

In the press right now, Michael Stipe is talking about the 12 videos (or films) he is having made for the record, one per song. In his press quotes he describes the videos as representing to him the concept of what an album is and could be in the 21st century. During recording, he and I spoke somewhat about the nature of what it means to make a “record” and what that entails. As part of this discussion, and thinking about ideas for what we could do to break the mold (the video project, an app, something on the web), I started outlining the evolution of what I considered an album since I started buying them.

Chronologically:

R.E.M. – Green: the first CD that I ever purchased. It was mystery, and it represented things I hadn’t heard mixed with things I had (Stand, Pop Song ’89). My exposure to the band was through MTV and this record, and various articles. The visual identity of the band was defined by the art which carried over to the videos (black and white) and stage performance (yellow, orange, Michael’s awful hair cut).

R.E.M. – Out of Time / Automatic for the People: The first time the introduction to the record was visual. In the case of Out of Time, the “Losing My Religion” video, which I think got as much airplay for the WTF factor as it did because it was awesome. Automatic for the People: introduced through a teaser on MTV before the video music awards in 1992. 15 seconds of “Drive,” with the video of Michael crowd surfing.

R.E.M. Monster – A piece in 1993 that was about what R.E.M. was up to (in LA, recording). Then Michael popped into AOL to chat with fans. The first video/audio was again an MTV teaser, this time of “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” This record was as much about the “package” of the band, the message, the identity as it was the music. Somehow the record came to be defined as about sex, sexuality, gender bending and such rather than what it really was about, revealed in the alternate title “Yes, I am Fucking With You”

And so on.

As each Album progressed, the things that defined it started becoming external to the music. This was driven in part by MTV and the press, but also in part by the band and their willingness to treat the concept of an Album as also a chance for rebranding. The hint of what was to come was in Michael’s visit to AOL. The real thing started bleeding through.

Every record since has gone on this trajectory: the music sitting along side, and sometimes behind the concept. Always informing, but less as the center.

This leads me to the now. I worked on five albums for R.E.M. at Warner Bros Records. In the course of this here is how I now define an Album (capital A):

• Branding: an album serves as a tent pole around which to rebrand a band. Logos, type faces, color, visual identites. This also applies to non-visual things such as: message, statement, platform, etc.
• Visuals: both with and without music, related closely to branding
• The Hook: something that serves as the tweet worthy summation of what this Album is aiming at
• The Angle: a unique method or action which serves as an easy method for someone to write about the record
• The Timeline: the sequence of events and windowing of releases culminating to…
• The Release: Not the end game, but rather a stop along the way
• The Music: Can’t forget about this? Or can you?

The last part, “The Music” is broken down into:

• Mainline Release: the 12 or so songs that make up the bundle known as The Record
• The Primary Record: the default release of those 12 or so songs
• The Auxiliary Music: everything outside of those 12 songs: b-sides, demos, live tracks, etc. They contribute to…
• The Premium Record: bundling of other content to justify higher price points

Along side this are other types of auxiliary content:

• The Videos: music videos and lyric videos
• Auxiliary Visuals: Interviews, EPK, Live in Studio footage.
• Photos: Photos held as exclusives and non-exclusives. Dolled out like Pokemon cards
• Art: The high res complete album art, as well as the visual “stems” to make other art pieces (banners, IAD ad units, etc)
• Style Guide: colors, type faces and approved look/feels

And then the releases:

• Standard Physical – the main release, eco-pack, jewel case or digipack
• Premium Package (Physical) – what TopSpin specializes in marketing
• Standard Digital – The 9.99 on iTunes release
• Premium Digital – The 14.99 on iTunes, uses elements of auxiliary content
• Retail Partner Release – Starbucks, Best Buy, Target?
• Direct to Consumer Release – optional, and getting more rare. Usually a step up from the Premium Package (Physical)
• Singles – mostly for international markets
• App – sometimes, album-as-app hasn’t caught on too well yet

OK then. That is a lot that constitutes an “Album.”

In fact, try to find the typical definition of an album in that mix? Is it the 12 song release? Or the 16? Physical or digital? Stream or paid download?

Was it released when all tracks were to market (one week prior to release), when the album was off security (and therefore leaked) or when it was on store shelves?

What do you review as the album? What figure attached to these do you use to judge success? Soundscan? Streams? Twitter mentions?

I posit that we are in a post album universe. The Album itself is anachronistic and has evolved into a place where it is a tent pole for cyclic branding rather than an encapsulated piece of art. Some bands might choose to keep the album as an atomic entity (ie, Radiohead), but to me it almost seems anachronistic. Ultimately, my view is that bands need to take the concept of an album and move toward the concept of a Release, in the software sense.

In that case, here are my rules for a Release:

• Announce the release when it is ready to ship. Lead times should be at most 4 weeks from announcement to “in hands”
• Self-direct all publicity and promotion. Own the visual language/identity, own the messaging.
• Fans matter more than radio stations, website exclusives, etc. Giving a video to the NY Times ahead of your own YouTube won’t get you a good review: don’t do it.
• Hear it and buy it: don’t put anything up to hear, watch or experience if it can’t be purchased. Reward loyalty for your fans through exclusives.
• Make your fans product evangelists. Everyone wants an iPad because everyone they know wants one or has one. Make your release so amazing that you want to tell the world about it.
• Own your press: disintermediate, be selective with interviews and use the channels at your disposal (video, twitter, etc)
• Make it an event. Time it properly, make all messaging unified and coordinated.
• Let the Release define itself: if you can’t summarize it in one sentence, keep winnowing it down until you can. It might be an app, a collection of songs, a video album, etc. Study this page.

And of course, make something of quality. Strive for perfection down to the pixel level for visuals, and timbre level for audio. Don’t let “well enough” suffice.

Every release might be your last, and in the best case scenario could define the rest of your career and be seen as a high watermark for everything you do. Treat it as such.

It would have been a very nice month to be off grid to a degree, and disconnected. Except I was not off grid and disconnected. I was hyper connected, very much on grid and mostly exiting the somnambulant stupor I felt I was under for the last bit of while.

I do miss Warner. I miss my office, the building, working next to legends like Lenny Waronker and being around music all day. But being outside of the building has been interesting as well.

A lot of the sentiment I’ve been living under for the past few years has been based on fear. Things slipping through fingers never to be returned. What I found leaving however is that while things slipped through fingers, they didn’t fall to the ground. A whole other ecosystem of hands was there to catch it.

The music business didn’t die. And it isn’t dying. I argue that the human race will have to die before an industry around music fully succumbs. It is changing. Shrinking, contracting and expanding. It is also diversifying and competing for attention and dollars with ecosystems and markets that weren’t even imaginable five years ago. Where one dollar might have gone toward a record before, it is now split between entertainment bills, ad-hoc entertainment, subscriptions and the increased cost of providing us the unencumbered connectivity and freedom brought by devices like iPhones.

When I was younger, even ten years ago, I spent money on my cell phone bill, my Internet bill and gas. Now I have my XBox membership, Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, iTunes apps and music, iTunes video rentals, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Github, 37 Signals, Rackspace Cloud servers, etc. Life takes more care and feeding. And substantially more recurring billing.

This might be deemed a “first world problem” and to an extent that is correct. We are a first world society which extends to that which provides us leisure enjoyment. And to that end, the amount of dollars I comparatively allocate toward recorded music has shrunk as my time has been subdivided by the ramifications of technological progress.

That is all well and good you might say, but the industry didn’t keep pace. To that I say: yes, it didn’t. But, could it? When things become successes, or industries normalize around something (ie, iTunes, Amazon, Facebook), we all become retroactive hockey puck prognosticators. We knew it would be successful, or it wouldn’t be.

To that end:

Yahoo, Microsoft, MSN, Google, AOL, eBay, MapQuest, Amazon, Real and MySpace.

The top 10 websites from 2006 by traffic and audience reach.

Markets move in chaotic fashion. Markets around technology even more so. I lived through the deaths of mediums, and contributed to some. I was working in newspapers in 1996, and saw Craigslist as a potential threat. Others did too. The ones that mattered didn’t. But it remains hard to change large businesses so fundamentally with such frequency and not have it fall apart.

Back to the music business. I still contend that the business didn’t die, because there remains business around that data which in the end is represented as music. When we reduce it all back to core fundamentals: music is the artistic output of noise distilled into data and recombined into artistic representations of what was distilled. The onus of representation used to be on the supply chain monopoly, but now is on the user. The fan.

This was scary for some. And liberating for others.

In the past year I’ve seen the space around music/data/representation go from a very “celebrity” driven culture around marketing to one more pure in its effort to remove distance between those that create and those that enjoy. Where once it was MySpace page design, it now had become TopSpin or open source tools for artist sites. Widgets became Soundcloud, collaboration and community around synchronous enjoyment of music. The DIY model came back with MobileRoadie, Songkick, Soundcloud and others. A whole ecosystem has emerged around being a fan, being a musician, being a band, and hell, being on a major label even.

What is exciting for me personally, as I’m ending my first month away (but not away) is that for many years the music business had a “oh, those kids!” attitude toward the startup community. The divide was bridged by few, but diligent people in the business (ie, Robin Bechtel, Rio Caraeff, EMI’s digital team, E-Labs at Universal, the WMG/WBR Tech department), but the ecosystems didn’t commingle. The participation was on the API key level, but API keys didn’t extend to lawyers and litigators.

But I can see now an ecosystem starting to form that could potentially be as strong as those around SaaS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. A day, hopefully where licensing content is as simple as API key and a credit card. Interoperability of things like playlisting. And hell, maybe some standards.

It is an exciting time to be in the music business. Just not if you were once self defined as in the Business of Music.

Oh, and for those wondering “where to next,” I don’t know yet. I will soon I’m sure.