What is all this stuff, who is using it, and ... WTF?! Where is the music?

 At the very end of this video about the whirlwind of tasks and services involved in managing an artist today, he hits it: build fans the old fashioned way - Direct Human Interaction.  It's that interaction that has been glossed over by the music industry.  The intrinsic value of how music makes people feel; of how we relate to one another.  The interactivity that some reach out for from artists like Imogen Heap.  But how do you squeeze a handshake or a smile into a plastic disc?

You don't.  You can't.  You shouldn't.  At least if you buy a tee shirt to support your favorite musician or band, you can wear it around and kind of adopt their image... it's sweet, but it's still not much of a sustaining relationship.

I heard someone reading a personals ad and they asked, "LTR?  What does that mean?"

Long Term Relationship.

All we've gotten from the consumer music world for the past twenty years have been one-night stands.  They don't even do "Where are they now?" on VH1 because... is VH1 even still on the air?  Where are *they* now?  The reason we don't hear about them is that there's no money to be made there anymore, so the investors have made channels like that almost irrelevant today.

Flashes in the pan are all we get.  Poof, and they're gone.  Because you can't fake long-term relationships and time is money, so by the transitive property, long-term relationships are expensive.  And major labels are corporations, not people.  They have to cut costs at every corner to maximize profits from a dying model, but they still need to exploit relationships... so they're like the worst kind of cheap date - thy ask you out and then expect you to pay for their meals and drinks.  Worse yet, they'll sue you if you don't.

Now... let's look at what it takes to make minimum wage in music today.  To make $1160/month an artist must (every month):

- sell 155 CDs on CDBaby
- sell 12,388 tracks on iTunes
- reach 880,000 plays on Rhapsody
- reach 4.5 million plays on Spotify

OR...

They can reach out and connect with 166 people in the entire world who think that they are worth supporting at an average of $7/month and out earn all of them, month after month.  Now, which seems realistically attainable?

The music industry is clearly dying, but music is doing great.  There's more of it and it's easier to distribute than ever before.  The conundrum has been, how do you get money from the fans who want to support the music they love directly to the musicians who make it in a way that empowers them to consistently make more of it?

Hint:  It's not in plastics.  It's in relationships.