The skies have cleared and it’s absolutely beautiful right now. Looking out the window I see the sun setting in the west, over a cluster of small ships. It’s exotic and intriguing, like Asia itself.

As for the first day of Music Matters… The best thing I heard came from Rob McDermott, manager of Linkin Park… He said "Where there’s artistry, there’s commerce!" Frustrated with the bitching of Calvin, the Warner guy in China, who he professed to love, Rob said they should package the album with the ticket, maybe include a t-shirt, that it was all about the consumer experience.

Actually, the big advertising guy said never to use that word. That we must refer to them as people. People who have contempt for us, trying to sell them shit they don’t want, pulling the wool over their eyes. He was like Seth Godin with an English accent. Expanding upon Bob Dylan’s old saw from the sixties, "There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" What is happening is the public is informed, only wants to hear from its peers and has an aversion to manipulation. Trying to sell the old way, trying to fake buzz in social networks, just won’t work, people are only listening to their buds.

Furthermore, this chap said that songs in ads benefit the composers/writers/performers more than the brands. That after the campaign has ended and time has gone by, the artist may get a bounce from a commercial, but the brand sinks back, there’s no lasting effect. This was perceived as heresy in the crowd. We’re entitled to our sponsorship dollars! But what if the big brands realize they’re not getting the worth of their expenditures? What if we have to rely on the music itself, and the bond with the fan?

Which is what Terry McBride was all about. My only problem with Terry is that the more you listen, you believe Nettwerk is a cult, that he’s purveying religion. But there are nuggets in his words. Most tellingly, he said that revenue from copyrights is at most twenty percent of an artist’s income. And, if this is the case, how bad is the problem of piracy? Shouldn’t the issue be addressed differently? How can we get the fan involved, and listen to him, to create new revenue opportunities.

Most fascinating story? Arista wanted to do a remix of a track from Sarah McLachlan’s Christmas album…and wanted to spend $30,000-$40,000 doing it. Rather than lay out the cash for an idea he thought specious, Terry released the naked vocal track onto the Net and let people create mixes themselves. The result was tens of thousands of takes, and using social filtering, a winner was picked, the creator of which was paid a modest sum, and the end product was purveyed, successfully. Kind of like with Avril Lavigne t-shirts. He let the fans come up with the designs, and the end result? They outsold the ones Avril approved, the ones she liked. Begging the question, who is king, the label, the artist or the fan?

Terry knows it’s the fan. He knows to fight the fan is ridiculous. That as soon as the CD hits Wal-Mart, if not before, the music is free. You’ve got to add value. Now tracks are worth a nickel at most, since the theft rate online is twenty to one…

And Terry talked about research, how by killing Napster, we lost a chance to track what everybody wanted, how they behaved. He’s a believer in data.

And there I go again, singing Terry’s praises. It’s hard not to be convinced. He’s a salesman in the league of Steve Jobs.

But no matter how good your pitch, the product must be great. Which brings us to that four piece band from Ireland. That’s where we’re going tonight, for dinner with Paul McGuinness and John Kennedy.

And now the sun has sunk over the horizon, only a haze of light remains… It’s like being in Tahiti, yet the island isn’t deserted, but inhabited, by millions of people, executing the financial transactions of the new world, China, and its surroundings.

They don’t quite understand why we don’t come over here and get our piece. They think it’s because we aren’t willing to work, aren’t willing to make so little on our initial investment. They don’t know we’re ignorant. That we westerners, more specifically, we Americans, are caught up in a PerezHilton culture with a disinformation campaign equivalent to that of a Communist country perpetrated by the mainstream media. They don’t understand that we’re in disarray. That FM may be nascent in India, that most people may be watching television in black and white, but they’re on the upswing, whereas we’re living in chaos, oldsters clinging to the way it’s been, newbies looking for traction…what can I say, I’m stuck in the middle with you!