"The problem with music today is not how much is one song, we have so much we can’t choose from it. Maybe I should get paid to listen to one song, there are so many things that’s wrong with today’s model and needs to change."

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi is one of the four founders of Pirate Bay.
Pirate Bay co-founder hopes it will die

Paying to get people to listen?  Aren’t we just about there?

Oh, don’t dismiss the comment because of the guy’s background.  Think about it.  We’ve got more music than time.  And it’s all on demand.  How are you ever going to get someone to listen to your song?

Or, to flip the equation over, when do you start charging in the food chain?

It seems that recorded music must be free until it’s not.

No, let me make that clearer.  People may buy a CD as a souvenir at a gig, especially of an unknown artist, but it seems most people don’t want to pay until you’re famous.  And then STILL most people don’t want to pay.

And this is not going to change.  Sure, we can rope everybody into a subscription and divide the proceeds, whether it be voluntary or involuntary (baked into an  ISP or mobile contract), but still, it’s almost impossible to get someone to listen to your song.

In the old days, we tuned into radio just to hear music.  Now many people don’t even bother.  And, as the audience ages, music radio will mean less and less.  You’ve got to be over the age of 25 in order to have grown up with good radio, arguably older.  Today’s teens have no allegiance to radio, it’s a dying medium.  Sit on your ass and wait to hear the one song you want?  While jive deejays and commercials interrupt the tunes?  That model is dying.

We live in an on demand world.

And what is it that people demand?

What they already know.  Or what friends tell them to check out.

And the concept of repetition is passe.  If someone doesn’t like your music the first time through, they don’t give it another chance, there’s a plethora of stuff they prefer instead.

So if you’re a newbie act, you’ve got to stop bitching about getting paid.  Right now.  And you’ve got to figure out how to get people to listen.  And dunning them with unwanted e-mails, harassing them doesn’t work at all, it just pisses people off.  So your only choice is to make music that sells itself.

And that’s really good music.

For a long time, Google didn’t even advertise, the service sold itself, via word of mouth.  Is your music as good as Google?

In other words, in an era where there’s more music than ever, the bar is higher than ever before!  What made it in the pre-Internet era would probably languish today.  In the old days, with enough repetition, with so few tunes being exposed, mediocre music could triumph.  No longer.  Now it’s got to be exquisite!  You can make a tune in a day, and put it up online, but chances are you’ve got to work for years before you can create something good enough to generate word of mouth.

This is a complete inversion.  This is the opposite of the Long Tail.

The Long Tail is important because it delineates the flattening of distribution, it speaks of availability, but it doesn’t create mass.  Now your chum in a faraway state can log on to iTunes and buy your track, but that doesn’t mean anybody else will.

So how long are you willing to slug it out?  Are you willing to forgo law school, marriage and health insurance to make it?  Are you willing to take your guitar to the bathroom like Duane Allman?  Are you willing to admit to yourself that you’re not good enough yet?

We all know great when we hear it.

There’s less great than ever before.

There’s tons of mediocre.

But we no longer care about mediocre.  We’re at an endless smorgasbord where we can cherry-pick the best items, and don’t even have to pay for them.  Don’t complain, this is reality.  You just can’t sell crap anymore.  It’s almost impossible to sell good.  And even if you’ve got incredible, you might have to pay people to listen at first.  Whether it be with free food at a gig, never mind free admission, free beer…

In other words, we live in a topsy-turvy world.  The consumer is now the desirable item, not the act.  How much are you willing to pay, what shenanigans are you willing to employ to buy the rare commodity he’s got to sell, time?  We’ve got plenty of music, but they’re not making any more time.