That’s what Seth Godin says.

Seth calls it an urge to be picked. I’ll call it an urge to be famous. And rich. With the belief that if you just put yourself in someone else’s hands, if you just get a little help, you’ll rise above the fray and become famous and be successful forever more.

But it just doesn’t happen that way anymore.

Everything starts from the bottom up. If you believe the opposite, you’re still living in the twentieth century.

So what you’ve got to do is woodshed and send your stuff to ten friends. And if they don’t tell others, if nothing happens, the problem is you.

Oh, I know you don’t want to hear this, you don’t want to self-examine, but your only other option is to get new friends or to struggle in oblivion. But to delusionally believe it’s about getting a big shot to push you…you’re wrong. That’s one of the reasons labels always ask young acts what they’ve got going on. They want to build on the fan base you’ve already established.

Seth says the key is to do work that matters, and to make enough money to survive doing it.

I know that’s not the modern paradigm, where everybody’s looking for world domination. But the question is, is that fulfilling?

Yes, I’ve changed topics. But that’s one thing that’s been left out of today’s discussion. I know plenty of people doing work I’d rather die than do. Like working in the Dakota oil fields. So you work like a dog, make money, ruin your relationship and..?

Now we need people to do menial jobs. But I don’t think those are the people reading this. You’re looking for something more. And yes, some people win the artistic lottery. But very few. If you want to survive, maybe you have to take your eyes off the prize. As far as getting picked, it happens long after you’ve done the work, when you’re no longer even trying.

Yes, the media has a herd mentality. You rise above the fray because your fan base can’t stop talking about you and suddenly everybody wants to write about you. That’s the story of electronic music in America. It’s not like there was a PR czar. As for the usual suspects…the major labels and Live Nation and AEG weren’t in it. No, the story of EDM grew as a result of the incredible success of the Electric Daisy Carnival, by selling tickets. If your ten friends tell ten more and it never stops…you’re gonna get a huge audience. That’s the story of the Dave Matthews Band, playing in a bar, opening for jam bands many have never heard of. But everybody exposed to the music told everybody else.

It’s kind of like mix tapes. They don’t write about them in mainstream media, but that’s where those who really care about hip-hop pay attention, and it’s from there that new rap stars are born.

But everybody wants a short-cut. Believing the game is rigged against them. That they just haven’t got enough money or any relatives in the business.

It might have been that way once.

But it’s not that way anymore.

You’ve got the means of production and distribution at your fingertips, they’re close to free. And if you’re not getting a reaction, if your friends are not spreading the word, the problem is you.

P.S. Seth also talks about being afraid. But it’s when you’re vulnerable and taking a risk that you truly get a chance that people will react. In other words if you’re self-censoring, you’re making a mistake. As for mistakes…you can always recover from them, especially early in the game. You can make more music, write more blog posts, this is what is called a “pivot” in the tech game. How will you know what works or what doesn’t if you do not play?

 “Seth Godin: The Art of Noticing and then Creating”
-you want the unedited version

What I like most is the tweet from MusicAlly:

RT @MusicAlly: Needless to say, Atoms for Peace albums still available to stream in full (unlicensed) on Grooveshark and YouTube

— Bob Lefsetz (@Lefsetz) July 15, 2013

What kind of crazy, fucked up world do we live in where artists are so ignorant, so behind the curve, so out of solutions that they rail against a platform that hasn’t gotten any traction anyway?

Streaming won. Kids watch music on YouTube. Over.

Furthermore, there’s no money in music for anyone but the owners of catalogs because individual acts just can’t get enough traction. We can ignore not only Rihanna, but Dave Grohl and Radiohead too. Oh, the fawning press makes it seem like these acts are important and universal, changing the face of American culture, but the truth is if you’ve heard all three, you’re part of a tiny minority paying attention, everybody else is salivating over new smartphones and the software they contain.

Yup, Steve Jobs kills the floppy, and Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich want to jet us back to the past.

Spotify gives 70% of the revenues to rightsholders. The exact same amount rendered by iTunes. What’s the problem? That they pay you over time instead of right now? Afraid that no one will listen to your music in the future? Then you’d better make it really damn good, or create tchotchkes people are dying to own, because the old slap together ten tracks to sell for ten bucks paradigm is so toast, it’s stale and in the garbage.

Once upon a time musicians used to lead. Now all they can say is GIVE ME BACK MY PAST! As for saving the future for the new artists… I’d feel better if the new artists created their own paradigm, but instead we’ve got wannabes too dumb to do anything for themselves. Want to neuter the power of the old gatekeepers, implore acts not to sign with majors. But no, Yorke and Godrich would rather rail against the present, unaware that it’s already history. Making Spotify the enemy is akin to the RIAA scapegoating Napster. What happened after they closed Napster? It got WORSE! There was  KaZaA and Limewire. Do Yorke and Godrich like Whac-A-Mole that much that they want to fire up the arcade when the game is just about worn out?

Yup, P2P theft is too much trouble. You know what made me stop stealing? Spotify. And for young kids, YouTube. The legal way is much more convenient. This was what was supposed to happen, this was the promise of tech, finally the rightsholders are ahead of the consumers, but in this case they’re ahead of the acts too!

How much money did it take to create the cell or cable systems. And with mobile phones, it took almost two decades for people to realize they had to have one. That’s progress. You invest now for rewards later. If you think record labels believe in this paradigm you believe Doug Morris owns Sony Music… But Doug’s just an employee inured to short term profits like the rest of the corporate titans. As for those vaunted new acts Yorke and Godrich are referencing…they want instant profits too! And are usually so bad they don’t deserve any attention.

The truth is, if you’re a superstar, there’s still plenty of money in music. And superstars are the future, because no one’s got time for any less. Just like there’s one iTunes Store, one Amazon and one Google, we don’t need a plethora of me-too acts, we just need excellence.

Don’t musicians get it? If you want to survive in the future, you need solutions.

Want a solution for recorded music? Create a site with everything and get everybody to pay. Cell phone companies don’t say you can’t call your grandma, but you can’t listen to AC/DC and the Beatles and now Atoms For Peace on Spotify. Metallica and the Eagles got the memo, they’re now living in the future, but the aforementioned trio and the rest of the Luddites, they believe if they hold their music back they can stem the tide of the future, the same way the lack of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles killed the iTunes Store. Huh? They put a dent in it not a whit!

Will Spotify win?

Who knows, Iovine’s MOG/Daisy may replace it. Or the interim might be iTunes Radio, with the public too cheap to pay for access for the moment. But the future is definitely not paying a bunch of money up front for songs you’ve never heard. Can’t get anybody but diehard fans to do that now. And only Yorke and Godrich’s diehard fans care about their misguided removal of their music from Spotify. Everybody else shrugs and moves right along, if the news even reaches them.

In Scandinavian countries the lion’s share of the revenue IS Spotify, IS streaming. There’s nowhere to buy a CD. Is that Spotify’s fault? Did Spotify kill the CD, the album and the record shop? No, the public did, by embracing new technology, and now they’ve all gone to streaming and the crybaby acts keep lamenting the passage of the past the same way buggy whip makers and typewriter constructors did and died.

To quote the great bard Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

What a difference a year makes.

Last year it was us versus them. This year…it’s every man for himself.

You remember 2012. When the Tea Party was battling the Democrats, when left wingers were scared out of their wits that automaton Mitt Romney would beat out Barack Obama for the Presidency. Now not only is that battle ancient history, we know it was irrelevant, because corporations run this country and the Supreme Court, installed for life, has been hijacked by a right wing majority and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it.

Have a different opinion? I couldn’t care less. Because opinions no longer matter. Now it’s about facts. Like how much money do you have and how much have I got. Did you get laid last night?

Yes, since the summer of 2012 hope has gone out the window, we’re no longer in it together, and one thing’s for damn sure, no one trusts television news.

All this b.s. about Fox and MSNBC. Neither covered Wendy Davis’s filibuster and that was ultimately irrelevant with Texas passing the bill anyway.

What is going on in America?

I’m tying to figure it out. And that seems to make me a party of one. Because everybody in mainstream media is so self-impressed, and myopic, I’m not sure they can even see the truth, never mind sacrifice themselves for it.

What we’ve got is a cable channel predicated on fantasy, with “Game Of Thrones” and “True Blood,” trying to be au courant and meaningful and missing the target by so wide a margin I’m not sure they know what the target is.

Something is changing in America. And it’s definitely not being televised.

What we’ve got is an incredible tumult, leaving everything up for grabs, and those with power and those who desire it are grasping at straws that will never stir the drink. They’re playing to each other instead of those with the power, the people.

We don’t trust NBC.

We don’t trust CNN.

We don’t trust Facebook.

We don’t trust Jay-Z.

Watching “Newsroom” tonight it’s clear they’re all in it for personal glory. And maybe that’s the ultimate point, that their hubris gets them into trouble, but why do we care to begin with?

Why should I care about your record? Because you made it? You’re just like Aaron Sorkin, so deep in your hole you’ve lost the plot.

It’s like we’re living in a post nuclear age, one of refugees, searching for sustenance. But all we’re fed is talking heads and advertisements for that which we cannot afford to buy or do not need. Will America right itself? Quite possibly. Will it be the land of the fifties and sixties, an egalitarian, socially mobile, near utopia? If you think so, you’re dreaming.

I don’t care what happened one or two years ago. Occupy Wall Street… That might as well be the “Macarena.” Goldman Sachs? No one thinks bankers will ever pay, that dream’s been forgotten, we saw the carnage, yet Matt Taibbi keeps writing about it and Aaron Sorkin’s making TV about it not realizing the problem isn’t education, but pessimism. We know the truth, we just don’t think we can do anything about it.

Change in America? It’ll happen the same way it did in the Middle East. With an unforeseen spark, a fruit vendor willing to sacrifice his life for injustice.

Sacrifice? Remember when young men went to Canada rather than participate in an unjust war within which they might get their ass shot off? Sacrifice today is when you forget to untag the photo on Facebook and you lose a job opportunity. As for Maggie being busted by a YouTube clip, this would never happen in real life, because no one’s that dumb! Is that how out of touch Aaron Sorkin is? That he doesn’t know how people really act?

When we get to the other side of this, people don’t realize it’s gonna be worse. All this hogwash about the opportunity on the Web? Oh, you can put your stuff up on Spotify and YouTube and tweet about it, but if you think anybody’s paying attention, you’re even more delusional than Sorkin. That’s the story of tomorrow, how everybody shrugs their shoulders and gives up and pledges fealty to the new gatekeepers, unbelievably powerful entities with all the eyeballs. Remember the old Internet, the nineties Internet, sans ads, where the worst thing you had to worry about was a pop-up advertisement? Today even the “New York Times” has full page ads covering its site. Advertising is so rampant online that this on demand world subjects us to more commercial messages than the old days of three TV channels and no remote control. The Web is all sell, all the time, and if you’re not tired of it, if you don’t think something’s rotten in America, then you’re profiting from it, big time, unlike the losers with Google ads on their sites earning bupkes.

It’s the Me Decade all over again. Remember Tom Wolfe’s era? When people had sixties hangover and focused on themselves, to the exclusion of everything else? Do you really expect me to care about these bozos on “Newsroom” taking themselves and their jobs so seriously? They’re laughable. I wouldn’t want to be them, the same way I wouldn’t want to be a banker, because I either want to be happy or do something that matters. And today no one wants to do something that matters, because they’re too busy trying to be rich.

Oh, there’s a patina of importance on “Newsroom,” but since we’re subjected to the real news 24/7, we have no trust for these self-promoters, not after we’ve experienced Judith Miller, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. We know it’s about the money. And if they weren’t making so much, if they weren’t invited to the right parties, they wouldn’t be in the business.

But the new gatekeepers will have it totally different. They’ll garner eyeballs through substance, not the smoke and mirrors and flash of today. And once they gain power, they’ll turn to the dark side, as the powerful always do.

Do you really expect NBC or CNN or Fox or MSNBC or any of the TV news outlets to matter in the future? They barely matter now!

And the truth about baby boomers is they don’t evolve, they pay lip service to the future and hang on to the past, riding the wave as long as they can until they cut out, swim to shore and start sipping pina coladas on the way to retirement.

The youth are inheriting the earth. It’s happening now. And they don’t believe in the old institutions. And they’re computer-literate in a way that the oldsters never will be. And they’re gonna build new institutions that will level those of the past.

But for now we’ve got to endure this inane chaos. Where those who don’t count, the baby boomers and their get rich quick children, are so busy amplifying their message that you can’t see the truth.

But the truth is we live in the age of the individual. That’s why you social network, to embellish your identity and feel good, how many friends have you got? You tweet the news so you can say you knew first, not because you really care. And just like Reagan channeled the discontent and swept into office upon it, a new leader, a new reality, a whole new paradigm is gonna emerge that will control us all, for better or worse, because we just can’t take this crazy myopic cash grab a minute longer.

Maybe it’s not the music’s fault.

Used to be you lay on your bed listening to music dreaming of a better life to come. One with friends, romance, all kinds of excitement.

Now you just log on to the Internet and hunt for these experiences. You know, the peak of a positive e-mail, a congratulatory tweet, a stimulating web page. The odds are low, but far from nonexistent if you participate. So you post, you give to get, this is the modern paradigm.

In other words, who’s got time for music that might be challenging, different, require more time to get into? And is the focus on live events their inherent transitory nature, is the fact you can make more money there than from records not a function of P2P thievery but a change in modern life?

No one asks questions anymore. Blame the educational system. Wherein the poor are passed through the most rudimentary of classes and the rich are prepared at prep school but abandon it all in search of cash, which is king in our society today. Did you read Amar Bose’s obituaries? You may pooh-pooh the quality of his speakers, but this guy refused to go public for fear of a board forcing him to compromise in the name of profits and said he had one house and one car and he didn’t need more money, he lived to think and invent.

Kind of like Douglas Rushkoff.

Last night I listened to his interview with Marc Maron on WTF and I found myself challenging all my preconceptions, gaining new insight into modern life, something that rarely happens in this sell or be sold society of today.

And that was one of Rushkoff’s points. That capitalists, corporations, have taken over the Internet, trying to replicate the pre-wired era, and the fit may be bad and the consequences may be worse.

Come on, you know what he’s talking about. The endless ads, the crazy self-promotion. Everybody’s trying to get attention, they want more, more, more, and there’s no time for the contemplated life, which is the essence of music. Unless it’s immediate, a one hit  wonder, driven by video, like PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” or wondrously infectious in its own right, like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” In other words, musicians have it right, they’re asking listeners to jet back to what once was, only listeners are having no part of it, if they’re listening at all. They’re too busy tweeting and Facebooking and…looking for that hit that only music could give them. Meanwhile, everybody in the industry, and the musicians themselves, is focused on money, something which the techies do so much better. Maybe they should step back and take the road less traveled.

That’s what Rushkoff is saying. He advocates unplugging, going face to face. And I get where he’s coming from, but I like being able to connect with so many online. Yet he makes the point…what is the point of connecting with your second grade buddy in cyberspace. After you get the hit of dopamine, do you really want to continue, how many relationships can you have, isn’t there a reason you grew up and moved on?

Rushkoff advocates local focus. In monetary exchange. In agriculture. He says the old worldwide money game no longer works. In other words, if you’re a hero in your hometown, playing your music at every social function, are you ahead of the game, far in front of your peers looking for world domination but not achieving it?

Come on. Jay-Z’s album has already been forgotten. And all we really remember about it was that he came up with a new way to make money. What has this got to do with music? And some say Kanye’s message on “Yeezus” is important, but without a hit, everyone’s focusing elsewhere. So what are the chances for you? Would the public like to spend time ferreting out greatness, unplugging from the web to spend time with albums, or is that a quaint notion discordant with the times, where everybody can get a bigger rush from a text?

I wish I could say Rushkoff is as good a writer as a talker, but I’m finding his book slow going, because he doesn’t understand the bedrock of writing is readability, it doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if people don’t want to read them, but he does bring up a good point. Few people I know talk about music, certainly not those uninvolved making and selling it. They’re hooked to the rush of their devices. They only have time for that which they can network online about, driving the blockbuster business.

It’s worth thinking about.

I am.

Amar Bose: “‘Company directors who pay themselves dividends get enjoyment out of the money, but I wouldn’t have that,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I’m a good person. I am just doing what I enjoy the most. I don’t want a second house, I have one car, and that’s enough. These things don’t give me pleasure, but thinking about great little ideas gives me real pleasure.'”
—Los Angeles Times

Amar Bose 2: “And by refusing to offer stock to the public, Dr. Bose was able to pursue risky long-term research, such as noise-canceling headphones and an innovative suspension system for cars, without the pressures of quarterly earnings announcements.”
—New York Times

Rushkoff On Maron

“Present Shock”