They didn’t care about music.

We’re in the tech era. But what they don’t tell you is one day it’s gonna run out of gas, it will be replaced by something heretofore unseen, dominated by nerds who were poor and got no attention and will suddenly rule the earth. Kind of like how the techies replaced the musicians.

Last night I watched the film “Downloaded,” the story of Napster. Which seems like ancient history, even though it occurred little over a decade ago. But what would stun the music execs if they pulled their heads out of their rear ends is that their audience, today’s teens, never knew any different, the free music/YouTube/Spotify/digital world is all they’ve ever experienced, and despite inane protestations from the boomer-driven media that vinyl is making a comeback, akin to stating that Model T’s are replacing Teslas, the past is never ever gonna return.

Sure, Shawn Fanning wanted free music, prior to his app you could never afford everything, certainly not if you were a college student, but what motivated him even more was the challenges, and the riches, yes, Shawn Fanning wanted to be rich and famous and if you look back at the turn of the century landscape you can see that he’s only slightly less known than Eminem and Justin Timberlake. A youngster watching this documentary would wonder who in the hell Fred Durst was.

So that’s not much different from musicians, the desire to be rich and famous, it’s just that Fanning achieved his goal and most musicians do not, what happened here?

Fanning knew it was about the code, that marketing came second, and he knew that the essence of virality was the wow factor, something absent from almost all music today.

In other words, music’s heyday is done, it’s a backwater.

Send me hate mail! Click away! Tweet that I’m an idiot. But the truth is Shawn Fanning was testing limits and musicians are not.

There, I said it. Shawn Fanning wanted to change the world, musicians just want to sit around and complain how nobody is listening, and if someone is, how they can’t get paid.

You see music is bankrupt. Not financially, but emotionally, creatively.

Oh, don’t e-mail me the exceptions. Certainly don’t tell me about your band of shoegazing white boys who can’t sing, or the wannabe rappers going on about drinking, drugging and driving. Where’s the mass appeal in that?

Then again, the masses never know what they want, they arrive late. It starts with early adopters. Who glom on to something so damn cool they have to tell everybody about it.

Napster was that cool. Facebook and Twitter in the beginning. Music?

The difference between Facebook and Twitter and music is the former are built upon the public’s information, without it they’re nothing, whereas music stands alone, if anything, the public gazes in adulation. Same deal with Apple. The product is tangible, not elusive, instead of chasing Wall Street dreams Apple is actually making stuff, that you can use to your advantage. So when you tell me how many Facebook friends and Twitter followers you’ve got I’m not impressed, I want to hear your music, and I want it to challenge and elate me all at the same time.

This is why Jay-Z screwed up. He subjugated the music to the tech, turning it into a data-mining expedition along the way. Yes, to unlock the lyrics from the Samsung app you’ve got to tweet that you’re doing so. This isn’t about music but commerce, and that’s what’s been the problem ever since…Napster eviscerated the music business.

Yes, feel triumphant RIAA, you killed Napster. But you also forced tons of music previously buried, unheard, from the Internet.

That was Napster’s magic, the unearthing of live and rare tracks. This was healthy for both the artists and the music business. Because it got people excited about music, they wanted to hear this stuff, not the authorized pap put out by self-satisfied stars. Yes, we want to hear the work tapes, the unfinished version, that’s how dedicated we are. New groups get this, they post rehearsal tapes on YouTube, but the problem is…there’s nothing so cutting edge we need to hear it. Is “Blurred Lines” that good without the video? As for Justin Timberlake putting boobies in his new clip… Isn’t that like trying to replicate the name your own price paradigm employed by Radiohead, which no one ever did?

Then again, I dare you to name two tracks from “In Rainbows.” Radiohead’s breakthrough was “OK Computer,” since then?

Used to be music was a plethora of breakthroughs, before MTV made it about image more than sound and the CD was so expensive money rained down on record companies. Now everybody’s about the money and there just isn’t enough in music, which is why Bono is a VC and all the managers have tech investments.

But the techies knew the riches came last. At least the old school ones. They were mesmerized by the problem. That was the genius of Steve Wozniak, without him, Steve Jobs had no product to sell. Woz could solve the unsolvable overnight. Kind of like writing a hit song in ten minutes. But today a hit song is written in a camp and massaged by a ton of producers, the music’s got no soul, and that’s why it doesn’t resonate.

Sure, there are occasional hits. But instead of recording another one this good, the artists make albums which no one wants to hear. We need another “Call Me Maybe,” not nine more B grade versions.

Isn’t it funny in tech the apps have to be totally usable, without glitches, but in music everybody complains the public doesn’t want to listen to substandard music ad infinitum, especially when the greats of history are right next door.

Forget Doug Morris. Forget the labels. Their hearts are not in the right place. They’re first and foremost about money, they’re only interested in that which will sell, tonnage, instantly. Tech takes years to reach critical mass.

Until today. Yup, we’re back in the dotcom era in tech. Everybody wants an instant hit. And what’s great about the techies is they’re not about music, only money, which leaves the playing field completely open to musicians…who have fumbled the ball.

The goal is not to be an overnight success. The goal is not to sell out. The goal is to establish a career, that goes on for decades. It requires years and years of woodshedding, developing your skills to the point where you can find your voice. And then refining said voice.

In other words, you wouldn’t expect a monkey to type “War and Peace” in his first sit-down with a typewriter and very few people know who they want to be when they’re ten.

You’ve got the tools, but none of the inspiration. Leaders in tech are few and far between. Steve Jobs killed the floppy, the record labels are still invested in the CD.

How can you create something so interesting, so riveting, that we’ll all pay attention?

That’s what “Gangnam Style” was all about. Unfortunately, it was the MTV paradigm replicated in cyberspace, it was not about the music but the visuals.

But music is really damn hard to do.

And so is coding, building a great app.

The key is to be so skilled, so versed in the basics, that you’re open to inspiration.

But today anybody with any skill is doing it the corporate way, playing to an ever shrinking Top Forty audience.

In the wake of income inequality and the focus on wealth, nobody wants to take the road less taken in the pursuit of genius. Oh, some say they do, but then they don’t stop imploring us to pay attention.

That’s what you hear again and again. It takes money and marketing to make a hit.

Hogwash.

It only takes music.

There are very few great things in this life. And if you find one, you tell everybody you know.

Tell me the track in your library that will blow the minds of two hundred million Americans. It’s not Rihanna, it’s none of the usual suspects, but it was the Beatles, who were fresh and new and different. And if you asked the Beatles back in Hamburg if they were gonna conquer the world, they’d say they were honing their chops, getting laid and avoiding day jobs.

You’ve got to get on the road to get to the destination. You cannot travel by thinking about it.

We need a reset in the music business. We need it to be about the tunes, we need to get rid of the corporations, players need to believe in themselves.

And take us on a heretofore unseen journey.

Not the one we’ve been on again and again and again.

It’s toast. Over. Done. History. Soon to be as behind the curve as Facebook, someday completely forgotten like Friendster.

Huh?

It’s the cacophony.

You see there are too many people on the service. As a result, very few are heard. It’s happened over the past six months, tweeting is like a stone in a waterfall, or more accurately, pissing in the wind. In other words, if you tweet and nobody reads it have you wasted your time?

Today Rick Warren tweeted something I wrote. He’s got in excess of a million followers. The fact that I can reach him stuns me. But despite his only tweeting twice since then, the retweets have not gone nuclear. Oh, there are plenty, a double digit number, nineteen to be exact, but if it had been six months ago, I’d be a hero at the Saddleback Church.

But now…

Twitter is becoming just like the rest of the world, a haven of winners and losers. Either you’re a star with an eight digit following and people are interested in what you have to say or…you’re ignored.

Interestingly, those in demand, those followed, those who have their words eaten up are musicians, if they’d only realize their power and stop selling out to the man and focus on the music itself, unlike Jay-Z.

But musicians don’t have to tweet to get their story across… Twitter is not the only platform that allows them to do this.

You see everybody wants to be a star and nobody’s got time to follow a million people. Just can’t be done. Furthermore, we don’t even want to.

Everything you hear is wrong. All this hogwash about algorithms and recommendations. Have you experienced Spotify’s new homepage? Right now, it says if I like Michael Bolton to check out Shania Twain. Isn’t that like saying if you like Cliff Richard to check out Loretta Lynn?

Yes, Spotify’s new service is laughable. Because Spotify doesn’t care about music, but money.

And the founders of Twitter don’t care about communication, but cash.

And the public is not beholden to any of these services. Which is why the story of the Internet is a few services that stick and a ton that disappear.

Why is this?

It turns out services are like bands. There are a few superstars and a ton of one hit wonders. And why no one else can see this is beyond me.

I’ve got 50,000+ Twitter followers. But I can send an e-mail covering the same stuff I tweeted about and the response can be deafening, even though on Twitter nothing happened.

Which is kind of why you see the tweets of all the famous people falling off.

Yes, someone goes on Twitter, tweets up a storm, and then…if they don’t stop completely, their number of tweets drops dramatically.

So it turns out we all want to communicate, we all want to connect, but we are endless grazers in the digital domain, making stars of services like turntable.fm and then discarding them seemingly overnight.

We want trusted filters. And we don’t want thousands of them, just a handful.

And those who will be trusted will not be those with an engineering degree, but a humanities degree.

Yes, the stars of tomorrow will be thinkers. Who will build their followings, which will migrate from platform to platform. Just like you discarded your Palm for your BlackBerry for your iPhone…you’re gonna abandon platforms continuously, until it’s no longer about platforms but content.

In other words, you don’t have to be on Tumblr or Pinterest, you just need a passing interest, a basic familiarity with Twitter, because they’re just way stations, this year’s “Call Me Maybe.” Google search is Elton John, but just like Elton can’t get on Top Forty radio anymore, there’s a good chance Google search will be superseded, since it’s a much more useful desktop app than mobile one.

There must be a reason for someone to follow you, there must be something interesting about what you say or do. And that’s got nothing to do with the platform and everything to do with who you are.

We are in an era of chaos. But stability is right around the corner. Just like Google search replaced the much less useful AltaVista and HotBot and so many other engines, this era of a million bands with few followers is going to draw to a close. Because just like on Twitter, there’s too much, the barrier to entry is too low, humans require order.

If you think you can go from zero to hero with little musical talent, you probably believe having a lot of MySpace friends made a difference when everybody jumped to Facebook!

It’s about the individual.

And your individuality is everything. Which is why Apple can create commercials in the style of Steve Jobs but they can positively suck. Because it’s not about the penumbra, but the zeitgeist. I mean what do those new Apple ads say? I can’t decipher it, and seemingly no one else cares.

So tweet away. Until you realize no one’s reading.

Then stop, read a book, become a three-dimensional person, have something to say…

And start over.

1. Have children. The rest of life is b.s., all the achievement and the wealth. At the core, we’re just animals, looking for love and inspiration. No one will be remembered.

2. The older you get, the wiser you are, but with baby boomers trying to emulate the young, ageism is rampant in America. If only oldsters would own their wisdom. But then they’d have to own the lines in their faces and their lumpy bodies.

3. Obesity kills. You can ignore Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston, the skinny-minnies, the fat police, the people who want you to make you feel bad so they can feel better. But the health consequences of excess weight are undeniable. Blame computers, blame the government, blame food producers, but we need a national campaign to get everybody up and moving, for their own benefit.

4. Exercise makes you feel better. Don’t go run a mile if you’ve been on the couch, work your way up and find something you enjoy, otherwise you’ll never continue it. But exercise gives you both an endorphin rush and perspective, it’s a great respite from your regular life.

5. Travel gives you perspective. Sure, it can also be enjoyable, but one problem we have in the U.S. is few have been anywhere else. You may rail against the Canadian health system, but all my buddies up there are lovin’ it.

6. Don’t be afraid to complain. It’s the upbeat nitwits that bother me most. Woody Allen famously said life is about the horrible and the miserable, we’re all trying to get along, if you keep telling me your life is great and you’ve got no problems, I’m gonna tune out.

7. College isn’t about what you learn in class, but what you learn outside of it.

8. Great teachers are few and far between.

9. Pursue your interests. As soon as somebody says you’re spending too much time on something, you’re on the right track.

10. People love story. That’s the essence of novels and TV and movies. That’s why reality TV shows have scriptwriters.

11. It’s more fun to see a movie in a theatre, but it’s an untenable proposition because everybody there thinks they’re entitled to talk and text.

12. There’s more insight and truth in the lyrics of Joni Mitchell than there is on the best of TV channels, even HBO.

13. If you need a new car to feel good about yourself, you need a psychiatrist more.

14. Phony rules in America. Everybody’s trying to put up a front to please someone else. But behind closed doors this is never true. Politics, business…ehh. If only they ran more like the home.

15. People can’t keep secrets. Tell one person, you’ve told them all.

16. Satisfaction is unexpected. In other words, it’s when you’re driving down the highway or walking down the avenue that you’ll suddenly realize you love your life.

17. If you want to feel good, help another person. Solving someone’s computer problem gives me more satisfaction than just about anything.

18. Everybody says they want shorter, but what they really want is something that rivets them, they’ve got endless time for great.

19. People don’t know they’re being judged by the spelling mistakes.

20. Change is hard, but always worthwhile. In other words, the cliche that after being fired or dumped you’re gonna end up in a better place is true. But what they don’t tell you is how long it’s gonna take to get to the other side.

21. People need to put you down to feel good about themselves, it’s a demonstration of insecurity and weakness.

22. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know something or need help. This draws others to you.

23. The high of success is very brief, it fades and then…what are you gonna do next?

24. When you’re young, you want to be a child star on television. When you’re old, you’d never let your kids be on TV.

25. A tan is cool when you’re young, bogus when you’re old. That’s the first sign of aging, the toll the sun has taken on the skin, if only young people knew this.

26. When you’re in college you think you know everything. The older you get, the less you think you know, even though you know tons more than the youth.

27. Persistence and perseverance are the key to life. If you give up when it gets hard, you will accomplish little, you’ll get nowhere.

28. Relationships are hard. Anybody who tells you they’re easy is lying or has a bad one.

29. If a couple tells you they never argue, they’re headed for divorce. It just means one person is not speaking their truth, and when they do…

30. The older you get, the less susceptible you are to hype. One time only events…seem to happen all the time.

I want you to watch this clip, wherein Nile Rodgers says his music had to be instantly accessible, it had to make the dancers move their bodies INSTANTLY!

That’s one of the many things I hate about complainers today, that I need to give them more time. Let me ask you, are they making any more? Is there a bank I can go to? Because I’m challenged, there’s just not enough hours in the day to do everything I want. Maybe I need thirty, maybe I need thirty-six, maybe then I can pack in all the newspapers, the websites, the novels, the physical activity.

But NO! (Said like John Belushi…) You don’t want to hear what I have to say, you don’t want to think about me at all, you just want to pile drive me into submission, with your endless e-mails and tweets telling me to take an hour out of my day, if at all possible an hour every day for a week, to let your album sink into my brain.

Huh?

Are you NUTS?

Nile was a nobody. He’d go to clubs and wonder…what it would take to get noticed.

First he had to establish a relationship with the deejay.

Then he had to feed him something so infectious that not only would the deejay not lift the needle, but the dancers would throw their arms up in exultation.

Ergo, “Le Freak.” And “Good Times.” And Chic’s initial hit, “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah.)”

Do we rate Chic any lower because of the instant infectiousness of their tracks?

NO!

Listening doesn’t have to be difficult. Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, stuff you don’t get the first time through. But now, with so many options, people don’t endure that which is not pleasing, they move on, so if you think repetition is your friend, you’ve got none.

Or let’s look at “Let’s Dance.” Far from one of my favorite Bowie cuts, I will say you get it immediately.

Everybody wants more of our time, and we don’t want to give it to them!

I will not talk on the phone, absolutely not. Because you want to waste so much of my time. Making like we’re friends for twenty minutes before you ask for the favor I don’t want to give you.

But it’s not only me, it’s kids. Phone calls? Are you kidding me? Send a text! It’s cleaner, it’s faster, there’s no wasted time.

The basics never change. You’ve got to practice, be original and wait for your moment, when you have to deliver. And if you think that’s a TV slot…well, there was Susan Boyle who delivered once and became an international star overnight, but isn’t it interesting that the only thing we know about her is that performance, I challenge you to name one of her tunes… She’s a novelty, not an artist!

And isn’t it fascinating that we’ve got Justin Bieber backlash. His career is toast and R. Kelly keeps sailing along, despite his legal problems, because people believe he’s an artist. If you think the Biebs is an artist, you’re a fingerpainter.

“We were an R&B band that had figured out this jazzy-type of formula to present music that deejays could listen to one time, and play it, and that the people would hear it, one time, and respond.

And that’s how we crafted our records. You play it first time, you got ’em.”

Daft Punk | Random Access Memories | The Collaborators: Nile Rodgers

It’s incredibly easy.

But it’s incredibly hard.

You don’t need any money, you don’t need any of the trappings, from looks to Facebook friends to an uncle in the business, you’ve just got to have that one indelible cut, that makes us need to hear it more. Whether it be Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” or the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

It works in every genre of music. You’re enraptured by the sound of Jay-Z’s “Can I Get A…” and then the girls come in and your head starts to spin and you ask that classic question…HOW DID THEY COME UP WITH THIS!

From Frank Zappa to today, that’s the mark of a great artist, someone who leads us into the unknown who we can’t help but follow.

Yes, I’ve got all kinds of time for new and great.

But that’s not what’s on a TV game show.

That’s not what’s being played in your basement, loved by your parents and friends.

Rather it’s something transcendent, as Pete Townshend sang, one note, pure and easy.