{"id":2872,"date":"2010-05-04T18:49:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T02:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=2872"},"modified":"2010-05-04T19:04:43","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T03:04:43","slug":"quote-of-the-day-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2010\/05\/04\/quote-of-the-day-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Quote Of The Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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"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."<\/p>\n

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi is one of the four founders of Pirate Bay.
Pirate Bay co-founder hopes it will die<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Paying to get people to listen?\u00c2\u00a0 Aren’t we just about there?<\/p>\n

Oh, don’t dismiss the comment because of the guy’s background.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about it.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve got more music than time.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s all on demand.\u00c2\u00a0 How are you ever going to get someone to listen to your song?<\/p>\n

Or, to flip the equation over, when do you start charging in the food chain?<\/p>\n

It seems that recorded music must be free until it’s not.<\/p>\n

No, let me make that clearer.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And then STILL most people don’t want to pay.<\/p>\n

And this is not going to change.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, we can rope everybody into a subscription and divide the proceeds, whether it be voluntary or involuntary (baked into an\u00c2\u00a0 ISP or mobile contract), but still, it’s almost impossible to get someone to listen to your song.<\/p>\n

In the old days, we tuned into radio just to hear music.\u00c2\u00a0 Now many people don’t even bother.\u00c2\u00a0 And, as the audience ages, music radio will mean less and less.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to be over the age of 25 in order to have grown up with good radio, arguably older.\u00c2\u00a0 Today’s teens have no allegiance to radio, it’s a dying medium.\u00c2\u00a0 Sit on your ass and wait to hear the one song you want?\u00c2\u00a0 While jive deejays and commercials interrupt the tunes?\u00c2\u00a0 That model is dying.<\/p>\n

We live in an on demand world.<\/p>\n

And what is it that people demand?<\/p>\n

What they already know.\u00c2\u00a0 Or what friends tell them to check out.<\/p>\n

And the concept of repetition is passe.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

So if you’re a newbie act, you’ve got to stop bitching about getting paid.\u00c2\u00a0 Right now.\u00c2\u00a0 And you’ve got to figure out how to get people to listen.\u00c2\u00a0 And dunning them with unwanted e-mails, harassing them doesn’t work at all, it just pisses people off.\u00c2\u00a0 So your only choice is to make music that sells itself.<\/p>\n

And that’s really good music.<\/p>\n

For a long time, Google didn’t even advertise, the service sold itself, via word of mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 Is your music as good as Google?<\/p>\n

In other words, in an era where there’s more music than ever, the bar is higher than ever before!\u00c2\u00a0 What made it in the pre-Internet era would probably languish today.\u00c2\u00a0 In the old days, with enough repetition, with so few tunes being exposed, mediocre music could triumph.\u00c2\u00a0 No longer.\u00c2\u00a0 Now it’s got to be exquisite!\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

This is a complete inversion.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the opposite of the Long Tail.<\/p>\n

The Long Tail is important because it delineates the flattening of distribution, it speaks of availability, but it doesn’t create mass.\u00c2\u00a0 Now your chum in a faraway state can log on to iTunes and buy your track, but that doesn’t mean anybody else will.<\/p>\n

So how long are you willing to slug it out?\u00c2\u00a0 Are you willing to forgo law school, marriage and health insurance to make it?\u00c2\u00a0 Are you willing to take your guitar to the bathroom like Duane Allman?\u00c2\u00a0 Are you willing to admit to yourself that you’re not good enough yet?<\/p>\n

We all know great when we hear it.<\/p>\n

There’s less great than ever before.<\/p>\n

There’s tons of mediocre.<\/p>\n

But we no longer care about mediocre.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re at an endless smorgasbord where we can cherry-pick the best items, and don’t even have to pay for them.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t complain, this is reality.\u00c2\u00a0 You just can’t sell crap anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s almost impossible to sell good.\u00c2\u00a0 And even if you’ve got incredible, you might have to pay people to listen at first.\u00c2\u00a0 Whether it be with free food at a gig, never mind free admission, free beer…<\/p>\n

In other words, we live in a topsy-turvy world.\u00c2\u00a0 The consumer is now the desirable item, not the act.\u00c2\u00a0 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?\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve got plenty of music, but they’re not making any more time.<\/p>\n

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"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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Kk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2872"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2875,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2872\/revisions\/2875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}