Don’t Be Like Canned Food

Gone are the days when musicians had to create products that take the shape of the medium on which they are delivered. (latest release from The Cranberries?)

Albums had to be:

• Cylinders = 2-4 min
• 78 = 3-5 min
• LP = 30 min
• CD = 80 min
• radio friendly = 3-4 min
• etc

Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind fame was the keynote speaker at the SanFran MusicTech conference this week. Jenkins proposed: “The album is an arbitrary concept. It’s not something that has to exist.” He sees new artistic freedom in being able to deliver songs singularly, with the option to package them later.

This may not be new news to anyone, but it is still a very relevant point for today’s musicians. In the same way artists are no longer confined to a delivery medium, they are no longer confined by a slow-moving, rigid, and mostly impermeable music business (with bad taste). Question what you have come to accept as the norm in the industry. As Peter Lubin said regarding major record labels, “…you should all turn your backs, and never pay them any mind, any more, ever again” (Artists House interview at Loyola University).

Stop thinking inside the box, or you will look like this:

The big whigs are out of touch with their customers. Todays’ artists need to take matters into their own hands because they are the closest to their audience and thus best able to serve them. And with so many new technologies today this is viable more than ever (if you have a well-thought out strategy).

However, the internet and digital technology has opened up the doors to every Joe Six Pack flooding the webs with his own terrible aluminum & gaseous compositions. (Music Industry 1962 vs 2006) It’s difficult to rise to the top when there is so much chatter.

Warren Buffet recently proposed in a television interview that there are three stages to good ideas

1. Innovation
2. Imitation
3. Idiots

And it doesn’t take too much imagination to apply this trajectory to everything that has happened in the music industry. Unfortunately, if you are frittering away your future on a friending frenzy (say it five times fast) on MySpace expecting to get noticed soon, you might be the idiot.

The music business is literally an open frontier right now. It looks very similar to this:

The angel of music manifest destiny is beckoning. Yes, it’s a scary, mostly barren landscape. There are some others people out there, but just because they make a herd doesn’t mean they know what they are doing or where they are going. They are all probably either imitators or idiots.

The artists rising above and getting noticed right now are the ones doing something new, doing something unexpected, doing something risky, being innovators.