The funny thing about music is that people can tie a certain song to a specific event in their life that occurred when they heard that song; the two become inseparable... I first noticed it in 2004, on the last real tour I did as a performing artist. The first day of the tour, I was in the audience waiting for the opening band to go on, and someone came up to me and said “it’s so cool you’re here! The first time I heard you was...” and then went on to describe a particular life experience that was occurring when he first heard a song I wrote. There were over sixty shows on that tour, and a night didn’t go by that I didn’t hear that speech, or a variation of it, at least once. It quickly became a running joke, The First Time I Heard You, and soon after that it became a conversation I dreaded. It was a heart-rending thing to hear, night after night, because I thought they were saying “you used to make things I liked. Now you don’t, but I’m here out of nostalgia.” It took an epiphany to realize that the First Time I Heard You conversation is is meant as a sincere form of flattery. “You are an ARTIST. You created something that MADE ME FEEL. This is IMPORTANT and I need to TELL YOU so you know that we have a CONNECTION.”

That epiphany, and a realization that the act of creation can and should be entirely decoupled from the business of commerce, is what I want to talk about. In fact, let's boil it down to a pithy aphorism: the coin of this realm is reputation, and our imagination is an ATM.

There was a brief period where it was kind of fun to watch the entire music industry collapse in on itself, like a dying star. Can we get more of Metallica suing people for liking them, please? But Seans Fanning and Parker didn’t make Napster because they were moved by the plight of the working musician. They did it because they could, and the act itself, the act of petulant children bent on destruction, was nothing more than a path to greater things for them, increasing their reputations. The music industry, for its part, was eminently destroyable, as it had created an economy of artificial worth, by virtue of its “throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see which noodles stick” business model.

That’s fine, and business is business, but the problem is that all those bands think they are special flowers (and the labels are in no small part enablers of this thinking; they spend a lot of time and effort making those artists feel like special flowers), and if their record cost $500,000 to make, then it is worth $500,000... Simple economics: a product’s worth is what someone will pay for it, for the most part, not what it cost to make. Hence the utterly false values ascribed to music today.

Something happened to me a little while ago that makes me think the Spotify valuation is high, if we’re using currency as our means of valuation. SomeoneI know, who is in the military, was recently deployed to Iraq. While she was there, a friend of hers gave her a portable hard drive with 250,000 songs on it...

To her, this hard drive was “cool,” and furthermore “a neat present.” That it contained roughly 1/8th of all the commercial music ever recorded by Western civilization didn’t change the fact that, on a visceral level, the worth of it to her was essentially the cost-of-replacement of the physical drive itself, because she could always get another copy. If you want to affix an actual monetary value to music, that value is now, and ever was, a function of two things: the true cost of the medium it is stored on, and how easy that medium is to duplicate. The quarter million dollar fine the U.S. government could theoretically levy as punishment for copying that hard drive reflects the false economy the labels have created, not the actual value of the music itself.

To be clear, I am in no way implying that art doesn’t have intrinsic value. But that value is not quantifiable in dollars. If we extrapolate the cost of that hard drive to the individual songs, we can say that each song cost roughly 4/100th of a cent. While this is about 2/3 of the payment for a typical Spotify stream, the money went to the drive retailer and the manufacturer that made it, and none whatsoever went to any artist, publisher, or label.

As an artist, if you choose to fight this battle over monetary value, know this: you will lose. That is a foregone conclusion. In fact, you have already lost. All of that nonsense with numbers and who’s getting paid and whether life is fair or not is all inside baseball, and the average person (the one ultimately footing the bills, it must be said) couldn’t give two shits. To them, pieces of art are tied to memories and experiences; they are either trying to recapture the emotions they felt when they first experienced the art in a particular context, or trying to create new emotions to go with new contexts. They are willing to spend a certain amount of money, for altruism’s sake, if it’s convenient.

[I]n my honest assessment, the opportunities are far greater now, and the rewards as ample or perhaps even more so. It’s easy. Just forget about money. Seriously. Let it go. You’re not getting paid? Join the club. Robert Johnson and Scott Joplin were the founding members. Muddy Waters, HP Lovecraft, and Jackson Pollack each got an achievement award. David Crosby gets the Bad Life Decisions Honorable Mention. You’re in good company. You should be proud.

Neither do I want to come off as a neck-bearded freetard. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are not many groups of people I disdain more than the Doctorow mashup crowd and their inspired thinking that art + art = better art, and everybody has the right, nay, the responsibility to make their own Mickey Mouse movies. If that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat, so be it, but on your head.

These Reputation Credits, an arbitrary unit of my own devising, are a reflection of how earnest you are in tending your public-facing persona... [I]f you contribute to the human cultural experience, you do earn them, and the more you contribute (or, perhaps, the higher the quality of your contributions) the more you earn. You can then turn these in for real-world dividends that can, for instance, pay the rent or buy sushi.

Make art.
Put it in front of as many people as possible.
Engage the resulting audience.
Repeat.

The more you do this, the better you’ll get at it, the more Rep Credits you’ll have, and the further they’ll go when you need to spend some of them. People want to be entertained. They’ll go all honey badger on some good entertainment. Give it to them, for fuck’s sake, and stop bitching about money. That’ll come in its own good time.

We are, for the first time since 1996, we are free agents again. We're without a record label. So what we're kind of doing is trying to get our bearings as to what we should do next, just as a band but also as a band that is kind of off in new territory again.

So it was hard and it was frustrating but it was also very telling for us and perhaps educational. Because what we were forced to do was we were forced into ingenuity. And so we came up with this idea to set up shop in this art gallery in Los Angeles and do the Incubus HQ and fly listeners in from different corners of the world and do these live broadcasts on the Internet. And so we started getting these ideas about subscription-based live concerts online and it ended up being a really scary and stressful project, but the fruits of it are still kind of revealing themselves.

We have this HQ box set that we're putting out and the DVD set comes out I think August 14 is the release date. There's like the superfan all six nights on DVD mixed in 5.1 with the CDs and pieces of canvases that people were drawing on in the room while we were playing music. Like I said, it's forced us to think outside of that normal music industry paradigm that we had gotten so accustomed to. And so in that sense the lack of attention from our record label and the end days of our record label relationship were really good and very beneficial for us as a band because it gave us a sense of what we might be doing in the coming years.

Linkin Park and Incubus were two of the very few bands who kind of like got a gust of wind out of the old paradigm of the music industry. But like survived out of it. There are so many bands that, bands in a traditional sense, bands who write their own music, and perform their music, that didn't survive that transition. That fell by the wayside with the industry. So it’s been frightening to watch something that you for a very brief moment almost learned to rely on, because we learned the ins and outs of how the industry worked, you know you poured your heart out into making an album and then the label puts the record out and you go out on tour in support of the album, and we even started doing it in the van and trailer. We'd make a record and get in the van with our gear and the trailer and we'd drive ourselves around the country and sell albums and T-shirts out of the back of the trailer. That was sort of our education and then once things started going really well, thankfully, we got a sense of what it looks like when all of the, when the engine is nicely greased and things are working the way they're supposed to.

And then it's like the millennium turns and the technology changed. And all of that became old. It became an antiquated model. And it was frightening at first but I actually have come to appreciate it. I'm going to actually use the pun, a living thing. It's a living system. Our technologies are a living system just like we are and our communities as human beings, and for us to expect them to remain constant is really just quite foolish. I mean anybody that's going to come to rely on the way that our music consumption is looking now is going to have the same hard lesson in less time than you think. I think that the technology is going to shift probably sooner than any of us really realize. And that's a really cool thing, because it keeps everyone on their toes. It levels the playing field, too. It's allowing for a really wonderful democratization of the music writing process and the music presenting and performing process. So what it's doing is it's making us try harder and it's making us expect the best of ourselves and the people that we work with. You know, do more with less.

I personally, when all is said and done, I really welcome these changes. And they excite me. And they scare me at the same time, but I'm choosing to focus on the excitement.

How should a good copyright system look like? Obviously, the one our civilization uses now doesn't fit the reality of today. Outdated, over-extended and unenforceable it leads to ridiculous court cases against random people and clearly fails to meet the needs of the digital world. Without good alternatives, the only solution some can imagine is to take what doesn't work and get more of it, hoping that this will do the trick. It won't.

In order to form the future of copyright system we need to step up and craft a model that will fit the digital reality, shaped by technology of today and tomorrow. There are some initial proposals, most notably Barcelona Charter or Washington Declaration, but we believe there's room for improvement and we want to give it a try. We invite you all to take part in the global project of crafting the Future of Copyright!

There are a number of things that make this contest interesting. Firstly, the judges: one is professor Michael Geist, a vocal copyright critic who comes up a lot here at Techdirt, and the other is Piotr Czerski, who wrote the phenomenal "We, The Web Kids" manifesto that has been making waves online. Secondly, they are accepting submissions in any medium and any genre, meaning we may get to see some cool copyright fiction coming out of this contest. Finally, the whole thing is crowdfunded: they are raising the prize money on IndieGoGo (which uses a similar model to Kickstarter), starting with a modest goal of $500 that they have already surpassed.

One thing is out of place, and that's the requirement that all submissions be licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. I'm surprised they added such a specific restriction, because it biases the entire contest, essentially endorsing Creative Commons as the future of copyright despite supposedly asking for varied opinions on the topic. It also implicitly endorses attribution and some sort of "share-alike" clause, even though there are many viable copyright philosophies that require neither of those things. Why can't people dedicate their entries to the public domain with a Public Domain Mark or a CC0 license, or retain their rights but make the submission freely available? Imposing a specific license on the entries runs counter to the idea of seeking a wide variety of proposals.

Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing the ideas this contest elicits, including those of any Techdirt readers who participate (and I suspect some of you might). If you want to enter, you have until April 15th.

The future of journalism looks like an ad agency.

This is what you think when you walk into the downtown Toronto offices of the Huffington Post’s Canadian operation, which it shares with its corporate parent, AOL Canada Inc. You probably don’t even need a description to imagine the scene, but here goes: Airy, two-storey, loft-like playpen on Spadina Avenue. Exposed brick. Rows of young folk in checkered flannel shirts staring intently into oversized monitors. A pair of electric guitars hanging above the boss’s desk, which sits invitingly in the corner rather than hiding away in a separate office.

For one thing, I'm not sure what's so scary about newsrooms becoming more open, accessible and friendly—to me, that doesn't immediately say "ad agency". But much more importantly, the Huffington Post is not the head office of modern journalism.

HuffPo is one brand, one network—a widespread and highly successful one to be sure, but just one piece of the puzzle. The simple fact is, there is no one hub of modern journalism. In fact, one of the biggest defining characteristics of journalism in the digital era is a movement away from centralization, with quality content coming from a huge array of sources both big and small.

It's old-world thinking that leads people to seek a single organization they can look to as an example of what journalism is becoming, and that prevents them from seeing the real change: the future of journalism doesn't have a head office, and it's not defined by what the Huffington Post is doing.

• Burt Rutan has designed a flying hybrid car that can fit into a standard one-car garage. Interestingly, this Model 367 BiPod isn't quite as far along in development as SpaceShipOne. [url]
• The AirMule is a vertical take-off-and-land vehicle that doesn't look ready to fly anywhere near residential areas yet. Maybe that's why its designers suggest using it for pumping heavy water into damaged nuclear reactors? [url]
• The European Union is looking into Personal Aerial Vehicles (PAVs) with a project called myCopter. It sounds strange that <60 mile flying trips could be more efficient than driving a car... [url]
• To discover more cool sites about aviation, check out what's currently flying around StumbleUpon. [url]  

Although it pains me to say this, it's the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday's regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that's the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks. Please don't make me say it again.

More than ever, it seemed apparent that scarcity sooner or later was going to bring all economic growth to a halt. Jevons gained fame in England in the 1860s by explaining how the looming exhaustion of British coal mines would probably mean the end of improvements in wealth and power. (Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania four years later.) And after Jevons died, in 1882, his study was discovered to be filled from top to bottom with stacks of scrap paper. Soon enough England would be running out of paper too. He didn't want to be caught without.

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they've both got it backward: traders' wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.

"The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating," Dr. Ridley writes. "And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before."

Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they're risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: "Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands."

And the other crazy thing we found when we were doing JPG is that by far, the majority of our subscribers were people who did not subscribe to any other magazines. I thought that was weird. Like, you'd think, "Okay, maybe the people who like print would buy it." But what we learned was it was the people who felt involved in the creation of it who were buying it. The people who were submitting their photos, voting on other people's photos, who felt involved in the community were the ones buying it.

So I think there's a real opportunity here for media makers to learn from this to say, "Well maybe the reason why people aren't buying newspapers and magazines is because they feel completely disconnected from the product, right? Because the old style of journalism was sit down, shut up and consume what we say. And in a world of collaborative media where everybody can participate online, everybody can make content, maybe what these media organizations need to do is tear down the walls a little bit and let people feel involved in the making of it, and then they'll buy the product.

"There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person -- anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me." Morris' almost willful cluelessness is telling. "He wasn't prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology," says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. "He just doesn't have that kind of mind."

"I believe that the CD will out-survive me as a format," Mr. Grainge said in an interview.

Consumers perceive that content produced by news organizations is valuable to them. This myth persists primarily in organizations that are dangerously out of touch with their markets. Public opinion of journalism, and of newspapers, has gone into a nosedive. Decades ago, people might trash-talk "the media" but generally would make an exception for their local paper. No more. Newspaper managers should know this, but many of them have fired their research people to save money, preferring to stumble through the fog without eyes and ears.

Consumers will actually make content purchases when they are confronted with many free options. Over the last 15 years, this assumption has been demonstrated to be false in digital paid-content experiments by newspapers all over the world. The numbers of consumers so inclined aren't great enough to sustain a business of significant scale. This idea persists primarily because so many newspaper people are deeply ignorant of what's been going on in their own companies, and because digital people generally lose power struggles with print people. Almost everyone I know who ran a paid-content online media experiment no longer works for the company where they tried it. Those companies are now largely ignorant of their own histories.

Publishers can exert their influence in the marketplace through laws and public policy, both of which could change. Newspapers have been trying without success to get rid of FCC's cross-ownership ban for decades. Newspapers, which are deeply despised by many politicians and sweeping sectors of their own customer bases, aren't going to persuade the government to outlaw Google.

Publishers will invest in emerging technologies that establish new work rules, new systems for organizing content and new designs for packaging editorial and commercial content. These would be the same newspapers that underinvested in the Internet for the last 15 years, while pouring cash into glitzy corporate headquarters, printing presses, and more newspaper acquisitions? The ones who now can't pay back the capital they've already borrowed?

News organizations can make the leap from an advertising-centered to an audience-centered enterprise. News organizations -- OK, let's be specific: newspapers -- are deeply addicted to high-volume revenue streams and huge profit margins that have enabled them to gobble up other newspapers and create huge, dangerously leveraged media chains. Such organizations require growth to survive and will fail in spectacular ways when asked to cope with shrinkage. And make no mistake, the scale of any news business that asks its readers to take primary responsibility for underwriting the costs of journalism will be tiny when compared with the fat times at the end of the last century.

But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don't work.
The old categories don't work.
The old ways of thinking won't work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won't control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can't control access using old forms of accreditation any more.

Those statements mean what they say and not necessarily more.

I am not arguing that newspapers and magazines and news services will die.
No, just that they must change.

To say they can blog as long as it isn't journalistic, misses the point.

To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a "news feed" of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn't a distinction.

Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life.

And none of these things is really private. They can get indexed by Google; they get searched; they can be public to the world with a potential circulation of every single user of the internet.

Take this scenario: I will easily aggregate my imaginary athlete's comments and thoughts on winning or losing or on the standard of judging with tweets giving the audience perspective from various parts of the stadium. I'll then add that in with mobile phone camera pictures and video posted on Flickr and youtube.

Well, my friends, who really needs the rightsholders, AP or Reuters if you can do that?

Some may be frightened of the picture I paint. Some may think I exaggerate. I actually get energised.

The only question I ask is: So what can we do to survive, or more fundamentally, to stay relevant?

I think the only path is to embrace the change and embrace the new. Longing for the ways of the past will not work.

We in the traditional media and you in the IOC must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value.

That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise.

It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.

It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Working against them would be crazy. Could you imagine gun toting guards trying to confiscate every phone off every spectator? That would become the story of the Games and it would ultimately fail, anyhow.
No, working with them is the answer.

Inspire them, and encourage them to do things that will enhance the Olympic spirit and actually improve the bottom line.

We have spent countless decades enveloping our activities in the cloak of professional mystery.

That era is over.

We must devote the time now to demystifying what we do, and working in concert with those who would seem to be a threat to the old order.

Remember that the world ultimately is a reciprocal place.

Treat people with respect and as partners, and they will partner with you.
Treat people as a threat or as criminals, and they will threaten your institution and ultimately bring it down.
This path doesn't have to be scary.