Derek Sivers interviewed Seth Godin on his new book, Linchpin.

I agree with Seth's first bit in the interview. And I'd like to summarize it, "Good is the enemy of great."

This is true in everything. Especially music.

Overall, I think what he's saying is that the herd is still following the record company example - trying to be successful by being commercial, rather than having the balls to be passionately original and possibly great.

But this is where I begin to disagree with him:

So, if the radio is already there, and music is free-er than ever, it's not clear that music is valueless. There's more music being listened to (not just played, but being listened to) than ever before in history, and that listening is proof that people value it. At least they value it enough to spend their time.

True, time is the most precious commodity we have. Once spent, we can't earn it back. But...

Get over the idea that your success is equated with selling the right to listen, or selling control over when people listen. Relinquish the opportunity to make money by controlling who can listen and when. That's gone. It's over. It would be like a bakery selling the right to sniff the fresh bread or a wine maker selling the right to look at the cool label. It's now a public good, something you see as you walk by.

A classic non sequitur.

What you can sell, what you better be able to sell, is intimacy. It's interactions in public. Souvenirs. Limited things of value. Experiences. Memories. People will pay for those things, IF: your art is actually great and if you make it possible for them to buy them.

True, the smell of fresh bread is free, but it sells bread. However, by Seth's reasoning, a free song sells intimacy and t-shirts?

Totally the wrong business model.

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In a short NYTimes article, “The End of Music,” published this past November, Glenn Branca argues that old music is the death of any sort of innovation in music. In other words, new music.

He might be right. The ubiquity of music, brought on by cheap to free digital sources has certainly opened up access for newer generations to the unknown old and for older generations to the comfortably familiar.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

Branca’s theory is summarized in his last paragraph:

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music (sic).

If you're going to play jazz, your music will be compared to 100 years of recordings of jazz artists. If you're going to play classical music, you've got to deal with the fact that audiences can stay home and listen to fantastic recordings of their favorite classical standards. And pop music? Innovation there often seems limited to visual design and fashion.

People like to pin the blame for the relatively tame output of the music industry on the major labels. The labels are just giving people what they want, though.

But the numbers that truly rocked the decade were the 1s and 0s of digital files. And it was all thanks to a dude named Shawn Fanning and a program called Napster. The former developed and launched the latter in, yes, 1999 so music lovers could share mp3 files online. And share they did; at Napster's peak, more than 26 million global users were swapping songs by everyone from Madonna to Metallica.

Net result: A world where you can now stream, download and burn - legally or not - virtually any piece of music ever recorded, at the click of a button.

Let’s start with the digital format most people listen to. It's pretty much agreed upon that Mp3’s represent a horrible way to listen to music. All the dynamics and sound quality are compromised, right from the digital file to the buds stuck in your ears. Admittedly, I even find myself listening to music through my laptop speakers occasionally. For sound quality this is as terrible, if not worse than kids in the ‘60’s listening to am music on tiny transistor radios hidden under their pillows at night so their parents wouldn’t know.

Certainly, the monster analogue stereo systems of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s reproduced music far superior to this.

Yet, this is how most people experience music today. Just walk down any street and you’ll see that everybody is doing it.

Why? Convenience.

Apart from the personal, when music is shared with others, new and different music is compromised again, so as not to offend anybody. It’s much more convenient to chuck on tunes that everybody is undoubtedly familiar with. No explanation or new music evangelism required.

How about the making of music?

Who needs to know chords or music theory anymore when you’ve got guitar tabs and software programs? In fact, who even needs to sing in key anymore when you’ve got Antares Autotune and live lip-sycing? Hell, even Britney Spears knows that.

What’s more, according to an article in the Village Voice, titled, “The Decade in Music Genre Hype” - new mish mashes - incorrectly known as genres, only last an average 9 months. The article is pretty much summed up in the first couple of paragraphs:

If Spin was right to name "Your Hard Drive" the best album of 2000, we'd like to formally nominate "The Internet" as Most Unforgiving Asshole of the 2000s. As of '09, bands have an official life span of about nine months dating from the launch of their MySpace pages, thanks to the comically accelerated, DSL-enhanced hype cycle. Faster than you can tweet "Serena Maneesh," entire genres of music are "discovered" by attention-starved writers; bloggers engage in hilarious slap-fights about who was there first; magazines feel pressured into writing clueless, hackazoid, late-pass trend pieces; bands get elevated to a critical mass of attention they can't possibly handle; and the phenomenon is promptly abandoned once we find a newer, shinier toy to play with.

Thanks to high-speed connections and low expectations, this scenario has played itself out over and over again lo these past 10 years. Here are but a few examples of the decade's Next Temporarily Big Things, each one pushed out of its tiny, insular spotlight by something a little lower on the list.

To Glenn Branca’s point, the ubiquity of all music and the convenience of accessing it has influenced today’s song writers, musicians and the audience. It’s much easier to rip-off something old, than it is to create something new. Inspiration and creativity have been replaced by convenience and laziness. Perhaps for good reason. Afterall, there’s little money in music anymore. Therefore, there’s little motivation in creating something truly new, if not moving an existing genre forward.

Is music the victim? No, we are the victims.

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