In a previous blog post I argued that a business model Seth Godin proposed in an interview with Derek Sivers was, well, just plain wrong.

He proposes that a musician should be selling "souvenirs, intimacy, experiences, memories and limited things of value." As for actual music sales? He says that’s over, comparing an attempt to sell an actual track to a bakery attempting to sell the sniff of fresh bread.

Another article, "The future of the music business" on the blog, Techdirt, champions pretty much the same model. They define it as:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model.

Examples of “reason to buy” runs the course from Trent Reznor’s $300 Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition Package of the album “Ghosts I-IV” to Josh Freese (a session drummer) who offered several options and price points on purchasing his album, from a $50, 5 minute thank-you phone call to a $20,000 spend the week with Josh event.

Today it seems musicians have to be master promoters first and foremost and a jack-of–all-trades, second. A P.T. Barnum carni surrounded by mysteries and illusions of their own making.

The audience? Well, as Barnum said himself, “There’s a sucker born everyday.”

I might disagree with the business plan, but Seth Godin is right. Unless digital coding becomes so robust and tamper proof that piracy is no longer an issue, the idea of people paying for music by itself is probably coming to a crashing end.

So, I suppose like a lot of people these digital days, musicians have to adapt to and become expert in new and additional occupations. Everything from social media marketers to web masters, to promotional experts, to t-shirt designers.

Though, I'm not sure where that will leave the actual creation of music.

Like pretty much every other article on the future of music, an L.A. Times article, “The path to success is no longer labeled” describes the change, or implosion, depending on your pov, of the music business. In it, the writer, Geoff Boucher describes another approach to music marketing:

…a novel approach to music marketing called Music Tees, a New York-based venture that puts band art on the front of high-end T-shirts and a track listing on the back. The $40 shirts come with a code to download the band's music; other acts involved in the venture include Mos Def, David Gray, Third Eye Blind, Regina Spektor and Devendra Banhart, and a recent contract with Warner Bros. suggests that the apparel approach to a hardscrabble music market is gaining some traction.

He goes on to sum up his thoughts on this development:

It's a topsy-turvy concept. It was music that used to sell T-shirts at arena shows; now a T-shirt can be the commodity, with music as the hopeful passenger in the transaction.

Music is now second fiddle to t-shirts.

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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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