Music 3.0 Book Released

My latest book "Music 3.0 - A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age" has just been released and is currently available in book and music stores and online.

Although we've touched on some of the issues here in recent posts (the book was actually born from a post here about Guns n' Roses almost a year ago), I've decided that the subject needs a blog of its own. Therefore I'm devoting an entire new blog to the subject called appropriately "Music 3.0", that will cover more of the business side of the music business. This blog will cover more of the production and music side of things from here on.

Music 3.0 is an aggregation of concepts on the new music business that I’ve been following for some time. These concepts include Seth Godin's "Tribes", The Theory of 1000, Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail", and "The Economics of Free" among others. The book looks at how these concepts pertain to the marketing and distribution in the business right now.

It also contains the guiding insights of some of the music industry’s brightest minds about where the industry has been, where it is now, and where it’s going (see tomorrow's post on the Music 3.0 blog for a list). With so much information currently available, I wanted to do what I do best - collect it, organize it, and present it in a way that hopefully everyone can understand.

I'm really proud of this book, and I hope that its readers find it as helpful as some of my other books.

The Long Tail - It Works If You Work It

A recent study by an unnamed music service (speculation is it's the iTunes store) states that of their 12 million songs, 9 million didn't sell a single copy last year. This flies against the wind of The Long Tail theory, which states that consumers will by more catalog than hits if it were available, the catalog being "the long tail." Economists who never bought the theory to begin with are now dancing on it's grave.

But wait. There's more to it than just having the catalog available for purchase. After having studied the Long Tail theory, I've come to the conclusion that this study doesn't take into account 2 of its 3 main points. They are:

• in order for people to purchase items in the Long Tail, the items must be easy to find and easily available.

• the items in the Long Tail must be priced attractively, something that iTunes or any other digital service hasn't done until now.

As a result, I think that before the naysayers dismiss this theory, they must give all facets of it a chance work. With variable pricing now coming to most digital stores, we can see shortly how price affects sales. It's that "easy to find" part that's probably going to prove problematic.