The Precarious Future of Jobs

When someone quotes a dubious statistic in conversation, I often reply by interjecting the somewhat humorous, "Did you know that 47% of all statistics are made up on the spot?" I always use 47% as the made up number - it's a nice prime number and has a good ring to it in my opinion.

So I almost always chuckle when someone puts forth 47 percent as an actual statistic. In this case:

...a now-famous Oxford University analysis forecasted that 47 percent of all jobs are threatened in the United States [by robots and automation].

Yup, that definitely elicited a chuckle. Yet while the exact percentage of jobs that are threatened is of course completely unknown and the statistic is meaningless in any case without a timeframe associated with it (threatened by next week? Next year? A million years?), the concept is serious and perhaps deadly serious.

As a roboticist, I do see automation based on AI and increasingly intelligent and flexible computing accelerating. For example, autonomous vehicles alone could replace several million workers within ten years (maybe more, maybe less, who knows?).

I predict my company of 4 people will eliminate thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of jobs in agriculture over the next 5 years. And the problem is that as workers move to new jobs, we'll end up automating those too, making it difficult for them to ever get back to a stable job situation. That's potentially different than in the past. Sure, buggy whip workers lost their jobs once upon a time but then went on to work in the automobile industry which was stable for the rest of their careers. Maybe new industries and opportunities will develop as old jobs are automated away, but it looks to me like the destruction of jobs in Schumpeter's Creative Destruction process will far outpace the creation, especially the creation of lower to middle skilled occupations.

While automation could promise ever more plentiful availability of goods, it's possible that we'll face widespread poverty as more and more workers find it impossible to land stable and reasonably well-paying jobs. One straightforward way of mitigating that is the Universal Basic Income where all citizens get a fixed monthly stipend, no strings attached. That would at least keep people from starving in the streets. And if so much is automated and there's so much wealth being produced, the UBI would be easily affordable.

But what about work itself? Can humans live without working? Or is work part of what humans need to be fulfilled? Are idle hands the devil's workshop? Will opioid and other drug addiction become even more widespread? Will all these things lead to the collapse of civilization?

Or will we all become barbershop quartet singers (I'm the guy on the right) and live happily ever after?

Happy New Year

I decided to sing my New Years Song (very originally and cleverly named "Happy New Year!") and record a video of it this morning.

Happy New Year! Enjoy!

The Disunited State of America

I can't really understand half of what this guy says. To be fair, that's probably true for all his other works, though I won't know, for I rarely paid attention to them (not my kind of music).

But anyone of my generation, even the ones not much into Rap, will recognize his name as iconic.

I once remarked on this blog: "The last two weeks of the news cycle have been spinning ever so fast about Trump 'scandals', I wonder how are people of different opinions interacting. Or am I the only one being unfriended?"

Even though the divide seen since his election is pretty obvious, and Eminem doing a rap calling all sorts of names is unremarkable, I believe he still set a new bar, one I consider symbolic of our times:

- "Any fan of mine who's a supporter of his, You're either for or against. And if you can't decide who you like more and you're split, On who you should stand beside, I'll do it for you with this", followed by expletives.

So his main fury is directed not at Trump, but to any Trump voter who may also appreciate his own work. He unfriended them all.

OK, I get he hates Trump, but to risk setting a pile of money on fire to show for that?

Merry Christmas

For your holiday entertainment (I hope), here is my barbershop quartet (I'm on the far left) singing the humorous song "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" at a recent Holiday Show. It was video'd by someone in the audience and was posted via her facebook page.

Update: Apparently the above link only works for facebook members. If so, try this one.

Singing for Mom

My sister and I went back to upstate New York for our Mom's 80th birthday. My mom seems to have pretty much everything she wants so it's hard to figure out what to get her. So, my sister and I recorded, A Cappella, a song of love for her which we delivered on an MP3 player and small speaker so she can hear us sing it whenever she wants.

Since I wrote about A Cappella singing the other day, I thought I'd share the recording with y'all.

Conjecture Explaining Downward Pitch Drift of A Cappella Singing Groups

I've been doing some barbershop singing lately, both in a chorus of about 30 men and also a quartet. I'm still learning the ropes so (fortunately) there are no recordings of me (yet) doing this particular form of music. But if you're curious about the sorts of things we sing, the following video shows Ringmasters, a really excellent quartet, performing one of the songs we're working on (both the chorus and the quartet I sing with) and is a good example of "modern" barbershop music.



Because there are no instruments to anchor the pitch, even a top notch group like Ringmasters will end the song at a slightly different pitch level than they start with. In this case, my "pitch pipe" tells me they end very slightly sharper than they started. They're so close that my ear couldn't tell and I needed an electronic tuner to discern that.

While a group can end either sharp or flat, the vast majority of a cappella groups end flat a majority of the time. This is especially true for bigger groups and often I can easily tell that with just my ear and without any sort of electronic help.

The question is why flat and not sharp? I've not found any of the answers to be compelling. Therefore, I've crafted my own conjecture, but I'm pretty confident that it's at least part of the explanation since it matches my experience recording music. On the other hand, it's so simple and obvious that I would've thought that it would be a common explanation, but I haven't seen it.

When we speak and sing, we usually mostly hear ourselves via internal pathways. In other words, our vocal cords flap about and the vibrations from that flapping are transmitted via our flesh and blood and bone up to our hearing apparatus. There's also reflected sound from the vibrations coming out our mouths (and noses to some extent) and then bouncing off of surfaces around us back to our ears. However, most of what we hear under typical conditions is received by our ears via the internal pathways.

Many of us who are past the half-century mark may have never heard ourselves speak or sing until we were teenagers or older. There simply wasn't all that much access to recording equipment and the early consumer recording devices had dismal accuracy when playing back a recording. I remember being SHOCKED when I first heard what I sounded like. It sounded nothing like I sound to me via my internal pathways.

In particular, I sound slightly sharper to myself via the internal pathways than I do via the external pathways. When singing along with instruments, I always sound very slightly flatter during playback than I expect given what it sounds like to me during recording.

It's very slight. So slight that it's hardly out of tune. The perception is more a matter of the other definition of "flat": dull; lifeless; low-energy. Whereas being very slightly sharp is perceived as alive, brilliant, and exciting! A somewhat related fact is that classical instrumental groups were tuned to ever higher pitch levels over the centuries:

During historical periods when instrumental music rose in prominence (relative to the voice), there was a continuous tendency for pitch levels to rise. This "pitch inflation" seemed largely a product of instrumentalists competing with each other, each attempting to produce a brighter, more "brilliant", sound than that of their rivals.

Another experiment that confirmed that I sound sharper internally than externally is what I call the "wall trick." To hear myself better from external reflections, instead of singing into a room, I'll stand facing a wall, about a foot away. It looks kinda silly, but instead of hearing myself mainly internally, I'm also able to hear the external reflections and it gives me an idea of what my pitch and tone sound like to the rest of the world. Recently, I sang a single note into a tuner while walking towards the wall. I maintained the same pitch the whole time. As I got closer to the wall, I sounded progressively flatter even though the tuner said I was singing the same pitch the whole time.

So both record/playback and external reflections confirm that I sound a tiny bit flatter externally than internally. I suspect, but haven't yet proven, that's true for most people. After all, people are similar physiologically, and I think the effect is due to our internal transmission filters being slightly more high-pass than the external transmission filters which probably are more affected by the resonating cavities that form our vowel sounds. Well, that's my conjecture anyway. I really don't know why. All I know is that internally I sound sharper than externally.

When we start a song in an a cappella group, someone blows the root of the key on a pitch pipe or electronic equivalent. If I sing my note and it sounds right to me internally, it will sound very slightly flat to those around me. Everybody around me will also do the same thing and sing very slightly flat. I'm going to sound flat to everyone else and everyone else will sound flat to me. But we want to align so we'll all adjust incrementally downwards a little tiny bit. And then we all sound flatter to each other so we adjust downward again. And again. And again. They're all tiny adjustments, minuscule really. But over the course of a whole song, all those increments add up and the group might end up noticeably flat, maybe even a half-step. Maybe even more. Even for very accomplished groups.

Ready...aim...sing!

Earlier this week Pete Seeger died.  There are some interesting perspectives outside the conventional mainstream praise that I thought were of note.  Bird Dog over at blog Maggie's Farm had this to say:

Grew up middle class, went to prep school and Harvard, affected a working class style but I doubt any working class people were ever interested in him. A likeable old commie, naive and innocent to the end.

Ron Radosh at PJMedia who knew Seeger personally concluded with this:

I know Pete would not have said that if I had been writing books about fascism.

More than likely, he would have praised my doing so. Pete, like so many others on the Left, simply failed to realize that communism is fascism’s twin.

Some also take umbrage, as does Graham, with calling Seeger anti-American. In his Mother Jones ^[8] article, David Hajdu, who spent time with Seeger before writing the article, called him “devoted to a few simple ideas, a nostalgist whose worldview often seems frozen in the era of his own coming-of-age.” He adds: “A strain of anti-Americanism has always run through Seeger’s work.”

If you don’t think that is the case, listen to the Smithsonian Folkways CD “Pete Seeger Sing-a-Long,” recorded at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in 1980. In an impromptu remark, Seeger makes a comment about how if the people had guns, you better watch out, because you don’t know whom the people would use the guns against. The comment receives huge cheers. That is to be expected of from an audience in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

Sunkara is right about one thing. He quotes Bruce Springsteen, who wrote that Seeger showed how song could “nudge history along.” Seeger did indeed help make communism more fashionable, and that is a tragedy, not something for which Pete Seeger should ever have received praise.

 Glen Reynolds at Instapundit linked to others...

JOHN FUND: Pete Seeger, Totalitarian Troubadour. “We shouldn’t forget that Pete Seeger was Communism’s pied piper.”

Related: Spengler: Pete Seeger: A Mean-Spirited and Vengeful Recollection. “I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born, born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud, a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused was a put-on from beginning to end. There is no such thing as an American ‘folk.’”

Instapundit  finished the post with a link to a fitting song by mathematics professor and satirist Tom Lehrer:
(which is as good an excuse as any for this post)

That's Why the Chicks Swarm All Over Me!

Via BrothersJudd, apparently "Holding A Guitar Makes You More Attractive".  There's me with a guitar below (on the cover of my Let's Party album).  What do you think?  Is it true? Does holding a guitar make a guy irresistible?

I had written early at my surprise at seeing my CD available on eBay.  In searching for the above picture (I think I've lost the original "art"), I found that it's also available on Amazon and a slew of other sellers.  I wonder if anyone has actually sold one?  Should I write myself a fantastic review?  Or a scathing one?

My other album, which I consider to be a lot better, is still only available at last.fm (right where I left it).  I'm guessing that the Let's Party title is more catchy which is why it has shown up other places, though it may just be that the overlap of what I think is good and what other people like might be very small.

Indie Publishing

Apple's iPod was released in the fall of 2001 and Amazon's kindle was released in the fall of 2007.  Those releases not only added another way of accessing content from the consumer's standpoint, but also rapidly accelerated the metamorphosis of content production, distribution, and consumption, affecting everyone involved.

One important aspect of the transformation is that it is a huge enabler for creating and publishing independent ("indie") content.  The physical CD, tape or record for music, and the physical book were substantial obstacles to independent song-writers and authors.  They cost money to produce, money to ship, money to find places to display and sell, and were expensive to produce in small quantities.  While it was possible to download music and books over the Internet to a computer before the release of the iPod and kindle, it was clunky and limiting.

I've been interested in indie publishing of music ever since I originally produced my two albums.  They were produced before the release of the iPod.  They each costs thousands of dollars to record and produce.  The ultimate "product" was 1,000 CDs of each, a few hundred of which are still sitting in my attic (I've since uploaded them to last.fm (here and here) where they are available for free).  Producing those same albums would've cost one-tenth as much and taken half the time with today's technology.

There have been a lot of songs published at this point.  For example, there are currently more than 25 million songs available from iTunes alone.  There are possibly approaching 100 million published songs worldwide representing a good fraction of a billion minutes of listening enjoyment (for comparison, we only live about 40 million minutes).

The related milestone of interest is that iTunes recently sold its 25 billionth song and the math here should be a bit scary for any song-writer hoping to make money creating music.  While 25 billion songs is a lot of songs, it's only an average of 1,000 sales per song.  At 99 cents per song, that's an average revenue of less than $1,000 per song.

The revenue per song will likely drop and drop rapidly.  Music tastes don't change very rapidly and songs have a pretty long shelf life.  There are now multiple songs published per minute and with each new song, the number of ears per song drops.  This, more than anything else, will force nearly all recorded music to be offered for free within the next few decades.

Fortunately, a song-writer/musician can make money performing.  A major act performing in a large venue generates revenues of millions of dollars per show.  Unknown groups can still sometimes get a toehold playing clubs and parties.  In some sense, the recorded music for these groups acts as marketing and advertising and has value to the artists even if no revenue is generated from sales of the recorded music.

It looks to me like the book industry is a decade or two behind the music industry but following the same trajectory.  Here's a quick excerpt to put it in perspective:

That means it’s possible that 15,000,000 books could be published in 2012. 15,000,000. Yikes. (The truth is, though, there is no way of extrapolating from the data how many books will actually be published. Some ISBNs don’t get used, some titles have a different ISBN for every edition, and some ebooks are published without ISBNs. As a frame of reference, 407,000 ISBNs were issued in 2007.)) 

Google estimates that as of August 2010, there were 129,864,880 books in existence. Which means that the total number of books that could be published in 2012 is more than 1/10 of all the books in existence. That is an unfathomable jump, a 500% increase in a single year.

Furthermore, contemplate that Project Gutenberg already has more than 42,000 free books in their digital library and are releasing dozens more per day.  They pick the most popular classics of all time so they alone can keep the most avid reader quite entertained, for free, forever.

Just like ears per song, the number of eyes per word is plummeting.  Just like music, the vast majority of novels will eventually be free due to overwhelming market forces.

Unlike music, the novelist has one advantage that the song-writer does not.  The novelist can write a sequel whereas music rarely has a compelling order.  Once a reader is 'hooked' on the first free book, the novelist can earn money from all of the books in the rest of the series.  For example, even if Rowling was unable to charge for Harry Potter 1, she certainly would've been able to make good money from the other 6 books.


I only read books (for entertainment) that have sequels.  Once I put effort in to learning the world and the characters, I want to know there's more.  Here’s my current book finding algorithm:

1. Goto amazon kindle books
2. Select genre of interest
3. Select 4 stars or more average
4. Sort low price to high price (at least the first several hundred books will be free)
5. Ignore books with less than 20 reviews.
6. Ignore books that aren’t the first in a series.
7. Ignore books with titles that aren’t appealing (I’m not too picky).
8. Ignore books with covers that aren’t appealing (I’m not too picky).

If I like the book, I'll buy the rest of the series.

This method has worked pretty well for me so far.  However, my current favorite SF/Fantasy series (the first in the series is Outcasts and Gods) I found by a different method.  The author (Pam Uphoff) made an insightful comment at a blog I read where many (most?) of the participants are authors.  I tracked down her books and I've really enjoyed them.  This is similar to how I found song-writer Jeff Shattuck.  With regards to the government takeover of GM, he wrote in a comment somewhere that "The Road to Serfdom is best traveled in a GM or Chrysler".

But, in the end, the huge volume of content being generated is going to make it very difficult for content providers to make money.  Content wants to be free!

Let's Party on eBay!

This brought a smile to my face.

"Let's Party" is a rock CD that I wrote, recorded and produced about 15 years ago.  I printed 1,000 of them and have given away most of them (I never tried to sell them).

So I'm quite surprised to see that one is being sold on eBay by an eBay "CD Store"! They're listing it for $22.99.  It's advertised as:

The real thing, not a CD-R.   (1187 is # on spine of case)
Cd is STILL SEALED AND UNPLAYED.  PERFECT SHAPE.  
NOT a cutout and NOT a record club edition.

Pretty funny! I wonder how it got there?

Drat! Foiled Again!

I think that focus, tenacity, and perseverance are the three most human qualities most correlated with success. While I think that these are mostly innate qualities, I think they can be nurtured and significantly strengthened.

I got my electric guitar out of the attic for my older daughter who takes guitar classes at school. They do classical guitar the first half of the year and electric the second half.

My guitar has been calling to me. I don't mean that I've been having hallucinations, it's just that I feel a strong attraction to it.

When my younger daughter was 9, she and I were listening to "Johnny Winter And... Live" and we started talking about the music. She really dislikes his voice, especially when he hits the high notes using a sort of gargling falsetto scream. I told her I rather like that style of singing but could understand why she didn't like it.

I then went on to say the he was (is) a truly great guitarist. I wanted to then continue by turning that statement into a lecture about focus and tenacity so I pointed out that one of the reasons he's great is that he basically plays guitar or listens to music every waking second. I do believe that's one of life's most important lessons: success is more due to focus, tenacity, and perseverance than any other quality.

However, I was thwarted in delivering the rest of the lesson because the conversation went something like this:

Daughter: But you're a great guitarist and you don't play guitar all the time.

Me: No. I'm an okay guitar player[1], Johnny Winter is a great guitarist[2].

Daughter: Well, I think you're a great guitarist, daddy!

So she melted me then and there, rendering me incapable of continuing the lesson, even though my first thought was, "I'd better get her ears checked."

Unfortunately, the flip side of the focus, tenacity, and perseverance coin is obsession. Obsession is unhealthy in and of itself, but also seems to be closely related to drug addiction and alcohol dependence. That certainly was true for Johnny Winters and who knows how many other dead or ruined rock guitarists.

It's a fine balance between being obsessed enough to achieve success (how ever one wishes to define it) and staying healthy and reasonably balanced. I think it might be mostly genetic though.

Notes:
[1] I feel that there are three levels of guitar virtuosity: guitar owner, guitar player, and guitarist. I'm somewhere in the guitar player range - on a good day.
[2] Great guitarists seem to have three qualities: (1) obsession, (2) huge hands, and (3) steel belted fingertips (mine blister quite easily).

Blog Friends

Today I had the pleasure of not only having his company, but also of having Hey Skipper of the Daily Duck treat me to lunch. He's every bit as insightful, thought provoking, and witty in person as he in his posts and comments and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with him. This is the first time I've met in person a "virtual" friend from the blogosphere and given the positive experience, I hope to have the opportunity to meet more blog friends in the future.

A second blog friend, Jeff Shattuck from Cerebellum Blues, just finished his first album. I've listened to it several times now and it's an amazingly, stunningly, jaw-droppingly good album. In fact, it's really two amazing albums as there are 14 songs. As a song writer I'm feel very humbled by his accomplishment.

Jeff Shattuck's narrative prior to the release of his album was that he suffered a brain injury and "woke up" with a "rekindled" desire to write songs. My feeling was that this was a great human-interest story that could be leveraged to help sell his music if he wanted, almost regardless of the quality of the songs.

That's all out the window now as he's proven himself to be a truly great song writer. The background is no longer interesting in comparison to the music.

My 15 year old daughter also likes the album a lot so the music appears to have wide appeal. The chord changes are innovative and sophisticated so I was concerned that it might be what I call "an album by and for musicians", where the appeal to mere mortals was limited, but my daughter walked into the room when I was first playing it and quipped, "I really like this song - who is it by?" and has since really enjoyed the rest of it as well, so I think most people will enjoy it.

Musical Trespassing

A while back, I was trying to explain to my daughter why illegally copying music was stealing. To my surprise, she simply could not see why it was considered stealing. Since she's an intelligent, fairly sophisticated, and reasonably honest person, her response made me question my assumptions.

I've since decided she's right. Copying music may be somewhat like trespassing, but it's almost nothing like stealing.

The intangible property of value that you own when you create music is the copyright, not the song itself. The copyright can be bequeathed in your will, sold, etc., much like tangible property. On the other hand, you don't directly have ownership in any of the copies of the song.

When I copy a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a song, I'm not stealing or directly affecting your ownership of the copyright in any way. This is very similar to when I walk across your land uninvited, I'm not stealing your land or directly affecting your ownership of the land in any way. I merely trespassed, which while illegal in the US (but not other countries such as Sweden), is a much different level of moral and legal breach than theft.

Indeed, unlike laws against stealing which are derived from fundamental western morals ("thou shall not steal"), copyright is only a legal issue, has no objective or traditional moral component, should only exist only to further the arts and sciences (according to the U.S. Constitution), and is really only even relevant if a substantial majority of people believe it has a net benefit to society (which, to the dismay of the record companies is becoming less and less true by the day).

I think that calling copyright violations stealing is derived from the legal marketing of the recording industry and other stakeholders in monopoly rents from copyright. After all, what better way to get the public on your side than to try to assign an erroneous but much morally stronger word to the violation of a law you strongly care about.

My daughter and her friends are right, copying is somewhat like trespassing, but not at all like theft.

The Future of Recorded Music

Once upon a time, I wrote, arranged, played the instruments for, mixed, and produced 17 songs on two CDs (here and here - they're free!). I really wrestled with whether or not to try and make money from those efforts for, um, well 15 or 20 seconds - 25 seconds top. Okay, maybe "wrestled" is a little too strong, but hey, I did at least contemplate it.

The reason I decided not to even try to make money is that the success of a band (or artist) and its music is only partly dependent on the music. More important is the marketing: the shows the band does (choreography, pyrotechnics, stunts, and other entertaining moments), the persistence of the band staying in the public's consciousness, the news and buzz about the band (personalities, arrests, drug use, etc.), and so forth. Sure, the music of some popular bands is pretty good, but some popular bands have pretty marginal musicians with pretty marginal songs. In any case, the music of popular bands is no better in any objective sense than the music of many unknown bands.

Relatively recently, I stumbled upon an interesting blog called Cerebellum Blues. Jeff Shattuck, the blogger, suffered a brain injury and woke up with a "rekindled" desire to write songs. He's now recorded his first album and is wrestling with how to make money from his efforts. He's spending a lot longer than 25 seconds thinking about it though. That got me thinking about it again as well.

Unfortunately, I've come to the same conclusion: even though his songs are, in my opinion, quite good, he's going to have a tough, tough time of it. Especially since he can't really do the concert thing due to persistent dizziness due to his brain injury.

The standard business model assumes that the demand side of the equation is the people who want to listen to music and the supply side of the equation is those involved in producing the music to satisfy demand.

However, in the case of music, demand and supply are also inverted in some sense. Humans are driven to create, and creating music is particularly fun and satisfying (at least for people like me). It's even more satisfying when people actually listen to your music. For example, I can't imagine that even a single musician or song writer would say something even vaguely like, "I couldn't care less if people listen to my music as long as I make money at it." Everybody wants to write and play for other people. That's a fundamental need.

In the case of that need, the demand is for people to listen to your music. The supply is then those people who are willing to listen to that music. In other words, regarding satisfying the need of the musician or song-writer to have others listen to his or her music, that musician should be paying the listeners, not the other way around.

However, first let's consider supply and demand from the more traditional perspective. Even from this perspective it's tough and getting tougher to make money solely based on recorded music.

Supply

Let's say approx 1 in 10,000 people has wherewithal and motivation to write and record songs with no expectation of generating any income from the recording those songs. Why might these people do that?

1.) Musicians create "demos" to get gigs at various venues (vast majority).
2.) Serious hobbyist (me for example, also silicon-valley entrepreneurs after IPO).

I'm guessing that there are on the order 100,000 such people in the United States alone, and soon there will be 1,000,000 such people worldwide. Let's say each writes 10 songs a year. That's 10,000,000 new songs per year. However, songs are forever (for example, I noticed that my 13 year old daughter has a 40 year old album by the Beatles on her iPod). So there will be around 1 billion new songs created per century.

Cost of Supply

Each song can be replicated for tiny fractions of a penny. With today's equipment, it takes maybe 40 man-hours per song to record and engineer (mix) and the efforts will likely result in a pretty high quality recording. The recording equipment is an iMac (or other computer) with a few hundred dollars of software (or even free if you don't mind some limited functionality and an occasional crash) and a few microphones (for vocals and to mike the instruments, amps and drums). The musicians have instruments which may be quite expensive, but they probably don't need anything special for recording.

So there's very little cost and very little effort involved in recording songs. Other than the musicians' and song writer's effort, the total cost can be almost nothing.

Demand

My guess is that an average person is interested in listening to maybe 10,000 different songs in a lifetime. My personal observation is that about half the people can't even really tell if a recording is in tune or not and another 40% can tell but don't really care very much. As a result 90% of people are happy enough with fairly low quality recordings and certainly today's computer based recording equipment is plenty good for that. Therefore, the vast majority of songs being recorded are good enough for 90% of the population.

With 1 billion songs per century and the need for a total of 10,000 songs, that's an oversupply of 100,000 to one! Even dividing by some large number of genres and even if I'm off by orders of magnitude, that's quite an oversupply for 90% of the population.

Connecting Supply to Demand

One argument against free music in the past is that there may be millions of songs, but how does one find songs that they like? Certainly some intermediary like a recording exec needs to do some filtering, right?

Well, no. One problem is that the recording execs can't get through the millions of songs either, so that route guarantees inferior music being distributed.

Technology to the rescue! With the Internet radios (Pandora, Jango, last.fm, etc.) people rate songs so you'll be automagically fed songs you like!

More on Supply/Demand Inversion

It's actually already nearly gotten to the point where Supply versus Demand has inverted, where the supply is ears to listen and demand is songwriters who want to have their music heard. Jango has a service call Jango Airplay where song writers can pay to have their music heard. It's $30 for 1,000 plays (i.e. a thousand individuals will be fed your song when listening to Jango). Pretty cool really. And the 90% of the population that's not to picky will have no reason to ever pay for recorded music again. Who knows? Eventually they may even get paid to listen to songs.

Back to Jeff. The best chance he has, in my opinion, is that he has a unique and interesting story (at least to me): "Suffered a serious injury and woke up with a rekindled desire to write songs." Seems like that could get him some human interest stories in major media which might bring people to his site and sell his CDs.

However, from what I can tell, he seems determined to "make it" based on the quality of his songs. Though his songs are good, I wish him luck because I think he'll need it.

Music Back Online

I've recently put the songs I've written and recorded back online at last.fm. The two albums are Let's Party and Schizophrenia and the music is freely downloadable. If you're curious and have time to listen to just one song, I recommend Circle on the Schizophrenia album.

The process of putting music online is sure a lot easier than last time I did it ten years ago. The interfaces are much better, both the interface to "rip" the CDs (I used iTunes) and the interface to last.fm. The faster Internet certainly helps a lot too.

The MP3 encoding seems to be better as well (or maybe it's just the faster bit rates) and the music sounds almost as good as it does directly from the CD. Since CDs are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, it's nice to have the music in reasonable quality MP3 format available everywhere for people to download to their iPods.

Since I've never intended to sell the music and since I don't think much of Copyright laws (as regular readers know), this music is free for any and every use, as far as I'm concerned.

Drunken Debauchery of the Past

Reading Throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater at Thought Mesh reminded me of a blues song I wrote in the 70's called Wellesley which chronicles the drunken debauchery of those around me (Note that it's not about me; it's about a frat brother). I didn't actually get around to recording the song till much later, but it still captures the essence of some behaviors from thirty years ago. This song is actually a man-bites-dog story in that, unusually and surprisingly, the drunken encounter didn't actually end with sex.

The amazing thing about being alive a long time is that you see that human nature and behavior changes very, very, very slowly, if at all.