So I’ve started writing this e-book, and I thought it would be appropriate to just lay out a bit of an introduction that explains where I’m coming from. This is what I came up with.

100 Questions I Keep Getting Asked About Music Online

INTRODUCTION

I do quite a bit of consultancy, teaching, seminars and workshops, as well as have quite a few conversations at meetings, in cafes and at friends’ houses on the topic of music online.

The range of experience and expertise the people I have these conversations with ranges from complete ignorance to total mastery. But I always come away from those conversations knowing more than I did going in.

Usually it’s because I’ve been told something about how musicians and the music industries work, sometimes it’s been because I heard about something internet-related I hadn’t previously been aware of (after all, it’s a big place, that internet) - and quite frequently, it’s because I find myself having to clearly explain something I had long taken for granted and hadn’t really thought through properly until that moment.

I thought it might be valuable to address some of those questions in a form that you can take away and flick through. That way, you can perhaps locate some of the things you weren’t quite sure about and see if my take on them helps clarify things at all. With any luck, the answers to these questions will spark some more questions, but hopefully, the answers in themselves will be useful too.

Of course, there aren’t exactly 100 questions that I get asked all the time. I’ve cut this down from a much bigger list. These are the 100 most frequently recurring, although they are often worded differently. My hope is that the answers here will help you understand the online music environment a little better, give you a bit of confidence moving forward, help you know the terms to use and what to ask for when you deal with web designers and internet-savvy audiences, and hopefully save you time and make you money along the way.

I’m not going to assume any prior knowledge - so my apologies if this all seems a bit rudimentary. I’ve oversimplified a lot of things in the interests of general accessibility, rather than technical accuracy. My assumption is that a) you make, teach, promote, distribute, sell, or are somehow otherwise involved in music. I am assuming you have sent and received email and that you have visited a web page - and maybe a search engine like Google.

With that in mind, let’s start with the basics.

That’s Monday.