A while back, I released an e-book called The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. Some people seemed to like it, and I’ve started on a new book tentatively called 100 Questions I Keep Getting Asked About Music Online.

But completion seems a way off. At my current rate of progress, we’re talking end of August — maybe mid-September.

But the e-book seems a good idea, and people seem to like downloading them and sending them to each other. So, just as an experiment, I’ve compiled a short PDF e-book based on a series of blog posts I did last year about things that haven’t changed as a result of the internet.

This one features a much smaller number in the title.

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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.

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This conversation is responsible for my next book

Sometimes speculative public funding works. Friends of mine went to South By Southwest Interactive. They’re smart people, they’re from Birmingham, and the idea was that they would bring back new perspectives and new technologies that would help the creative and economic wellbeing of the city as a whole. As far as I’m concerned, this was a resounding success.

Yesterday, they met up to chat about what they’d learned from it - and they put it online, live, as they chatted. I saw it after the fact, as you can here. Sadly, three of the six participants spend most of the time off-camera - but even so, I actually found this inspiring.

And here’s the important bit: I’m actually going to do try and do something interesting because this happened.

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I’ve made the observation in the past that the internet can be thought of as being like electricity, and all of the different things that can plug into it are like appliances. Web browsers, email software, instant messengers, media players and so on.

I’ve also made the observation that quite a lot of the time, when we use the one of these things - say, the web - to do online music, the effect is a bit like trying to dry your hair with a toaster. It’ll do the job, but it feels like there’s probably a better way to approach this.

So now that we’ve got that idea lodged in your head, let’s talk about the actual characteristics of the internet. Which means that we also need to talk about the characteristics of digital media generally. And to do that, let me tell you about the next generation of my own family.

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