You can't find Austin anywhere. He's barely on the Internet. His unmastered recordings are decaying on a hard drive in a defunct studio, and the venues that loved him have given up trying to find him.

You could choose to have no website, no Facebook page, no videos, no album, no Twitter, no centralized location on the Internet, and never do much of anything on the Internet that could be called self-promotion, and that your fans can and could effortlessly do everything for you…

The name of your brand, the URL you use, the first word you type, the sequence in which you release your songs, your lyrics, the images you feature, the videos you release, the messages you type, and everything you put into your online presence should be part of an elaborate plan to seduce fans.

Do you believe crowds of humans will ever (or do now) sway as much control over the rate and depth of media dissemination as the established media machine does now?

When a westerner (an American for example) walks by the office of a co-worker, and the co-worker is quietly sitting there doing nothing, the westerner’s first reaction is that the co-worker is lazy and probably slacking. On the other side of the world…

The Click Control business-copyright model is one in which rightsholders will (someday) simply and easily suspend and reclaim their copyrights. It makes sense to be able to temporarily and selectively suspend one’s copyrights to encourage adoption (including commercial usage), and then (via the click of a mouse) reclaim their suspended rights someplace along the way to becoming a classic…

The formula stipulates that for a song to obtain maximum traction, all the variables in the formula have to push up and max out. If you plug the formula into a spreadsheet and play around with scenarios, you will notice (it’s all multiplication), that a single low variable sinks a song (this is important). In other words, you need ALL the variables to work for you to maximize the conversion rate from listeners to fans.

The more that I read about the latest and greatest music marketing trends, the more I want to stand up on my desk and shout “don’t go over the cliff with the rest of the lemmings!”

The cost of acquiring a music collection is approaching zero, while the cost of listening to whatever you want is no more than a 30 second ad spot for every sixty minutes of music…

In any business, a good manager should be able to tell you the ‘end-date’. The end-date is a hypothetical day in the future when cash reserves will run dry if expenses continually exceed revenues. Knowledge of the end-date is a huge (negative) motivator. When the boss says: "We need to generate X by next Thursday or else...", people respond like soldiers going to battle.

Written in 2013: Today, a great wireless device has to be a phone, a camera, a computer, a GPS, an e-book reader, an application ecosystem, an entertainment center, a social instrument, a business toolbox, and a great music service. Music probably consumes more device-time than any other phone feature. So, it’s clear that device manufacturers understand that music-as-a-service (MAS) is a core feature that’s essential to competing. However, the current music stack that includes: MP3 acquisition and management, playlist management, playback control, music discovery, music recommendation, and social sharing is outdated and cumbersome.

Does death by obscurity really happen to great songs, or does lack of traction only happen to mediocre songs?

I think this is one of the most important questions that we can ask ourselves. Do most fans just want your music, or do most fans want something else from you beyond your music?

Music absorption is the process that occurs between music discovery and the (self) conversion of an average music consumer into an active fan. I believe the music absorption process is radically different now than it was just two years ago, and understanding how this process has changed should impact your approach to succeeding in the music industry.

Music is now the most naked product on Earth. Music sits upon the shelf unwrapped, raw and void of packaging. Consumers can fully try it before they buy it; they can take it home unmolested; and they can pay for it randomly, or not at all. I can’t think of another product that is so fully exposed and vulnerable to quick and precise, pre-purchase decision-making as music.

You don’t need to hit home runs. 10% weekly growth will get you where you need to go.

Artists, labels and rightsholders, tell the nerds the Internet is already broken. The web is balkanizing around huge ecosystems run by giant companies and paranoid governments.

Art requires investment, as somebody always has to pay the bills.  Investing in artists has to appear attractive on a cost-to-scale analysis basis.  Every attempt: legal, cultural or otherwise, to weaken copyrights is an assault on every artist's capacity to scale via minimal incremental investments, and thus the capacity to compete for investment dollars.

When it comes to music and advertising, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for some artists will not work for others, and vice versa. However here’s one thing I can tell you for sure: too many artists are using advertising as a blunt force instrument. Simply dropping a picture of yourself, your band, or your album art into an ad unit and then indiscriminately campaigning nationwide for clicks will rarely generate the advertising ROI you need to justify spending on another campaign.

What do you call the person that has decided to surrender an email address, follow you on Twitter, or Like you on Facebook? If the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, or as someone said last week: “a fan is someone that buys all your stuff”, then we need an intermediate descriptor that sits between a potential fan that has yet to learn about you, and a fan or fanatic that is already buying your stuff. ‘Pre-fan’ seems like it will work, but why bother? As more and more labels and artists use advertising to bridge the gaps between social media islands, it’s essential to get the advertising return on investment (ROI) calculation correct. If a potential fan is not yet a fan, and if a pre-fan is not really a fan, then you need to apply TWO conversion rates to your ROI calculation.