Scott, I agree wholeheartedly with your recent posts. Last night at NoisePop in San Francisco, Celia and I began a discussion on the same topic and we largely agree on the premise that artists should be paid fairly, handsomely in fact if their work rocks.

That being all said, the challenge is how to confront the nature of digital’s inevitable rise to reality and dominance. The absence and demise of physical media is a foregone conclusion. Digital fidelity is here today. The only folks complaining about the lack of quality are audiophiles. Media is merely a storage issue. We are moving to an era where access to the internet will be ubiquitous and without wires. Quad processors for the home computer are on the horizon.

So now, where does the artist and his posse go? Technology has wrought this digital nightmare on all of us but the optimist in me also believes that technology will have us. The technology has to have key attributes ~ the ability to get paid or pay for the artists’ work, the fans have to be in the value chain, artists should be able to monitor and monetize the use of their work, provide licensing opportunities, and on and on and on…

One of my goals it to start an imagineering session on several items:

1) What do artists want in a digital world?

2) What do managers want?

3) What do labels want?

I am looking for specifics, i.e. “need the ability to monitor where my songs are being played”

I don’t promise solutions but technologists like myself work on precise functional specifications. Who knows? The idiots on this blog may be the ones to spark the elusive solution to the digital nightmare.

To be part of the solution, we need to figure out what we are solving first. There is rarely a information problem that can’t be coded. Understanding what we want is the down payment for the music industry’s future.