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Hello,
I thought it might be appropriate for me to write a personal note here as CEO of the company.
First let me introduce myself. I've been in the software business for 23 years. I'm a geek at heart, and like many geeks I'm also an amateur musician. I like to write songs. I'm pretty unprolific so finished ones don't come out too frequently. Still, I hope to find some time in the not-too-distant future to record some relatively recent songs.
But my most unforgettable music experiences were from the time, almost 20 years ago, when I lived in Greenwhich Village and was part of an organization called "The Coop," a singer/songwriter cooperative, from which sprang such artists as Suzanne Vega and Christine Lavin (one of whose songs is on the same CD as one of mine, a collection still available from Smithsonian Folkways, Fast Folk SE 203 Vol. 2 #3). The Coop was founded by the inimitable Jack Hardy.
I heard a lot of great music from local Greenwhich Village artists when I was involved in that scene. Really great music. But you almost certainly haven't heard the vast majority of it. Very few have. Most of the people who made it didn't fit the star system, mass-market mold which is the only mold that the traditional music industry is capable of supporting.
EM is the expression of a dream. The dream is: Artists should be able to sell recorded music purely based on the quality of that music.
They shouldn't have to be photogenic. They shouldn't have to be willing and able to leave their homes and families for months at a time to promote themselves and perform at distant gigs. They shouldn't have to be businesspeople.
In fact, most characteristics leading to success in the traditional music industry have nothing whatsoever to do with music. If someone has those characteristics and also produces great music, it's only a matter of luck that all those characteristics happened to come together in that one performer. But most artists are not lucky that way. That means that the public doesn't get the benefit of being able to hear much of the greatest music being created today, by many of the most talented musicians alive today.
And further, even if an artist has many of the necessary non-musical characteristics, and creates very high-quality music, he or she still won't succeed in the star system unless there is a mass market for that style of music. For instance, my good friend Allen Kovler (a. k. a. Allen Shadow) is a fine songwriter/performer, a Kerouac-influenced rock poet, who is quite strong on many of the right non-musical characteristics. His day job is as a Director of Public Relations! He has the know-how to score reviews of his work in the mainstream press (which have been raves). But the traditional record industry has nevertheless been useless to him; like many non-mass-market artists, he has had to start his own label in order to get his message out.
So part of the EM dream is that shouldn't have to be mass-market music. Music that has the potential to be loved by 10,000 people world-wide is just as valid as the biggest mega-star's music; and in fact might be more beloved by those 10,000 people than any mainstream music is by its consumers. But the major labels would never touch such an artist and the indies don't have the means to connect more than a tiny portion of that potential audience with the artist.
These facts are a tragedy for the artists and a tragedy for the music-loving public.
There is only one way to solve that problem. That is by creating a world in which the only thing worthy artists need to do to succeed is record good music and make it available to the public, taking advantage of whatever means for paying artists is dominant at the time. Today, it's CD's with free promotional mp3's available over the Internet. Maybe tomorrow it will be Web-based tipjars. The payment mechansim doesn't matter from our point of view. We believe there will be some way for artists to be paid, because the end result of the copyright controversy will not be that talented artists don't get to make a living. No one wants an outcome where there is less great music. Musicians, like anybody else, need to pay the bills if they are going to be able to do what they do.
I am convinced that the Internet finally provides the basic materials needed to create that world. Clearly, it hasn't been done yet. That's because the mere fact of the Internet's existence isn't enough, and online reviews written by consumers, such as may be found at Amazon.com and ePinions.com, also aren't enough. Something more is needed.
Emergent Music represents, I believe, the first example of that something more.
I have been thinking about how to solve this problem since the mid 1980's, when I created the first business involving the technology of collaborative filtering. (CF is now used by such companies as Amazon.com for recommendations.) I came to realize that CF alone isn't enough, that something more is needed, and that it must be done on a large scale.
Our aim is to change the music industry. I know that's a big goal for a small company to shoot for. Grandiose, some would say. But the companies that have grown to be major music industry corporations did so by exploiting mass-market, least-common-denominator principles. That's what they know. They simply don't believe that other approaches are possible, and to the extent they do, they see them as a threat to the status quo.
So, the solution has to come from the outside. I believe that this team is uniquely qualified to deliver it (see more on the team, with links, near the end of this letter).
Our Web site, EmergentMusic.com, aims to harness the same principles that allowed Linux to emerge, seemingly out of nowhere, as a competitor to Microsoft. The key is that there are a lot of people who want to change things, who want to be involved in creating an alternative solution; but they need a seed upon which they can build.
In the case of Linux, Linus Torvalds created that seed in the Linux "kernel". Once he had that working in the context of previously-created GNU software, there was a complete, if primitive, operating system that could be added to by thousands of geographically distributed people communicating by means of the Internet. That humble seed was the focal point from which grew an industry-changing operating system, now supported by such companies as IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems.
There is nothing special about computer software that gives it some special ability to be created in this grassroots manner on the Internet. The same basic ideas would can apply equally well to the creating of a encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge, or a directory to new music. The only reason that Linux was the first industry-changing product built in this manner is that the tools that are needed to harness such collective power were, at that time, only usable by software engineers. So, the first major success of an Internet-based collective effort was what one would expect: a software product.
But that situation no longer holds. Our company has created software tools that enable anyone to contribute to such a large-scale collective effort. Not only do they enable anyone with an interest to contribute, but they solve some problems that are getting in the way of the centrally-managed Linux effort by enabling decentralized management of improvements. There are other products aimed at these problems, which are quite useful and successful in their niches of addressing technically-minded people. But these solutions don't provide tools that are simple enough for non-technically-oriented people to fully take advantage of.
Our solution to these problems is available now at the Emergent Music site. It is built from the ground up to be usable by anyone, using mathematics to automatically do much of the work that is done manually by people in earlier solutions. And it is focused on the music world, with the result that it has the potential to be the seed, in the sense that the Linux kernel was a seed, from which a new kind of music industry can start to form.
One way to look at Emergent Music is as an engine with the ability to translate the energy of the music-loving community into attention for worthy undiscovered artists in all genres. It does this through enabling the people who earn the best reputations for making truly valuable contributions to the community -- which they do by identifying worthy artists, writing, and rating -- to have the power to help worthy artsts they believe in. But there's an important twist. This twist causes our music directory to be free of the "influence" of payola and other types of greed-based distortion. On Emergent Music, only worthy artists can rise to the top of the directory for each genre. People who earn reputations for reliability can help their favorite artists rise to the top more quickly, and thus help them; but they will never get to the top if the community doesn't agree that they deserve to be there, or if the community doesn't agree that they are, at the time, truly undiscovered. Come explore the site, and you'll see how this works. The ideas behind it have been years in the making.
In the end, I believe that EM has the potential to become the seed of an entire alternative music industry, the way a grain of sand is the seed of a pearl, and the way the Linux kernel was the seed of a major competitor to Microsoft in the realm of server software. This alternative industry will value musical quality above all other considerations. We believe that there is such a huge need for this alternative to come into existence, for the sake of music lovers and music makers alike, and that it can eventually rival the traditional music industry in size and power.
The last sentence above is one that some people have trouble with. They think that because mass-market music has dominated the scene for so long, it will always do so.
But from my point of view, that is like the railroad companies believing, when powered flight came on the scene, that railroads will continue to dominate because they had done so for so long. (This was a view that prevented the railroad compaines from capitalizing on their position as the already-established and trusted compnies for handling the world's travel needs, and, in the end, resulted in the airlines taking over most of the business for long-distance travel. The outcome could have been very different if the railroads had had more vision.)
The fact is that mass-market music has dominated for so long for only one reason: there has been no viable, large-scale alternative to mass marketing. Marketing was done by means of radio, television (especially as MTV gained prominence), and the print media. Those are all mass-marketing media. Of course mass-marketing-friendly artists dominated. No one else had a chance.
But now other kinds of artists will have that chance. The Internet provides the core capabilities. But the Internet is not enough without custom tools for the purpose of enabling a new kind of marketing. We believe we have provided the additional tools, and we call the new type of marketing that will emerge "merit-based marketing." That is, undiscovered artist will get publicity exactly proportionate to their value to the community. Experience the site first-hand to understand how this works.
It is my belief that, with a viable alternative to mass-marketing in place, the floodgates will open, and large numbers of worthy artists will emerge who never could have before. The average audience size of these artists will be less than the average audience size of mass-market stars. But there will be many more of these artists, and they will add more value to the community. Because of these simple facts, the result will be that the overall volume of music listened to will be on at least the same order of magnitude as in the traditional music industry.
I could be wrong. Maybe such artists will never exist in large numbers. But I am betting that I am right. Partly, my bet is based on my past experience of hearing so much great music that most people will never have access to, even people who I know would love it, simply because it wasn't mass-market music and so could not break out of its local confines. Partly, the bet is made by analogy to other phenomena such as the distribution of the populations of cities, links to Web sites, etc. which tend to follow something called the "Zipf distribution". There is no reason to assume that artist audience sizes won't follow this distribution, followed by so many other similar phenomena, when unconstrained by the limitations of mass marketing. And if they do, there will be more of a total audience for smaller-audience-artists than for artists who are at the top of the star system. This is simply the more reasonable assumption when the current constraints are removed.
Assuming that mass-market artists will continue to dominate when the only evidence is from the time when virtually all marketing is mass-market is, very simply, erroneous reasoning. It is equivalent to having a pair of loaded dice and rolling ten snake eyes in a row, and therefore concluding that the same will happen even with unloaded dice. But no one would doubt that such an extrapolation would be ridiculous, because the fact is that when the artificial constraints are removed, the situation changes entirely.
We believe we are the first to create the real possibility of removing those constraints.
We are only just starting. You will see that there are presently only a few artists represented on our site. But we can grow to a size that will manifest our full potential only if you find the seed that exists today to be truly empowering. So, we welcome your feedback and will support you in every way we can. You will find we are very open to your ideas, criticism, etc. We want to make this site work for you, and we realize we can't do that alone. If you're a worthy but unknown musician, or have some interest in the success of such a musician, this is your site. It's made to solve the biggest problem you face: helping the worthy musician connect to his or her natural audience. And if you're a music lover tired of being spoon-fed least-common-denominator music through the mass media, this is also your site.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Luckily, the technology business has treated me well enough that I've been able to personally provide the seed funding for EmergentMusic.com. I have also been lucky enough to be able to put together a great team. Bob Swerdlow has been dedicated to technical excellence for many years and has several industry awards to prove it. Matt Goyer as already made a name for himself as one-half of the founding team of FairTunes (now MusicLink). (Read more about me here.)
You can now experience the results of our hard work. If you share our dream that musicians who make good music should succeed without regard to factors like physical appearance, industry connections, and mass-marketability, none of which have anything to do with the quality of their music, I personally invite you to join us and help make the dream come true.
Enjoy!
Gary Robinson
CEO Transpose, LLC (creators of Emergent Music.)
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