First, I have to say I agree with essentially every single piece of the article. This is clear thinking from someone who obviously has seen all sides of the picture.

But first, I want to talk about a personal example that centres around the role of technology, and spins back around to some ideas.

I discovered this comment via our trusty patio11 in this tweet - https://twitter.com/#!/patio11/status/192482034403393536, which probably emphasises the need for surendipitous discovery mechanisms.

One of the distribution parties I really like (and which got mention in the article) is Bandcamp. As Lowery stated, they only take 15% of the revenue made from bands (it drops to 10% once the artist has >$5000 in rev - http://bandcamp.com/pricing) and provides some really great features, the most significant one I feel being a publicly facing band website which really focuses in one the content (more on their FAQ - http://bandcamp.com/faq).

I was searching for music to code to, and the instant-play feature of bandcamp sites made it so convenient to find stuff I wanted.

The most recent purchase list:
- Glorie - http://glorierock.com/album/glorie
- Maybeshewill - http://maybeshewill.net/discography/ and http://robotneedshome.bandcamp.com/album/to-the-skies-from-a...
- *shels - http://shelsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/plains-of-the-purple-bu...
- Ever Forthright - http://everforthright.bandcamp.com/album/ever-forthright
- Sioum - http://sioum.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-mortal-but-was-fiend
- When Day Descends - http://whendaydescends.bandcamp.com/album/when-day-descends

It all started with the "Recommendations" page of Cloudkicker - http://bandcamp.com/recommended/cloudkicker, which led to the discovery of "When Day Descends" and "Sioum", which in turn led to the rest of the above.

By clicking through the links above, and previewing the tracks, it's obvious that I'm a fan of instrumental rock / metal / post-rock / jazz-metal, etc... and I literally found.

The artists named their prices, bandcamp got a share, and I discovered some insane music that I was more than happy to pay for (all the above only cost me about US$50).

Ok, that's a personal example from this one particular music enthusiast. Some assumptions that made this possible:

- I like discovering stuff. I started by previewing the Song 'CAFO' by animals as leaders on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmfzWpp0hMc&ob=av3e), getting my mind blown, searching for other similar artists, finding Cloudkicker, and then spiraling to the rest of the similar artists

- I've got niche interests. I've been playing the electric guitar seriously for a couple of years (about 4,000+ hours of practice by my best guess), and since all sufficiently complex Melody converges to Metal and all sufficiently complex Harmony converges to Jazz, I end up developing a liking for those "obscure" genres, and don't ever mind the extra work needed to find, learn about, and pay for good music, even if it were just to make myself a better musician. This drives the above discovery process.

- I got a paypal account the moment I turned 18, and wired my (Australian) bank account to feed funds directly into it, and always have enough cash on hand. Not everybody has a convenient source of money to spend, especially not a large chunk of the demographic that finds pirating attractive (teenagers and young adults in particular, especially those in "less developed" areas, though I don't know exactly how much piracy stems from this group)

Hopefully we'll have more technology like bandcamp which make it easier for the creators of music.

But I have a more general gripe. In short, I hate it when consumer-facing, disruptive technology gets adopted too fast. There just isn't enough resource (brain power) to get things right.

What I mean is that the entities who end up winning use "technological solutions" that optimise for market-share instead of creator productivity.

We then end up merely hoping that the market settles upon a solution that has the creator's interest in mind, which is essentially hit or miss. Once the market settles upon the winning model, it typically is there to stay until the next diruption cycle.

I like to raise the example of the iPhone, specifically, iOS.

I just recently developed a substantial app for iOS (substantial meaning > 40k lines of code, not including comments and .xib files), and I can't remember how many times I was swearing at my computer at how atrocious iOS is. non-comprehensive APIs, arbitrary restrictions, non-deterministic view behaviour, potential for retain cycles even with ARC, no backgrounding for sockets, pathetic tooling (had to get a third party openSSL), etc, etc, etc ...

I doubt it was malice on Apple's part, but rather, an optimisation for profit rather than creator productivity (iOS devs). A "slick" interface which is uniformly programmable is all they need, and they weigh the tradeoffs and decide to adopt the existing MacOS platform to build iOS instead of starting from scratch (which would have arguably allowed for much more "developer control"). Let's not even get into the app approval process yet ... that's a whole other mess.n

But I like that example because (a) it was an opportunity to gripe about Apple (sorry, the Lisper in me couldn't resist =P), and (b) there is a significant market opportunity (for music, and for apps), there are high production costs, and the creators of the final product will figure out a way to make their stuff anyway. Which makes it all the more harder to change the existing system without fundamental disruptive forces.

Where can technology help? I honestly don't know. One way is to hope that the disruptor is benign (like Linus and Linux), but more often than not it is profit-seeking, and won't respect the means of production (the artists). Maybe some cryptographers can make specific DRM channels to authenticated parties in a sufficiently general authentication scheme (inherent to the computing environment, and not having to jump through 5 different hoops)? Maybe ubiquitous P2P payment systems will enable musicians (and other artists) to take credit for their work?

I'm starting to ramble, so I'll just end on a positive note, saying that the solution space is sufficiently large, and the non-financial motivation to continue to produce music is enough to constantly drive people toward solutions. We need more technical people (like Lowery) writing articles like this and talking about better ways to approach the problem with a technological solution -- it's the only type of solution which we can rightfully say, "nothing can stop an idea whose time has come".