This is where crowd-sourcing might work – I agree with your idea that we put it out to the community to see if we can coin a new phrase more in keeping with the times.

Are we ready for a change Greg. NO MORE DJ’s. We are no longer Disc Jockey.
We are ‘MUSIC MASTERS’. Those to can put and theme a show should be called what they truly are. MUSIC MASTERS. Take the lead on this. Maybe put it out to your network and see what comes back. I used to be a DJ but now I’m a MM.

Dave Charles

There are indeed miracles in physics, until they are fully understood, and with so much of physics as yet not fully understood, that leaves a lot of miracles. Particle spin, string and membrane theory, and even gravity are a few of my favourites.

As for artists wanting to benefit from their work, I think the question is one of extent. I know quite a few musicians who are happy just to be able to make enough to continue making music – that is the type I’m referencing in my comment about the desirability of artistic patronage. Certainly, that doesn’t cover every musician, and perhaps it doesn’t even cover most. There’s a great interview with Moby in which he addresses this very point, at:

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090811/mossberg-does-moby/

I certainly did not say or mean to imply that even the most obviously “shark-like” music industry folks are evil. In fact, I took pains to show that it is the process itself that I think is the issue. Put another way, sharks are a part of the ocean’s ecosystem, and are as essential to its well-being as any other other creature. Just as one creature’s prey is another creature’s predator, one person’s “exploitation” is another person’s promotion.

Finally, I’m not sure where I led a reader to believe that our application had anything to do with “putting artist’s songs on our website and putting Google ads around them”. In fact, our application is nothing like that – it is a completely new way of delivering music that has nothing to with putting songs on web sites and nothing to do with Google ads, although you were correct in assuming that there is a revenue split for the artist. I hope when I finally get to let the cat out of the bag that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you find.

Three things:

What I really need as an artist is creative space, courtesy of a benefactor who doesn’t really care about making money

I think artists want to benefit from their work as much as everybody else. If this was real artist’s attitude s/he would not need patrons…to be in it more for the money than the art but rather would upload her/his songs to a website and let people listen to them for free, and maybe to just make a decent living s/he would put Google ads around it. This is one thing.

Humans do exploit other humans for their own benefits, it is in our nature. And yes, music industry does it too. It exploits musicians and their fans. Artists want to sell their songs for as much as they can. The fans try to get them the cheapest way, possibly by torrent or the like. Music industry solves this problem by staying in the middle. So they are not all evil. They are helping artists to draw money from their fans and providing the fans with the music. Everybody should be happy, but humans are also greedy so we keep complaining. This is the second thing.

Mediazoic’s role here is (there is nothing wrong with it, it is the way is should be, it is physics) to take part of the music industry’s business and make both sides of the fence (the fans and artists) to complain little less. So, Mediazoic will put artist’s songs on their website and put Google ads around them and do a revenue split between themselves and the artist. The fans will listen for free as they wanted but they have to click the ads. That is the third thing.

The money equation remains constant.

I definitely agree with your “diagnosis” about envy of other peoples’ success. Because there are a few “overnight successes”, some are led to believe that such a path is the rule rather than the exception, when you and I both know that just isn’t the way things work. A focus on research and best practices is great advice – find the positive paths to keeping you going where and when you can, and pretty soon you’ll realize you’re just where you wanted to be.