The sky’s the limit—Ryan Van Etten self-photographed in summer 2010 and ready to take on the world in 2011.

For years I joked that my New Year’s resolution was to get into hard drugs, and have good posture. Well, luckily for my health I never followed through with the former. Actually it might be luckier for your sanity too. I have to say though that my posture has stayed pretty straight. Hell, I think I’m still getting taller at 31.

I know it’s already a month in. It felt like a 25-day jet lag that just avoided a crash landing when I saw a moment of clarity. I have a new resolution for this year—be edgier. And I mean that in a ‘challenge the norms’ and ‘push the motha’ f’n envelope’ sort of way. You can dig it or not. (FYI: You don’t need drugs to be edgy.)

be edgier.

1. High-Octane Friend-Filtered Content

The voices of consumessegers are magnified by the network. Facebook’s upgraded social plugins (e.g. the epic like button integration) are putting fan-driven music into overdrive by making it easier to share your likes with your friends. Take a look at likebutton.me when you’re logged into Facebook and you’ll find an aggregation of your friends likes. Ask yourself, what is it that people share on the web? The answer is better content. Whether it’s entertainment or information, people tend to share the content that they regard as better a.k.a. worth sharing. A lot of shared content comes from mainstream sources, however—like unknown awesome bands—there is plenty of awesome less-discovered content. With the new like button integration, Facebook is changing the mentality around sharing—it’s as easy as liking now. They’ve made it extremely easy to share. The outcome of this is higher-octane friend-filtered content which should help us discover the best content out there.

2. Different Strokes For Different Folks

For some, music is a career, for others it’s recreation, and many players feel stuck in the middle of the spectrum like a pedestrian on a highway median. The overall music scene is expanding and becoming more diverse genre-wise. There’s enough lanes for a steady flow, and that stuck feeling is mostly mental. Music selection is heading towards infinity. Listeners want what listeners want—each has their own taste—but they have to be exposed to it first (unless they decide to create it instead). Is there maximum amount of creativity in the world? Hell no! The roadblocks of physical world don’t always exist on the web. They are a mirage. But everyone sees from a different perspective. When you stop squinting and open your eyes wide, do you see the open road, of a traffic jam?

3. Fans Behind The Wheel

It all starts with a few people who believe in something to the point that they are motivated to share it with their friends. These fans create ignition sparks by influencing their friends. Who’s controlling the music-industry steering wheel now? It’s the fans who dominate social media and communication.

4. Where’s The Free Petrol?

Chris Anderson in 2008: From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you. (Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business)

7:30 Kevin Breuner: I find myself kind of caught in the middle of that being an artist myself who is making music and putting it out there for sale. but at the same time, someone passes me a band that I’ve never heard of, and technically it might be illegal to download the tracks. But at the same time I’m thinking I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, it didn’t cost them anything to get me this copy, and I might actually show up to a show because of it. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

8:00 Chris Anderson: Every band that puts there music on MySpace, which is to say every band, is on some level volunteering to give their music away for free in one form to drive demand for the others. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

9:10 Chris Anderson: Free music has been part of music for as long as there’s been radio. Radio is free music. No one—I don’t know of anyone—who objects to their music being played on radio, even though they may often get no money from that, because they understand the marketing value. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

Kevin Breuner in 2009: The future of music lies completely within the artist’s hands, period. If they want to focus on selling recorded music and their fan base will continue to buy it, selling music will be a big revenue stream for them. If they are fantastic live and want to give away a track to entice people to come to a show, then live shows may be their big revenue stream, but it’s all up to the artist and what their fan base will allow. The future of the music business is NOT in the hands of companies who dream up business models that artist should follow. The future is NOT free music because some guy with a degree and years working in the industry says so. The business plays by the artist’s rules now, and that scares the pants off the gatekeepers that used to make a living deciding what the artists could do. (Music will be free + Touring is where the money is = BS!)

Digital freebies are essentially a free source of advertising, but only if there’s a method behind it. For example, there’s giving away an mp3 in exchange for an email address. Why’s email important? Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin Media (an avant-garde service for midstream–mainstream musicians), reported that close to one-third of their artists’ revenue is driven through email alone and stressed the importance of “being where the fans are.” But here’s a question—does a single fan today account for more, or less, net revenue in the long run? What free tactics do you have packed in your trunk?

Multitouch makes “sense.”

The idea of multitouch sensors has been around for years, but multitouch has yet to see wide-spread implementation in computers. I think it’s coming. I think a wave of multitouch operating systems is going to redefine how we interact with computers. But I think they’ll be touchscreens and gesture-based systems too. I mean after getting used to the iPhone’s touchscreen, I’ve noticed that I want to touch my computer screen sometimes to move things etc. Anyone else catch themselves doing that?

Touch by chrisevans

Computing needs to be intuitive.

Computing needs to be more intuitive. UI advances will address that. Our brain’s hard wiring is capable of a lot more that pointing a mouse—we need to give it the chance to be more creative and boundless. By using our hands differently, with more intuitive movements, we’ll be helping our mind work more naturally. It will make a better fit between the brain and the computer by way of the body. One day we might we have chips that connect to our brain energy, right? Our brain is a super computer, right?

It all relies on intuitive design. Pranav Mistry talked about intuitive interface design in his SixthSense technology presentation. It virtually connects us to the computer via our gestures. According to Mistry, “We are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world.” Think about the games and apps we could make with that. While not nearly to the extent of SixthSense technology, Nintendo’s Wii is somewhat based on gesture recognition but the player has to hold the controller which recognizes movements in 3 dimensions. The Wii is essentially a wireless mouse with an extra dimension—it’s fun but I wouldn’t characterize it as intuitive. Even still, it’s extremely popular.

Rage gets some air on stage during their encore at Lollapalooza 2008 in Chicago.
Image: flickr/revolute