In NJ, summer 2011, I witnessed a violent conversation about what is the best mobile music app. It pretty much sums up the state of mobile music streaming in 2011:

Alternatives that come to mind are MOG and Grooveshark—both of which share the same main attraction as Rdio and Spotify: on-demand streaming. They are fundamentally different from discovery-centered apps like Pandora. Last.fm and exfm are in the cross. Who’s back do you have…what’s your vote? ▼

Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson performs in 2005. – Photo: Andrew Kendall.

“If you haven’t got a scene you’ve gotta’ set your own scene” said Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson at 31:40 and “keep your ears peeled” for song ideas said drummer Nick Hodgson at 51:00 during their interview below with Steve Lamacq on BBC Music:

3OH!3 singer Sean Foreman performs in California in 2009. 3OH!3 reportedly reached “3.7 million fans via 304 different artists” through Headliner.fm. Photo: Flickr/msimmondsphotography

“Promotion on the social web was broken. We wanted to see if we could make it better.” –Mike More, Headliner.fm co-founder.

This interview was a long time coming. Mike More (@mikemore) had introduced himself to me last June via email. He was excited to talk on the phone about what he referred to as fan trading—the concept behind his new startup Headliner.fm which mirrors live music’s headliner-opener relationship online.

What’s the story behind Headliner?

MM: We [Mike More and Bill Cromie] were working with all the major labels, TV networks, and film studios helping them to promote their new release via video on the social web. While we were doing this we realized how broken music promotion and marketing for bands and artists on the social web was. We also saw early on the move from the inbox to the stream or real-time communications and that this was growing very quickly. So we put our heads together and thought like a band or artist. We asked ourselves what is the best way to reach new fans on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile devices. The answer was simple: ask other bands with similar fans to tell their fans about your band—collaborative promotion. We liked this idea because having bands become the filters for messages seemed the best way for bands to get the most of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile platforms. Having an artist recommend another artist is like having a chef recommend a restaurant. You know that this person who is making the recommendation has taken his or her time to vet it, and has the background that would allow them to be well-qualified to make a recommendation. Additionally, collaborative promotion rewards bands for their existing fan base and allows them to reach new fans fans in a scalable, authentic way. These ideas were the guiding principles of Headliner and kinda where Nabbr [their previous company] fell short.

Headliner launched in late 2009—what are some things you’ve learned along the way since then?

MM: The most important thing we learned is to listen to our users. Headliner is here for one reason—to serve their needs period. We have just partnered with SoundCloud so our users can check out other bands music quickly and easily before they accept promotions from other artists. This was the number one request by the bands who use Headliner so we implemented it quickly. The SoundCloud partnership allows bands to syndicate their music to Facebook and Twitter—Headliner is becoming an artist-run content syndication network on top of Facebook and Twitter.

How does online promotion compare to offline promotion?

Playing a show you get to get your music in front of a new audience for 20-min or an hour. The audience are having drinks hanging with their friends and having a good time. On radio once your song is added to a national play list your song will be heard by millions of people tens of thousands of times daily. The signal-to-noise ratio is much lower on both of these offline promotions. Radio is like 20 songs 50 times a day and that’s it. Both of these are very hard to replicate on social media platforms. Most large brands would have a hard time replicating the impact of a live show, national radio, or TV campaign online.

Additionally the signal-to-noise ratio on the social web is way out of control. You need to think of social media differently. The only similarities—and what holds true for both—are that you need to have great music and you need to reach a large new audience with enough frequency to break through the noise on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile devices. What we see is that it takes more reach and frequency to stand out on the social than offline. The main advantages of social media are the lower cost of using scalable viral techniques and the quality of new fans you can reach.

On which social network—Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace—does Headliner seem to work the best. Are fans on one network ‘worth’ more than on another? What’s the exchange rate so to speak?

MM: We see a higher response rate on Facebook and Twitter mainly because Headliner only messages fans via status updates. That said, when MySpace changed their band pages and placed status updates on top of the page we saw response rates jump up a MySpace. We have 133 million fans over all about 40 million on Facebook, 37 million on Twitter and 56 million on MySpace. We see this because bands still have a lot of fans or social capital on MySpace music.

I don’t think fans are worth more or less on any platform. A fan is worth more to a band when they’re real and engaged in the band’s music. The exchange rate is one Band Buck to reach one new fan on any platform. That said, bands can choose only to run promotions on Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace so bands can chose which platform they think is most useful for their promotion needs.

How does the pricing work?

MM: We have a freemium model. So any band of any size can sign up for Headliner and reach 15k new fans on us—plus earn Band Bucks for their existing fans and by accepting promotions from other bands.

It’s critical for us that bands have a free service to reach new fans which is better than any paid alternative. We want the free experience to be so good that some portion of our bands will want to upgrade to the Pro level to get a few more bells and whistles.

So for free you get to reach new fans for free on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile. We have two subscription accounts, Pro ($30/month) and Platinum ($50/month), which include additional features [e.g. deeper analytics and location-based targeting. Pro comes with 300k Band Bucks per month and Platinum comes with 750k, equivalent to 300 and 750 "new fans" respectively.]

Do bands that have a larger fan base have greater authority or ranking?

MM: No, bands on Headliner with larger fan bases do not have greater authority. In fact, smaller bands or bands who have smaller fan bases tend to have more reactive fans than bands who have over 500k fans.

We have a chart that ranks bands by how many new fans they reach and how many promotions they accept from other bands. We wanted to create a chart which rewarded bands who are best at cross-promotion other bands.

Do you have any other social web communication insights?

MM: The real-time web or status updates have changed the way fans communicate on the social web. If you look where all the action is on Facebook it’s around status updates. Bands need to get their music into the stream.

Who are your favorite artists—Headliner or not?

MM: That’s easy. I’m a big Wu-Tang Clan fan. We have both Redman and Method Man on Headliner. I love their music.

Tell us about Nabbr—how did you go from Nabbr to Headliner?

MM: Nabbr was a great learning experience for both myself and Bill. We started Nabbr as almost a completely different company. The original idea was for a media-rich list of anything on the web that you could share through social media—think StumbleUpon with video, music, and images. We did not really get that much traction with this idea. So via a conversation with a friend of mine, Steve Greenberg, who was the president of Columbia Records at the time, we came up with the idea for what Nabbr ultimately became—a video-syndication network. Steve had just finished a CD with a new group he signed—the Jonas Brothers. He was very excited about his new group. He’d shot three videos for he same song with three different endings but was having difficulties getting traditional media to give his them any thought. Traditional radio had rejected the idea of playing the Jonas Brothers because of their age and pop music had just fallen out of style, and TRL was a no go. So Steve asked us how we could help get out. I suggested he start a MySpace page for his band—keep in mind this was 2005 when MySpace had about 12 million users—and we would post his videos on the front page of their MySpace page and make the video shareable (pre-YouTube).

This stunt worked okay but did not really move the needle for the Jonas Brothers. As we took a look at the Jonas Brothers fans we saw that one fan owned a site called whateverlife who had 3 million kids showing up a month. I reached out to her as asked her to post the Jonas Brothers video on her front page with a button to vote for the band on TRL within a day the Jonas Brothers made it to #4 on TRL. Steve called me in disbelief and asked me is this was real. I told him first of all you paid us nothing to help you and second of all we are small startup living on Ramen soup and no sleep—what money do we have to invest in your artist? The rest you say is history—shortly thereafter we found hundreds of other social media sites and reached a combined audience of 40 million monthly unique viewers where we syndicated video for all the major labels, movie studios, and TV networks. Since then both video and the social web have exploded.

In a lot of ways Headliner is a much better way to syndicate content on the social web—it’s smarter, faster, cheaper, more targeted, and authentic.

What’s on the horizon for Headliner in 2011?

MM: Our big goal in 2011 to help as many bands and artists as possible to build their fan bases through the power of collaborative promotions. Collaborative promotion is not a new idea for bands but until now has been hard to scale without a platform. We want to help create long-term value for bands and artists who use social media to reach and engage their fans. On this note we plan to roll out more tools to help bands and artists find discover the best bands and artists to promote with. The idea is that the more that a band uses Headliner the easier it should become to message new fans about a new show, track, or post.

// Notes: The interview took place via emails in 2011 and was edited for clarity.

Tom Silverman has made his entire career in the music industry. Circa the early 80s he founded Dance Music Report, the New Music Seminar (NMS) and Tommy Boy Records, now Tommy Boy Entertainment, whose roster includes hip hop staples De La Soul, Naughty by Nature, House of Pain, and more. WE+PR, the public relations team who works with NMS, set up a phone interview for me with Silverman, who had tons to say about the music industry. Stream the full interview—all 55min—by pressing the play button to the ←left—or on Bandcamp.

Our interview took place on January 20, 2011. Later that night he would fly to France to attend MIDEM and I would drive with my dad to Philadelphia—fearless of impending snow—to see my cousin Sharon headline at Johnny Brenda’s. On the phone that afternoon, Silverman told me about some of his early experiences with Tommy Boy Records, thoughts on the current state of the industry, and about the then upcoming New Music Seminar in Los Angeles—NMS LA 2011 took place last week (February 14–16).

If you remember I’d attended NMS NYC 2010 last summer and had heard Silverman speak to the summer crowd inside Webster Hall. I can tell you he is extremely passionate about what’s right and wrong in the music industry, which you’ll be able to hear yourself as our conversation heats up through the interview. Below I’ve transcribed a few select moments.

08:00 Silverman: We aren’t selling records—we’re selling perception. The perceived value of music is 100 percent arbitrary.

09:30 Silverman: He [Steve Jobs] has to work with a gigantic lead time and drop new products every 3–6 months like we drop albums. We haven’t thought about the obsolescence of music [in the way that Jobs thinks about Apple's product lifecycles].

15:45 Silverman: [On iTunes] every time somebody coverts from buying songs to buying an album [Soundscan] deducts it from buying singles. It acts almost as if those singles hadn’t been bought. So if I bought two singles from an artist last year and then I bought the album this year, then that artist gets minus two singles. So that’s also had an impact. In 18 percent of iTunes sales, album sales are ‘complete my album’ sales, and with some artists it’s a lot more than that. So every time somebody completes an album it’s a minimun of one song, but most usually it’s two songs that are minused out. That’s had a major impact in turning song sales backwards, not because less songs are selling, but because single songs are being coverted into albums and then being deducted from singles.

16:45 Silverman: What’s happening right now is catalog sales are dropping off in singles and they’re slowing down substantially in albums (digital albums) because people have already rebought their collections in MP3 form—in digital form.

25:05 RVE: If you’re going to advertise anywhere I don’t know why you would do it anywhere besides Facebook—because of the way you can target stuff. [...] Say you’re in a rock band in New York City. You could target an ad on Facebook to people that like the Smashing Pumpkins that live in New York City that are between the age of 20–25. [...] I wouldn’t advise anyone to buy ads on Google. I know Google makes all this money from ads but I never click on them—I have clicked on Facebook ads.

34:10 RVE: I was reading about [Pablo Picaso] on Wikipedia and there’s so many things that correlate to the music industry. [...] They said the total number of artworks he produced is estimated at 50,000 which is a lot of pieces of [art] but he didn’t sell most of them. He had most of them in his possession when he died. He only sold the ones that he needed to sell to make money. The rest of them he kept because…I guess he just wanted to keep them or was just to busy making art. He wasn’t really concerned with it. I wonder if today if he’d be like taking pictures of it and uploading pictures of it to Flickr…or you know? Also they said that his art has been stolen more than any other artist in the world. [...] He’s pretty much referred to as the most famous artist.

35:35 Silverman: There’s influential art and there’s popular art. Just because it’s popular it doesnn’t necessarily mean that it’s important but it does mean something. Margaret Mead, the famous cultural anthropologist, said “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world—indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” The point is it’s always a small group of people that make all the change. [...] Kind of like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash all in the Bronx doing hip hop and nobody else in the world was doing hip hop—it changed the whole world really but it came from a 5-mile radius.

36:45 RVE: People would probably want me to ask about what you said in the Wired interview last year about most albums being just “noise” from “hobbyists” that clutters the marketplace. I mean I think that came across as kind of like a negative outlook to a lot of people, but I was thinking, aren’t really—I mean a hobbyist is really someone that just does something for pleasure. I think it has sort of a negative connotation [...] but aren’t the hobbyists the ones really driving musical innovation, or don’t you think they’re playing a big part in that?

37:30 Silverman: It doesn’t seem like they are. I always believed that they would be but it doesn’t seem like they are. Why isn’t any of that stuff breaking through? I mean if it’s that fantastic, it’s findable, everything findable, somebody’s got to discover it, and the word needs to spread. Why isn’t all this fantastic, creative, amazing art coming out musically through the web where everything is available accoding to the long-tail theory.

38:00 RVE: You want to think the cream will rise to the top.

38:03 Silverman: And it’s not happening. In fact not only is it not happening, it happened more before there was an internet than it’s happening now. I can tell you when Afrika Bambaataa came out with “Planet Rock” it rose to the top and I had only one or two employees working with me and we ended up selling 600,000 twelve inches. The cream rose to the top better then than it does now.

39:00 RVE: People like choices. Me, I don’t want to hear something that’s like everything else. I want to find [music] that’s different, the stuff that’s cutting-edge, and the stuff that’s changing. I mean there’s so many like generic…I mean there’s a lot stuff that just sounds generic. When you find something that’s really unique, really good, then it’s awesome. The more people you have making music the more likely that’s going to happen.

39:40 Silverman: Definitely there’s five times as many people making music now than there was 10 years ago. There should be five times as many great pieces of music coming through than ever. But the opposite is true. [...] In 2008 there were 1,500 releases that sold over 10,000 units. In 2009 that number dropped to 1,300. In 2008 there were about 200 artists who broke 10,000 for the first time. Less than eight of them were DIY artists that broke on their own or on very small indie labels. [... ] Eight artists breaking on brand-new or on their own labels is pathetic!

41:50 Silverman: Using samples, moving around samples, and working with Garage Band is kind of like the musical equivalent of color by numbers. [...] You don’t have to be able to play an instrument really. You don’t have to be an amazing engineer. You don’t have to go into a studio and know how mic’s work. Anyone can do it. It’s a two-edged sword. On one edge it gives power to the people and on the other edge it gives power to the people who have no abilities.

42:50 RVE: I’d rather have a world where anyone can make music. [...] I think stuff gets filtered by people’s friends. I think people say “hey did you listen to this?” I think that’s still going on but I think it’s going on Facebook and in text messages—I think it’s still going on in person too but it’s also happening on Facebook [...] because it’s easy to share stuff. I think the stuff that’s getting shared more is the stuff that has more readily available in a “content” format.

48:25 RVE: Every TED video that gets recorded goes on YouTube and is available for free…why not do that for NMS?

48:35 Silverman: You know what if I could charge $5,000 like TED charges for people that come and have a waiting list then I’d put everything up there [on YouTube].

48:55 RVE: The way I see it though it doesn’t cost you anything extra to put it on YouTube, right? Wouldn’t it be free promotion?

49:02 Silverman: If we put it on YouTube and people see that then they don’t have to come to the conference. Then it does cost me something because our numbers will go down even further and we won’t be able to afford to do the conference.

49:17 RVE: The New York one [last summer] sold out, right?

49:20 Silverman: It sold out but it sold out at such a low price. [...] It’s a marginal business. Let’s put it this way. Nobody makes money at the New Music Seminar.

52:50 RVE: I just feel like instead of listening to those baby-boomer generation executives I’d rather listen to their kids because I think that’s where you’re really going to learn stuff.

53:03 Silverman: I hear you but nobody’s going to pay to hear their kids talk [at NMS].

// NMS NYC 2010 and NMS LA 2011 both sold out. I think unleashing all the keynotes on YouTube would increase attendance—do you? Who’d you like to see speak at the next NMS?

GigsWiz allows promoters to submit gig details, which, working through APIs, get syndicated to event search sites like Songkick and Eventful. GigsWiz also lets promoters automatically post information about the gig to the Facebook/Twitter streams of the bands on the bill. But the promoters aren’t able to flood the stream—it posts once when the even is first listed and again eight days before it. Event organizers can also keep track of sales as they come in.

Bands have two incentives to join. First is that the service helps promote their shows. Second is that they get a kickback when they promote their shows. GigsWiz has set their ticket fees at a flat 15 percent. A $20 ticket costs $23 and no more. From that 15 percent, 10 percent goes to GigsWiz, and the other 5 percent is potential revenue for the bands. It’s like they’re getting paid to help themselves. For comparison, Ticketmaster has been known to charge upwards of 30 percent.

GigsWiz is based in Finland. They launched in the UK on January 25. Joonas told me that they see the the U.S. and the UK as their biggest potential markets—so that’s where they wanted to start. Right now GigsWiz is best geared for the big music middle class—for venues that have decent-sized shows and the bands that play them. They are also incredibly fit for promoting festivals. Promoters are able to broadcast to the fans of every band on the bill.

The GigsWiz team includes the three co-founders Joonas Pekkanen, Juuso Vermasheinä, and Kai Lemmetty. Joonas said they had previously worked on another tech startup and that his background was more of a techie than a music junkie. Also on board is David Hazan—based in New York—and a handful of programmers in Helsinki. Lemmetty and Hazan are both at NMS in Los Angeles today.

Joonas gave me a quick tour of the interface on our video chat. It seems really easy to use. Screenshots are viewable here.

There’s a lot of green—as a whole music consumption on the web is clearly increasing. One contributing factor to that is that the percentage of people that have internet access is growing. Notably extreme growth occurred for SoundCloud, OurStage, Bandcamp, Grooveshark, and ReverbNation. It’s understandable why SoundCloud is rocketing—it offers rock-solid tools, widgets, community, and an API. In summer 2010, SoundCloud launched a Creative Commons search page. Like Indaba Music, SoundCloud is heavily geared towards electronic music and producers. IMO electronic music is growing faster than rock and has more room to evolve. In my analysis of the 2009 heat map, I referred to Grooveshark as Jaws-like and this year was another feeding frenzy. Grooveshark now gets more visits than Last.fm. But let’s zoom out and view the bigger picture:

In February 2010, Sysomos reported that approximately 31% of YouTube videos are music—roughly one out of every three. The YouTube Music area on the map below represents this 31%. Its size is roughly equivalent to 3x everything else combined. Compared to YouTube, Grooveshark is a minnow. You want pop perspective? According to the Compete data, ladygaga.com had more visits in 2010 than any other artist, and although her traffic decreased 55% over the year, she still gets 5x as much traffic as nin.com. According to data from Next Big Sound, Lady Gaga videos got played 45 million times on Vevo* in December 2010. Dividing that number by the 2 million unique visitors that Compete estimated for Vevo that month tells us that the average Vevo user watches 23 Lady Gaga videos per month. Scream now if you have to. Who had the most visited website at the end of the year? I thought is was going to be paramore.net, who with over 400,000 website visits in December 2010 had Eminem, Bieber, and Gaga all beat. But it was taylorswift.com who had the most, with close to 600,000—that’s like half of Bandcamp right there.

Bonus tracks: Right now The Pirate Bay gets as much traffic as MTV.com. Based on its current trajectory Pandora will soon surpass The New York Times. The most popular music magazine online is Rolling Stone—2.2M visits in December 2010. The most popular music blog is Pitchfork—1.4M visits in December 2010—like two Hype Machines. NPR is in the same ballpark as Last.fm.

Update 3/20: Based on requests to add additional sites to the heat map, there is now an alternate edition on page two that includes 8tracks and We Are Hunted rather than Thumbplay and Deezer. All are now on the data table. Regarding Lady Gaga’s 45 million plays, Colin—presumably Colin Willis from Next Big Sound—commented that Next Big Sound’s Vevo play count included Vevo plays from YouTube and therefore the 23 Lady Gaga videos per month calculation is inaccurate.

Get On Bits.

Digital is the bomb. When I say ‘get on bits’ I mean get digital. Get on YouTube. Get on Facebook. Get indexed. Become bits. Bits outlive memories. Legacies live on bits. ‘All we are is bits in the cloud.’

Bring Me The Horizon singer Oliver Sykes pushes the edge of the Vans Warped Tour 2010 stage in Dallas, TX.
Photo: earlylove/Flickr

YouTube it.

In 2010, YouTube takes the cake as being the sweet spot for music. Their fact sheet reads currently that “people are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube” and that “52 percent of 18-34 year-olds share videos often with friends and colleagues.” Vevo, which launched in late 2009, saw screaming growth through 2010 largely due to its integration with YouTube. It’s pretty understandable why video is so engaging—it combines multiple senses: sight, hearing, and—if you’re pressing a keypad or touchscreen—touch. Triggering the brain from multiple angles makes for strong communication and vivid memories. Video influences people. Last month in Wired, TED curator Chris Anderson and Jon Chu talked about how access to free online video accelerates innovation. Chu used the example of kids who learned dance moves by watching videos of other dancers, “Kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it to create a whole new dance style in itself. This is happening every day. And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages with cheap webcams come the world’s great dancers of tomorrow.”

Live is unique.

Seeing a live show is an experience—it’s not a product, but that’s not to say that it can’t be captured on one. Ask Aderra, a company who “records live concerts to flash drives and MicroSD wristbands which are available to the audience immediately after the performance.” Their USB drives can also be used to access exclusive content on the web. It’s important to realize that experiences have more intrinsic value than products.

Cut the intro.

Get right to the hook. Two time lessons in 2010 were seconds and clicks. At NMS NYC 2010, Jay Frank (@futurehitdna) said that artists have, “10 seconds to engage someone—to impress them.” He said to “clicks to content,” because the more clicks it takes, the more it’s bye-bye attention span. In a way this explains the addiction to YouTube, whose videos are one mere click beyond Google search results. “Anything more than two clicks and you’re missing out on the majority. … Impress them fast.” If you’ve made it this far into the post, you’re a champion, and deserve a video for the rest of the ride.

API breakout.

Expect to see more mashups based on music APIs. Most notable IMO are mashups built on APIs from The Echo Nest and from SoundCloud. The Echo Nest is a data-driven startup that launched in 2008. Its platform is in use on MTV Music Meter, MOG All Access, Indaba Music, Bandintown, exfm, and more. Based on data from Compete, web visits to SoundCloud were up 850% in 2010. A number of apps—many mobile ones—support integration with SoundCloud. Keep Grooveshark on the radar, their web visits were up 235% based on Compete, and unofficial Grooveshark API documentation is available on APIshark. The Grooveshark library is also accessible through the Tinysong API. Spotify too has potential for a mashup explosion. See the API list: 30 Music APIs.

Mystery tour.

There are several events/ticketing services out there beyond Ticketmaster/Live Nation, such as Eventful, Songkick, Ticketfly, and Live Music Machine. Ticketing is mysterious and because of that I think less music startups have gone in its direction. But live music is really what music is all about, and I think we’re going to see a lot more action in this space, especially when more people have smartphones and are using location-based apps. But the question I’m asking about ticketing is, ‘what could possibly stop Facebook from wiping away the entire online ticketing industry with an official ticketing service within Facebook Events?’

Brainmelt.

I’d like to write about licensing, but it’s just so boring and complicated, still, in 2011, and this article is already way to long for the YouTube Generation. I do think something about the licensing needs to change, especially in the U.S. where “WTF is SoundExchange?” is the typical reaction, and many musicians believe that receiving payouts from rights organizations is a straight-up myth—it’s not, but setting it up may melt your brain. For now what I think is worth knowing is that the majority of money that SoundExchange pays out comes from Pandora. So if you’re on Pandora, then you definitely want to be registered with SoundExchange. If you’re asking “how do I get on Pandora?” then read this. First, push to the end of this article. You made it this far. I promise you it’s worth it.

Born free.

If you asked Austin Powers what he thought about the internet, I know exactly what he would say..: “it’s freedom, baby, yeah!” His nemesis, Dr. Evil, would be saying “throw me a frickin’ bone here!” Who would you rather be? Free is the nature of the internet and what makes it such an advance. If you’re not embracing that free spirit, then you’re in the wrong industry. It’s like the accelerated innovation I mentioned at the start of this rap. Everyone is building on each other’s work. It’s human nature. Pablo Picasso would tell you that “good artists copy—great artists steal.” Picasso didn’t become famous by making a few great paintings. He became famous by making thousands of them. He only sold the ones that he needed to, keeping the rest in his possession, and nowadays I can’t help but wonder if he’d be getting them on bits. Really it comes down to more than creating fresh music, but being innovative on every front, and living it. That, my friends, is art. // @ryanve