Ive been a professional musician for 18 years now. I’ve done pretty well, sold 1.3 million ‘records’, toured the world and I’m one of the lucky ones, I still love making music. In fact I’m am still obsessed with it, trying to write that perfect song.

At the beginning everything was crazy and exciting, creative and new. Rock and roll crazy. Then digital hit and the money started to drain out of the business. Like the air leaking out of a balloon we watched all the grease that makes this business run dried up. People started to get scared, and rightfully so, for their jobs, lives and for the business they had spent so much time building. This was not a fun time. Being around people in a dying industry is very depressing. Music was still great but the atmosphere of the music business was poisoned by fear.

I started getting heavily into the web a few years ago and the light bulb switched on. I mean it, a light bulb moment. Since then understanding the new principles of the web has become my ‘other interest’. I was school by my good friend Mitch Joel over lunch(s) and the rest of my education comes from Google reader and Google share (amazing what you can learn from reading what the smart folks think is important). I read a lot.

And Voila, there it is. The new world right in front of us.

I love it for 2 reasons.

1. Hope
We don’t really understand how its all going to wash out but the possibilities are incredible. It’s like we have landed on the moon. Its out in front of us. You can stay on the ship or… you can explore (worry about ‘the model’ later)!

2. Creativity
As a musician i love it. There are no gatekeepers, no one has the keys or the money, you really can do what you want, release what you want. You are free to try. It gives you the opportunity to be creative in so many ways the old write, record, release, cycle did not. The trick is figuring out what to do and how to do it.

In this blog I’m going to talk about the convergence of art and tech. Were intellectual property meets the digital domain. how ‘everything is miscellaneous‘ has changed the way we tag and organize the world, walled gardens and data portability, open social, permission marketing and advertising overload, ‘free‘, purple cows and meatball sundaes, six pixels of separation and shed salads, how bob is a genius and how bob is a whining again about the same things, ‘1000 true fans‘, SEO, blogging and micro blogging and why you are what Google says you are etc.

We have landed on the moon. you can stay on the ship and dream of the days when life was good and the CD was king (all intellectual property), or you can walk out onto the surface, and start to explore…

In the old system the CD was valued over all things. As artists (and audience) we bought into the idea that the only thing that mattered was the final product. We were on the 2 year cycle of write, record and release. Then start all over again. Well from all the artists I’ve ever talked to that has very little to do the natural creative cycle and has everything to do with the record companies ability to monetize.

What makes the final recording of a song after its been through the whole process worth more than that fleeting moment of inspiration when the song is just written. Well nothing and as the final product, the CD version of the song, loses its monetary value its time to re-evaluate how we assign value to the rest of the process.

Ive been experimenting lately with uploading songs in different phases of the process. I put up a song called ‘And So We Run’ when i first wrote it, during the ‘romance period’.

Then posted the first time the song was played in front of an audience.

The final version (which i love) will be on the new album. Is one more valuable than the other?

Its time to rethink how we assign ‘value’.

So what do you think has ‘value’?

This blog represents my ‘other’ interest. When I don’t have my head in a song I spend too much of my time reading and thinking about the ever changing crossroads of art, tech, intellectual property and the digital domain. I’m interested in the overriding principals and concepts of how art will function in the new information age, but also looking at practical applications for those who create and control intellectual property.

Many of you will have seen this. The intersection of art, technology and physics. Gravity at work in a program and in a small way, a new element brought into the artistic process. So many things we haven’t thought of yet. (the music doesn’t hurt)