Cory Doctorow is always worth watching: insightful, funny, often provocative and consistently knowledgeable. OK, so I’m a bit of a boingboing fanboy. And yes, the video was posted weeks ago, but I’m just now getting to it.

In this talk, part of the Cambridge Business Lectures series, Doctorow brings together two key topics which I’ve seen lots of folks discuss separately:

• The Internet as perfect copying machine, including the absurdities of digital restrictions management (DRM) and the necessity for changes to business models as a result of a changing technology landscape
• The Internet as (nearly) perfect mechanism for bringing people together for collective action both serious and banal

It’s a mash up of Lawrence Lessing on copyright (including references back to John Philip Sousa’s concern about atrophying vocal cords if recorded music is allowed to circulate) and Here Comes Everybody era Clay Shirky (discussing the traditional cost of organizing, getting large numbers of people working together as the single largest problem for companies to solve in the information age).

There’s also, though, enough Cory Doctorow here to prevent it from feeling like any kind of rehash or unauthorized, second generation degraded copy. My favorite example:

Paris Hilton’s genitals have joined the undead – they will live forever, stalking the Internet until the last plug is pulled on the last network router.

Doctorow points out th risk that the first discussion – the internet as copy machine – has largely distracted us from the second – the internet as a fundamental connecting machine. Here he overlaps a bit with The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It era Jonathan Zittrain, arguing that we can’t allow the solutions to the former use to kill the value presented by the latter. Or, as Doctorow puts it:

We need to have a balance, a detente, that says to these firms, “You can try to make your living, but you can’t do it at the expense of the system that is delivering all of this public benefit. Not just copying movies, but beyond that – beyond that small parochial concern – allowing us to organise ourselves in ways that ennoble the human condition, and if you make it a choice between the Internet and Police Academy sequels, eventually society is going to vote for the Internet, so you can’t make it that choice.”

Well said, indeed – and I liked some of those Police Academy sequels.

One of this morning’s sessions at Public Media 2007 was on music discovery: “how has the internet changed the process of music discovery for listeners.”

Panelists included Geoff Mayfield (Director of Charts and Senior Analyst, Billboard), Pinky Gonzales (Echo Music), and Ben Roe (RoeDeo Productions), as well as Bruce Warren (Assistant General Manager for Programming, WXPN) who ran the panel.

The panel started with a piece from “On the Media” about WBEZ’s decision to drop Jazz programming, and the fact that even many of the jazz aficionados they surveyed who admitted they didn’t actually listen to jazz on the radio.

This set the context for the conversation: what has replaced the radio as a mechanism for discovering new music?

Geoff Mayfield went through some of the recent history of music purchasing as it shifts from “physical product” to digital.

First, he pointed out that the last 5 years are not the first “slump” in Billboard history. There was a “post-disco crash” from 1979-1982, followed by a long and steady boom period from 1983-2001. 2001-now, of course, is a strong and fairly consistent decline – less steep of a decline if you add back in digital downloads, but a clear decline nevertheless.

He also pointed out the sheer dominance of the “head” as opposed to the “long tail,” at least in terms of numbers sold: in 2005, 9.7% of the new releases accounted for 96.5% of the new releases sold. The shift to singles is pretty evident as well – one of the impacts of digital distribution has been the shift back to singles from albums.

Interestingly, the biggest week for physical purchases is the week leading up to christmas – the biggest week for digital downloads is the week after xmas.

Benjamin Roe was unfortunately unable  to show his presentation (Oh, the tech issues which can plague the Mac laptop user in a PC world.)

He talked about the consistent decline of album sales, but held up against it a contrasting trend which is increasing interest in music overall – greater sales of instruments, interest in American Idol, iPods, etc.  I’ve seen this quite clearly myself – I buy more albums now than I used to, largely as a result of listening to podcasts and radio sessions (streamed over the internet) and reading MP3 blogs. (In fact, I often talk about discoving music this way on Goatless, my other blog).

He talked about a number of ways music discovery is working today – the classical podcasts from the Gardner museum in Boston, a 16-year old operatic singer who posted a video of herslef singing a challenging aria on YouTube, and got an instant community of supporters (including a vocal coach), and podcasting.
Pinky Gonzales described the business of Echo Music as being about creating new relationships between musicians and their fans.

He mentioned as an example the band Rascal Flats – at one point they were the highest seller on the (country, I assume) charts and at the same time the most traded (country artist, I assume) on file sharing networks. This doesn’t mean that being traded on the P2P networks caused them to be the best selling, or vice-versa, but it does suggest that being popularly traded didn’t exactly doom them to obscurity either.

From Echo Music’s perspective, it’s about exposure  as an opportunity to build a relationship. Radio used to be the trusted friend who recommends cool new things, but it isn’t anymore. One example of the kind of thing which is replacing it is musicians making recommendations – audience members proved (in research) more receptive to getting recommendations about new music from a musician they liked than they were to a recommendaiton from their own friends.

What should bands looking to find an audience do? It has never been easier to get your music out there – unfortunately, you can’t make people like it. Get a website, get a myspace account – start there. you need an email list, and you need to communicate regularly to that list.

In addition, you need a “live experience,” you need a culture – you need something for the audience to connect to.

The conversation in the panel as a whole touched on a lot of different things -  “buzz” bands online, MP3 bloggers, internet streaming, podcasts.

In the end, I think the clear trends were:

1. There is a “long tail” of music – but in terms of mass commercial success via album sales, blockbuster pop releases remain few and far between. Massive commercial radio airplay is still the main draw here.
2. For a smaller, more dedicated audience (people, for example, who actually pay attention to what albums were released this week or are coming next month), there are many new mechanisms for locating music – mp3 blogs, podcasts, internet radio streams, and services like Last.fm or Pandora.
3. There is still a valid role for the editor here – someone who helps to filter the noise from the music, as it were, and recommend new music to listeners interested in hearing it.
4. Being successful as an artist still means producing quality music – creating something that people connect to – but the mechanisms by which people find that music may be changing.

It’s great to see Jobs, and Apple, coming out against DRM, which has long been the reason I never buy music from iTunes.

But as Lawrence Lessing points out, why does Apple have to wait for the majors to come around?

So bravo to Apple and Steve Jobs. About this I am happy to be proven wrong. But then here’s a simple next step: There are artists on iTunes whose creative work is Creative Commons licensed. Colin Mutchler is one. When his stuff first went into iTunes, he requested the DRM be turned off. The request was refused. But if no-DRM is Apple’s preferred policy, then let them begin here.

Getting DRM selectively enabled or disabled on iTunes would go along way toward showing the major labels that it can be done.