Social media and the music industry

On the heels of my recent blogpost about the use of social media by music festival organisers and promoters, I was happy to hear about David Usher's CloudiD blog through Mitch Joel's Six Pixels of Separation podcast. Usher is the former lead singer of Moist and a social media early adopter. From what I've seen, he's got a Facebook profile and has played with YouTube. He's even following me on Twitter for some strange reason. Talk about pressure to perform.

Usher's blog includes some interesting tidbits such as :

My relationship to social media is love - hate
Love-the interaction, the learning, the reading, the ever changing exchange of ideas…the community we create
Hate-that its addictive and self perpetuating-that it becomes the end, that all the reading, all the feeds, all the comments become so consuming

source: Tell me about your creativity

I'm with ya brother. I wonder if it's a songwriter's fate to rhyme what one writes ...

And serious fodder like:

The money has not left the music business, its just moved around a bit. Its gone from the labels and retail that use to distribute content to the isp’s, mobile and social networks that now distribute content. Music drives traffic and artists hold the keys to musical content. If artists could organize they could redefine the metrics of social networking. Imagine a social network that routed most of the ad revenue back to artists. Even more important that cuts artists in on the equity and multiples of the social network, based on traffic. (and just for fun add non profit component). Metrics are not cut in stone.

source: I have a dream : if artists could organize

I hope he'll let me buy him a drink at PAB or at PodCamp Montreal in September (soon to be announced). Or, why not, a 3e mardi Third Tuesday Montreal event. I'd like to pick his brain about where he sees social media and the music industry in 5 years.

Until then, I'll happily add his blog to my blogroll.