David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists and Megastars

David Byrne’s describes 6 music dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els, each offer­ing var­i­ous lev­els of artis­tic con­trol. The totally DIY model is cer­tainly not for every­one — but that’s the point. Now there’s choice. What I like about this piece is how David Byrnes defines music, and that by doing so expands the idea that it is just a piece of plas­tic meant to be bought, sold, traded and replayed end­lessly in any con­text. We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fab­ric: to con­gre­gate at con­certs and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Inter­net) as a form of social cur­rency; to build tem­ples where only “our kind of peo­ple” can hear music (opera houses and sym­phony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their polit­i­cal beliefs.