Music is both culture and commerce. Those two things are inextricably linked. In different periods of history and in the context of different technologies and media forms - music culture and music commerce are profoundly different.

The way to navigate the changes as they happen is to understand them. In order to adapt to the new environment and thrive it’s important to make informed, deliberate and progressive responses that are appropriate to the opportunities new context – rather than fearful, reactive and conservative ones that view the new environment simply as a threat and as chaos.

This book aims to provide a guide to those changes – not to tell you what you should do – but so that you can make intelligent, rational and strategic choices about your own music business, or so that you can come to understand the changes in the ways in which music is used and understood as part of our new and increasingly dominant music culture.

More about this book.

1. About this updated version
2. Introductory note
3. Understanding Music in the Digital Age
4. This is a conversation
5. Music
6. The Digital Age
7. The Internet explained
8. A short explanatory note on Mediation
9. The 20 Things Revisited
10. 01 Don’t Believe the Hype
11. 02 Hear / Like / Buy
12. 03 Opinion Leaders Rule
13. 04 Customise
14. 05 The Long Tail
15. 06 Web 2.0
16. 07 Connect
17. 08 Cross-promote
18. 09 Fewer clicks
19. 10 Professionalism
20. 11 The Death of Scarcity
21. 12 Distributed identity
22. 13 SEO
23. 14 Permission and Personalisation
24. 15 RSS
25. 17 Reward & Incentivise
26. 18 Frequency is everything
27. 19 Make it viral
28. 20 Forget Product - Sell Relationship
29. Where to from here?
30. Lots more to come
31. The thank you page
32. Further Reading