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.