The Idea Blog

There’s a wonderful study and conversation about the music industry today in the current (Issue 16.01) WIRED. Clearly it’s the best study or assessment I’ve seen, and I recommend it to you if you have any interest in (a) music as a business, (b) music as music or (c) David Byrne, Brian Eno, Radiohead or other smart people who happen to be composers, musicians and creators.

I suggest it to you as much, however, as an example of how an article can really work online. I haven’t seen the magazine issue itself yet, but online it includes interactive graphs, audio discussions from some coffee shop between Byrne and Eno and much more rich content.

Look, I love magazines. I love to hold them, scan their contents, turn their pages, view their photos - I love to read magazines. When I see a relevant article, I like to find it online and send a link to someone else.

But I love to read online too. Sure, the screen isn’t as easy as the printed page, but if you can get past that, there’s potential for so much more than the magazine can give.

You can look up a word you don’t know, track down a reference, get background from the web’s encyclopedic resources, refresh your memory about something else by opening a new tab and hunting it down. (Was it “Yalta” or “Malta” where Churchill, FDR and Stalin met?) You can email the author, save it to read later, forward it to a friend - all of which I did with this piece.

Go the WIRED article by David Byrne, “David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars,” and see what I mean.