Keep Up With The Techies ...

On the recording side, Nashville is state of the art. Belmont University even has an Atmos Rendering Unit and a Motion Capture Space. The Music Row and area studios are world-class and that is why the world comes here often to create.

Consumer web speed is really going up around here. My home speed just went to 300.mps down and 29.90 up. That's fast. I can still hear that phone connection sound to get on AOL and that You've Got Mail. The Tech times are changing at light speed.

Now all that above is like Greek to most. There is no reason to know about it as a consumer. The part that has to be understood is the path way now that people are getting tuned in to the music. Renting, buying music is a web of confusion outside the comfort zones of iTunes and Target's music section.

Things have changed and I'm not sure everyone wants to admit it. Amazon Music just this week signed Garth music to a streaming and selling deal. They also dumped Lady Gaga into the marketplace for $3.99 on a deal of the day. Think about this great business model: Brad Paisley released a song to radio one day then a video the day after. The song was a featured hourly iHeart song. Enough exposure to enter the chart in the 30s. Then the video exploded. It went the way every creator dreams about. VIRAL. One million, then five million, then 10 and 15 and 20 ... now 24 million views and 20,741 comments on Facebook. Another 1,145,668 on YouTube. All that in two weeks ... Mediabase radio spins to date: seven million-ish ... Sales: #1 on Billboard's Digital Songs Chart. Go back just a few years ... how different can you get?

The whole streaming thing ... free music at your fingertips on YouTube and the other streaming services. Whoever signed off on that business model was insane. Free music for all ... And today cyber attacks blocked access to Spotify, Netflix, Twitter and Amazon.

If you are an artist, a manager, an owner or anyone with a dog in this hunt, you better get up to speed on this post-CD world. It is tricky. The Snapchat promotion with Garth Brooks took some figuring out to accomplish. The Amazon push for consumers is fascinating. We are so far past the days of three big TV networks and a few powerful radio stations.

If you don't have a child, you need to visit one and watch how they operate. They do not consume radio or TV or music like you do.

The world is even more digitally on fire. Try to read up on tech in India and China. You really just hire a tech head to handle that segment of the business. It just about is the business!

Facebook is like kindergarten and some people aren't even going to daycare!

There has to be a way to get ahead of the curve or you will be crushed. This is not a "sky is falling" thing It is true.

The mobile, digital world now is like the transistor radio was to the public post WW2. If you were around then, that's when mobile music really started. The all-transistor car radio was a $150 option in the Fall of 1955.

Mobile is not new; it's just really different ... and traditional media of today is not long for this world. The five-minute commercial breaks ... the slow introduction of exciting music is going to catch up with the "play it safe" gang. We live in a microwave food, gigabit download world. Careers need to be reinvented and restaged. The cheese has been moved and the hungry mice better figure out where it relocated. Going back to the same spot will lead to starvation.

Election fatigue and stress ... The Wall Street Journal today asking for staff to take buyouts. TV stations owned by failing newspaper companies have been chopping heads for several years now.

It is an exciting time to move with all new possibilities. You just have to retool the factory and get on the train. Smart people like the NFL are even having trouble. The really smart are skipping ahead to the end of the movie to see how this ends.

I just spoke into my Comcast cable remote control. If I could only get SIRI to understand.

Technology when it works is really cool! What would Johnny Cash think about being the soundtrack for a Wolverine movie trailer? I think he would say it was good!