A co-founder of Second Life who claims to neither buy nor listen to new music is going to be Sr. VP of digital efforts at EMI.

He also admits that he “[has] a lot to learn about music” which, I guess, is supposed to head off any ironic, snarky commentary.

Even more: “I’ll be reaching out to many of you for help as I figure out how to build the right team to generate sustained, ongoing innovation around music. (Want to work on these challenges? Let me know!)”

I’d suggest a subscription to Gonze but I can’t help feeling the analogy I used previously still holds. In 1994 Microsoft built up a team of Web crazies to produce IE, IIS, ms-Java, et. al. and you could swear the company had redirected its focus to the WWW. Wall Street bought it and that was all that mattered. Every time some exec mentioned the “I” word, the stock popped another 20%. In the end when the Netscape/AOL/Sun smoke cleared and margins remained high every executive who drank the Internet Kool-Aid was eventually shown the door. Since then the company just got more entrenched in XP and finding ways to milk a client-based solution (even one masquerading as a server) .

So, I’m not going to be snarky, just pessimistic. Is a company the size of EMI really prepared to chew off its own limbs in order to get out of the trap? For all the talk that Microsoft was ready to cannibalize itself during 1994-99 browser war era, having execs (figuratively) conduct investor video conferences in tiger-skin loin clothes and holding spears, at the end of business day, it was just an act.

This week saw the passing of Bo Diddley and Sidney Pollack. Diddley was just before my time, if you can believe that. By the time I tuned my transistor radio into WINX-AM (DC) he was already “an oldie.” Diddley is revered by a lot of musicians that I revere but I never connected with him even though his right hand had a punch that was undeniable.

Meanwhile, Pollack is definitely of my time. He was an unabashed Hollywood director and producer who made several schmaltzy blockbusters that I found unwatchable. I don’t know that anyone would call him a risk taker, but as a talented provider of escapism there was a sensibility, yes, OK, a boomer sensibility to his films that makes his overall body of art “important.” His legacy will be tied to a line of dialog that he used in at least three different movies (that I know of):

“You think not telling a lie is the same as telling the truth?”

How boomer is that? He was totally tapped into the Watergate-J. Edgar Hoover-paranoia from “Three Days of the Condor” through “The Firm” and even later as producer on “The Quiet American” and “Michael Clayton” and that’s why we loved him.

But my favorite work he’s ever done, just on a shits-and-giggle level, was as an actor (he’s acted in as many movies as he’s directed) in “Husbands and Wives” by Woody Allen. He has several scenes in the film but the one that stands out for me is when his character literally drags his new young, trophy wife away from a party of his hyper-intellectual contemporaries after she tries to engage them in a discussion about astrology. Pollack’s delivery of this character’s embarrassment and rage was as genuine, heart-wrenching and hilarious as anything you’ll ever see.

But seriously and on a more positive note…

Lucas’ conversation brings up the idea of the collective (A. K. A. musicians’ community sites, net labels, etc.) acting as the new version of a recording label. Not a full replacement in terms of what a label does today, like Amazon replacing brick and mortar book stores, but more like blogging, which has parallels in the pre-Web world but is a service industry born of the Web itself.

The musicians’ collective and it’s implications, commercially and otherwise, are not new ideas to me. After all, I run one for Creative Commons called ccMixter. Unfortunately with the confidential nature of the way the ccMixter RFP was held under wraps for 18 months I chose the better part of valor (for once) and did not discuss these things in public because I was scared out of my mind that CC’s tax exempt status could be hurt if the ccM hand-over was screwed up. This, of course, turned out to be one lawyer’s opinion but it was the only information I had at the time.

The business opportunity implications lurking around ccM would take more than a blog post to relay but here’s one highlight that makes the ccM collective even more interesting than other sites that pool album shopping carts and other resources.

Lucas and Neeru’s original vision for the site was a re-use model obvious to them, new to musicians. They saw the site laid out as:

a) source material
b) remixes
c) recursion

From day one of my involvement I felt that with a few additions (e.g. giving a cappellas a top-tier status, creating a Sample Pool larger than just the one site, focusing on quality via the Editors’ Picks) that we could help propel the concepts into a model musicians could wrap their heads around. This combined vision has given ccM a unique process for creating really good music that, like blogging, has parallels in the pre-Web days but has grown into something different.

Somehow, unlike hiring a producer (A.K.A. your boyfriend) to create an album based on a singer/songwriter’s material and unlike collaborating with other band members to jam together until a vocal and instrumental work as a unit, the act of tossing things into a sample pool with no fixed objective or assignments has yielded some fantastic music. When I say “no fixed objective” I mean we even stopped having remix contests over a year ago and the music only got better. It got better because the thing drawing in better singers was better producers. And the thing drawing in better producers was better singers. There’s the recursion thing writ large in real terms.

fwiw I walk around these days thinking “I can’t believe it fucking worked!” because maybe Lucas and Neeru and folks at CC are used to having their visions pan out in the real world but this is new to me. I tried for years to convince singers and musicians that open music was good for their careers and the world and exposure through sharing was the sane route, not the inverted distortion field of handing over 100% of your rights to a huge corporation in return for financial debt you can never repay. Of course, all of those are still true and certainly part of the attraction, but it wasn’t until this recursion-in-the-pool thing starting taking off that all of a sudden the best musicians I know are forking over stems and pells without blinking. I look up now and I realize in two years I’ve gone from nearly full-time evangelism to nearly none.

Now, maybe the CD is dead. Maybe a ccM model isn’t amenable to selling songs at $0.99 a pop.

But how could this thing not be marketable? Especially if we’re talking about, like blogging, a new type of service, born of the Web. Assuming all the other fundamentals of business skills are in place (clever marketing, good people connections, profit oriented bookkeeping, etc.) I would say it’s worth a shot to go after the huge B2B music consuming marketplace.

In “mo better label“, Lucas has a very nice conversation going (I’ll be using that as a spring board for other posts in a bit) but he goes off the rails suggesting that EMI grabs ccMixter. ;)

Actually that would be a brilliant move for EMI, pretty terrible for ccMixter and inconceivable for me to trust an organization like that to be my employer or guardian of the site. That suggestion reminds me of calls for Microsoft to fully embrace the open/free source world. As far as I know they still don’t believe in the Internet over there. They sure didn’t when I left seven years ago and several key executives expressed hopes that it literally go away, like floppy drives or dialup modems. I suspect, like many major media companies, they are basically hanging out waiting for next best thing — the end of net neutrality. At that point they can choke down the pipeline and use http for what God intended: paid everything. And by “hanging out” I mean buying politicians, spreading cash around to mega-sites and other lower hanging fruit.

By far one of the funniest books I’ve read in many years is “oPtion$ - the secret life of steve jobs” by fake steve jobs. This Jobs reminds me a lot of a less literary version of Joseph Heller’s King David in “God Knows.” But it is not a “joke” book. Well, OK, it is a parody but it is as well written as most of the “serious” books I’ve read in a long time. And there’s an out-loud-laugh per page. The book is fantastic: get it, steal it, mooch it, whatever, just read it.

As all good parody goes, the brilliance lies in how close it cuts to the bone. On the record industry (this isn’t the funny part):

“Fact is, the music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rocks stars. but beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of banking, though it’s really more like loan-sharking: They put up money to make records, and then they force recording artists to pay the money back, plus loads of interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them. We’ve seen what the Internet has done to music retailers. Next to go are the big stupid warehouses. The label guys know it, which is why these bastards are fighting like cornered rats.”

I mean, that’s it, no?