We don't decide the music we're given to listen to anymore, it seems. If not that, the charts are fixed. Giving an impromptu talk at the Publishing Next conference, Anish Trivedi, author of Call Me Dan, said that these days you have software that decides what music is heard: it analyses the song, compares it with what is currently on the billboard top 10, and picks the music for the labels. Reminds us of Akon's HitLab. "For every 50 manuscripts that get trashed, there are 5000 (music) tapes that get trashed." On piracy, he said that "We spent 10 years trying to combat this. All we realized was that you cannot stop it. We used DRM to protect tracks. The consumer just went - we don't want this. As a result, you started getting things like the IODA, which said lets make it easy. You're a musician, you made a track, we'll make it easy. You have sites like emusic, which had a free track a day,and made it easy to publish and download. It was a random track, a different genre. I may have downloaded it, trashed it, but I did listen. People were able to put a full album on sale. Along with making content available digitally, Trivedi recommended that books publishers make their content discover-able, using meta-tags. "I've benea proponent of narrow-casting. What the Internet has done is to allow hundreds of different formats, but it has also made discovery possible. No one names the name of that…
