Dear record companies,

I don’t know if the old model is working anymore. Well, duh. But more specifically, I am not sure if the amount of spins a record gets is totally where it’s at anymore.

Don’t get me wrong; I still think the more a record gets played, the more it sells. But what I’m trying to say is that isn’t all there is anymore. The case in point is MySpace the killer app and all the other alternative ways of marketing music other than traditional terrestrial radio.

In other words, the old model of giving kickbacks to the radio station who spins your new song the most is nice, but you’re likely wasting resources. It’s not all about radio spins anymore. If I were you, I’d be making my music available all over the place so it can spread virally over MySpace, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, through e-mail, through websites and any other way you can think of.

Screw DRM.

Give up. Just give music something akin to the creative commons license. I’m not saying you just allow your music to be spread for free amongst everyone and their grandmother. But for people who are reviewing your music online or talking about it on blogs or wanting to use it in a YouTube video or on MySpace, let people have a creative commons type license to use it.

Let me make a music bed out of a loop of a song for my radio show – as long as I somehow cite whether on-air or online where it came from. If I want to open a podcast with a KT Tunstall song, I should be able to as long as I give KT credit, right? It’s just like running photos in a newspaper or on a blog – you have to give credit.

Maybe this opens it up too much because how can you police that? How can you make sure some kid in Kansas who has posted your song on his blog is citing your music in a way that helps market it?

I don’t know but I’m just saying. Keeping music under lock and key for those of us fans who help spread it like good rock n’ roll foot soldiers is soon to be the way of the past. It has to be.

Signed,

The lowly little part-time radio DJ in Phoenix.