Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times, says the world is flat. Rather than reiterate all his points (here: 10 forces flattening the 21st century) I’ll focus on one…..

“the personal computer. With the PC, individuals could suddenly author their own content, words, photos, spreadsheets, videos [MUSIC – Bb] in digital form, etc. And once your content can be shaped, manipulated and authored in digital form, it meant that it could be sent to so many more places and distributed in so many ways”

He doesn’t mention music specifically, but music was the first media to really REALLY be affected by this new flat world. It devastated record companies, freaked out artists, and combined with Web 2.0 (MySpace cough cough), it pretty much allowed EVERYONE to become a recording artist. The democratization of music so to speak.

This is all well and good I suppose, but it sure kicked me in the ass. The real problem with this is there is SO much clutter on the flat horizon, you really can’t see the gems for all the garbage littering the landscape.

I guess what I’m getting at is like most other recording bands, we have had to rethink the traditional distribution model and are now joining the online digital music revolution. With some luck we can stand out on a flat horizon.

[UPDATE: Friedman’s cheering on the Iraq invasion made me decide he is a total dick. -Bb]