Hi, welcome back, and welcome to module 4 of this course, managing your online presence. Now, of all of the channels that we have been talking about during the previous module, these days especially, the online ones are going to be the ones that are most important. That means your social media, that means your email, and it means your website. Now, we will talk about websites in much more detail in future course. But for now we're going to focus on the strategies for using social media channels, and best practices for email, and that will be our focus in this particular module. Let's start with just some perspective about the Internet and the online world. Because I think it's important particularly if you are of a certain age where you've grown up always knowing the Internet. That is becoming increasingly common folks like me, I'm among the last generation of folks who started his professional life before the Internet was a force to be reckoned with, and we're quickly aging out of the population. It's important I think to just recognize just how fundamentally things changed as a result of the digital revolution. First of all, how we access information has forever changed. I know it sounds terribly quaint and unarchaic, but you know it used to be that if you needed a piece of information, you had to look it up in a book yourself, or you had to go to the library and look it up. This is why people bought hard copies of encyclopedias, because it was a repository of information that you can have in your home. Of course they went out of date quickly, so that's how they made money selling the yearly attendance, but nobody does that anymore. If you're curious about accessing information, you Google it. You go online with your favorite search engine and you find it. Which leads us to the second one, the speed with which we access information. It doesn't take me time looking up in a book or traveling to the library when they're open, it's almost instantaneous now. Therefore the ability to access information anywhere at anytime as long as you've got a connection to the Internet, you're good. Of course, none of this means that the information that we find is necessarily the best information I would say, that's one of the downsides of it. The ease to which we can distribute information. Of course, when I say information, I mean any kind of content. The ease with which we can send things out to 1,000 people at the blink of an eye. Or to have people from literally around the globe interacting with our content, and our information, and material simultaneously. Think about how impossible that was until just these recent decades. Then the last is the degree of connectedness. Again, this is both a good and bad thing, and depending on how good or how bad a thing it is probably depends on a lot of your own worldview, but that also has fundamentally changed. How has this impacted the music industry? Because it has of course profoundly, music is on the good side far more accessible than it's ever been at any point in human history. Even when it was the radio, when radio first came on the world stage. That obviously changed everything in terms of how music was accessible when records for your home stereo became affordable and commonplace. That was also a game changer. Before those things it was a live performance or nothing. But now, again, virtually anywhere, anytime you just have to be able to connect to the Internet. People who have gotten rid of their home music collections because they don't need a bunch of CDs or LPs anymore. They can put everything they need on their smartphone and plug-in or stream any kind of music that you could imagine. That means that we're exposed to more content than ever before. We used to have to wait for your song to come on the radio and you'd be excited when it did, or the capacity of your home collection, that was what you had access to on a freewill basis. Again, now you can access the world's catalog, and so that's its own thing. This has led to fundamentally new business models. In other words, how do we make money in the music business? The publishing houses and the big recording companies use to rule the roost. They were the gatekeepers, they were the ones that determined what songs got on the radio, they were the ones who determined who the big stars we're going to be, and they dictated the terms. But now with streaming, and downloads, and home production being easier than ever, really good quality equipment being remarkably affordable, and editing software that allows you to do a really sophisticated project without having to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to go into a studio, all of that has made the old business models completely obsolete. The question of how do you monetize what you want to do with your career? How do you monetize your music? Is a completely different question now than it was 30 years ago. It continues to evolve and change. This is, of course, a double-edged sword, all of this great stuff that's happened. It's easier and cheaper than ever before to get your music out there into the world, and that's a good thing, and it's harder and harder to monetize it [inaudible].
