Last week I started a post about direct-to-consumer sales and relationships. It was prompted by a post about Ian Rogers (of Topspin Media) and a speech he gave at the the Grammy MusicTech Summit in Seattle. Also part of the post was Live Nation's plan to sell downloads directly from artist web pages -- an inevitable development but not terribly exciting. But I never finished the post, so I'm doing it now.

A guy at Topspin emailed me to let me know the slides from Ian's speech are posted at the Topspin blog. I'm not going to summarize the thing for you, but I encourage you to read it. What Topspin and similar companies are doing is bridging the gap between artist and consumer, changing the relationship, selling products in different ways and finding new possibilities.

I don't think the "old model," as Ian calls it (high volume, low margin) will be replaced by the "new model" (low volume, high margin), or that mass marketing products are likely to disappear (if music, why not every other mass marketed consumer product?). Judging from his comments, Ian doesn't believe it either. He sees a shift away from the old and toward the new -- not one replacing the other -- as Topspin aims for the "entire middle class of artists" for which the old model doesn't work. Some artists will want to sell millions of albums and they will trade a low royalty rate for full arenas. But technology and entrepreneurs will bring new ideas and artists will have more options and tools. It's an exciting time.