I’m very glad you did the talk that you did at the TED@Sydney talentsearch. There is a lot of hot air that passes for discussion regarding the future of the music industry and you showed that you are very engaged in helping to facilitate and move forward on this.

Musicians and other creatives will be very grateful when they realise that you are making a huge contribution to understanding what is really going on.

Spotify is also contributing which is something I wrote about a while back. They just went live in NZ. I don’t have any numbers yet on what this means for the musicians I work with but Daniel Ek is a guy to watch.

I’m not really that fond of facebook myself and so I’d rather engage without having fb track all of my activity as that is still an invasion of privacy same as it is when google does it.
http://www.dialogcrm.com/blog/2012/01/16/discovering-new-music/ has some thoughts on future of music.

I would highly recommend http://andrewdubber.com/ Andrew is based in Birmingham and is very much a world thought leader on the future of music / business.

He is coming down to NZ in September.
TEDx Auckland is August 25th & TEDx Dunedin is on July 6th. There are other TEDx’s in NZ being planned.

Canberra is September 8th you should keep an eye on that.
http://tedxcanberra.org/tedxcanberra-conferences/tedxcanberra-2012/

One last comment. The fail fast idea you also mention above does have some validity and you should perhaps reframe that one more like this.

Everything new has a learning curve. When we plan new projects we often don’t understand all of the key variables and what the “fail fast” concept refers to is much more the concept that for every big idea there are many related actions and activities.

It is those actions that you should “fail fast” on not you big idea. Perseverance and focus are important but so is making progress on more short term goals.

An example would be if a particular marketing tactic is not working ( i.e it is failing and not being validated by the market then you simply stop doing that. )

On investor pitches you should check out http://www.ted.com/talks/david_s_rose_on_pitching_to_vcs.html if you haven’t seen it before. Frankly the presenter comes across as a bit of a wally in the talk but his pitch deck is very successful. You should also check most of what Dave McClure http://500hats.typepad.com/ & other places + Paul Graham – his essays and Y Combinator work in particular.

Keep up the good work.