Reading this Wired article, sad from Limewire withdrawals, made me uber aware of a sincere and unassailable rift in the music industry:  the constant clash between businesspersons and the artist.

Read “The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In a Keynote,” and you’ll initially feel solidarity with the writer.

He explains his side of things.  He made Apple mad and they turned the full force of their corporation against him via shady, covert monitoring of his operations and a very publicly personal dig delivered by Steve Jobs himself.

But Derek Sivers, the author, invokes multiple questions with his behavior.  Did our hero really post notes from a private meeting with Steve Jobs online immediately, without expecting fallout? Is emailing vendors a new business plan contingent on an unsigned contract ever a good idea?  Was there no reason to suspect hidden fees or rollout glitches somewhere in this scenario?

I don’t know that anyone with business schooling would make such a blunder.

And that’s just it.  Our hero was not a businessman.  He was a musician who almost accidentally figured out a way to distribute music via a homegrown, word-of-mouth awareness system, but thanks to the growing web, was able to reach a much larger group of consumers and flourish beyond the limits of his homegrown system.  It’s like one bartender at a party with an ever-expanding line of drinkers.  At some point, you can’t keep up. And when you can’t keep up, people look elsewhere to be satisfied, and others step in to serve them.

Derek Sivers chose the life of a musician, but was smart and ambitious enough to design a website that functioned as sharing center.  Yes, he monetized it, but his mentality was not that of a shark, a CEO, a determined conqueror or perfectionist.  He strove to be fair by charging artists $40.  He took Steve Jobs at his word without a whiff of self-consciousness.  He bypassed standard business sense to spread information—his job as head of CDBaby, and likely, the motivation behind becoming a musician in the first place… the spread of creativity and information.

A human who’s found business appealing and invested in business schooling is not going to cover $200,000 themselves simply to not piss off a bunch of musicians the way Sivers did.  As a businessperson, might I note that my ilk are combative, driven, focused and pay attention to the bottom line.  Commerce is our battlefield.  These kinds of people are not evil.  They are me.  They could be you.  They may be on Wall Street, fiercely striving for Bentleys and trophy wives and zillion dollar playhouses in the Hamptons, playing a high-stakes game.  They’re not enjoying the Chinese rugs.  They’re enjoying the fight, little Machiavellis, every one.  This is our humanity.

Musicians are less motivated by the accumulation of money, but more about what’s in the eye on the pyramid on the dollar bill. As a musician, might I note that we may crave the hedonism of the Rolling Stones, but the enjoyment of life and the sharing/ creation/ commitment/ creativity/ completeness that comes from tearing off a crucial solo or having friends sing along by a campfire is the game to be played.  This is our humanity.

Please note that I’ve chosen illustrative extremes to illuminate my generalization

And nowhere is the clash messier, more unfair, or more convoluted than in today’s record industry.  Similar to the ad game, the industry is comprised of humans that are both logical and sensitive.  But the power play of “winning” the money will always fall to the businesspeople.  Musicians may choose to monetize music on their own terms, but the suits will always watch the market, plotting a better way to pull it off, a bigger group of people to market it to, and to continue our analogy, putting together a new batch of punch while you watch yourself run out of booze.

And because the users, the punch drinkers, the downloaders and music fans, are on neither side, they’re just interested in the punch.  The party.  They’ll take it where they can get it.  Example:  Limewire’s demise and the growth of other file sharing sites have a correlation.

Humans want music.  They’ll find music.  And they’re not going to pay top dollar when there’s a discount alternative.  Why buy the cow when the milk’s been free?  Regulations will always screw the artist out of what they deserve.  How are musicians going to thrive in the business world?  How will business create a format for artists to survive while feeding the production system and the manufacturers?  Music is a large industry.  Musicians are a critical creative resource.  Manufacturers deserve monetization for their work as well.  How to reconcile this issue?

There’s no determined solution.  This is a project to attack from all angles.