Thanks to Mitch Joel, I found out that musician David Usher has just started a blog called “Cloudid”. He wrote in his initial post that when he’s not head-deep in a song, he spends “too much of his time reading and thinking about the ever-changing crossroads of art, tech, intellectual property and the digital domain… the overriding principles and concepts of how art will function in the new information age, but also looking at practical applications for those who create and control intellectual property.”

My one quibble would be to say I think he’s not spending “too much” time on this stuff. He’s quite obviously a thoughtful guy and perspectives like his are valuable.

On April 9, Usher weighed in on the controversy that blew up after Billy Bragg wrote “The Royalty Scam“, an op-ed for the New York Times. I think the nub of Bragg’s argument was this: “The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.”

Not long after that, the founder of TechCrunch, Mike Arrington, weighed in with a forceful essay called “These Crazy Musicians Still Think They Should Get Paid For Recorded Music.” Arrington argued that Bragg was wrong to suggest that social networks are responsible for decreases in recorded music sales, saying “Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.”

So when Usher decided to jump in on April 9, he wrote “Artists have been signing and getting screwed forever by the old model but that doesn’t mean they should, doesn’t mean its fair and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for something better. The money is still in music, its just moved from the record companies to the ISP’s, mobile and social networks. It’s gone from copyright holders to ‘the pipe’.”

I don’t know whether musicians are “owed” money by the social networks that host their music and materials. I doubt there’s a single legal point in their favour. I’m not holding out much hope that Zuckerberg or the other creators of social networks are going to feel a moral imperative to support musicians. And I’m don’t think someone like Coco Love Alcorn (May 17 at BobCat House Concerts, btw) putting up songs on her Myspace page is an equivalent to Bo Diddley getting screwed by Chess Records.

But Usher is right as well. He writes “In my fantasy musicians would band together, create their own Ning, host their own ads and get a cut of the revenue and the equity.”

What he’s talking about is what we want to do. We want to take the focus off the ‘product’ and put it on the process; we want to give fans an opportunity to support the bands they love DIRECTLY, and we want to give artists an opportunity to develop relationships with their fans in an authentic, transparent, and manageable way.

In another of Usher’s posts, he likens the ‘new world’ of the music industry to landing on the moon. Usher’s orders, as the Neil Armstrong of that mission: “you can stay on the ship and dream of the days when life was good and the CD was king (all intellectual property), or you can walk out onto the surface, and start to explore…” 

So put on your moon boots and come on over, David. We’re ready for you.