Sparks from the Fire

A Rant In Reverse

In a departure from the usual post on Inspirational music, today I’d like to tell you about a kid I just met.

Kids!
I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!
Kids!
Who can understand anything they say?
Kids!
They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs! (more…)

OK, so I had one. A close encounter, that is. I had just changed the knife blade to a new one. Extremely sharp. Not paying attention and talking away while doing some paper cuts, before I knew it, I had slashed my thumb to the bone.  It was so fast I didn’t even feel it until after it happened.

Then, oddly enough, there was only the recollection of pain – there was never a pain in the moment of slashing.

Later on I realized that in the recollection I was just making the pain up, because in the moment of the cut the blade was so sharp and the act was so fast that there was no time for the pain.

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In the old record business model it used to be that the life span of an artist’s new CD was about 3 months.  After 3 months, if a song or CD did not “break out”, the record company would usually give up on the CD and stop the promotion. Then the CD would die. Often, because of the high costs of storage, the excess CDs would simply be destroyed.

It usually takes 6 months to a year to create a CD. Why then so short a life span?

Because the money it took to promote it nationally, even locally, through radio was so exorbitant. In those short 3 months a company could literally spend millions of dollars basically promoting one single off the CD. If it tanked, bye bye to all the work. And most of them did just that – they tanked. For a great variety of reasons – many of which had nothing to do with the worth of the music.

Today, it’s an entirely different story. Radio is fast slipping away as the communication medium for music.  The internet is the new radio. No longer do artists have to manufacture tens of thousands of CDs in preparation for launch. Digital downloads took care of that. The high cost of storing all those jewel cased CDs does not exist anymore. Promotion on the internet relies more on smart creativity than the almighty buck.

So now good and even great music does not have to die and disappear. It can simply sit there in virtual space and wait to be discovered. And so in a very intriguing way, music always remains new – new to the listener who discovers it.

This is one of the high concepts behind Watchfire Music. It’s a trusted destination for people of all faiths and cultures to explore, experience and ultimately purchase new Inspirational music – no matter how old it is. It is always new. Fifty years from now it can still be sitting there on our site at virtually no cost to us waiting to be discovered.

A good reason to explore the site. It’s all new.

~ Peter Link

Faith…
I sat in my favorite chair. I knew it was time to figure the problem out. I had been struggling with it for over a year and needed to get my arms around it because I knew it was a great idea and great ideas just don’t come along that often.

Flash back one year. Jenny Burton and I have just finished a show in Boca Raton and are driving up the coast of Florida. We get into a long discussion about her career and where it’s going. We have this great idea! We shall put together a group of 9 of our favorite NY studio singers behind her and do a show of Inspirational music.

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