The compounding interest of music

(Off-topic: Sold TWO CDs Yesterday... Paint With Sound... Yay! It's one of my very favorites. )

On-topic:

In my very unscientific estimation, we have tens of thousands of people making music in the world. From shower singing to stage screaming to streetcorner strumming - on and on. People have made music for eons.

With the interposition of the "Internets Tubes", fairly affordable video/audio recording capability, and lots of people with creative urges - we are experiencing the first-ever GLOBAL instant music sharing and distribution. Interesting bits of sound and soul can be created, recorded and shared in near real-time. It is fascinating to see a pre-teen in Asia, America, eastern Europe (or anywhere in the world) play some impossibly fast, two-handed, insanely articulate guitar solo in his bedroom - recorded and then quickly released on YouTube. Even more interesting is to see video responses from others who answer back with insanely articulate solos. I don't aspire to be someone who has spent every waking hour getting good at one single thing, but I do find it to be inspiring that someone can even accomplish such things.

Sometimes you get someone who plays an incredibly emotional and beautiful rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps (George Harrison) - on a ukulele.

Sometimes you get someone (half a planet away from you) building an entire piece from single-note-sequenced still images and sound to accomplish what he could not do in real time.

Sometimes you get someone who puts together a slide show of images and thoughts to play on top of a wonderful instrumental piece.

So, what do we do now? We must understand that this is just the beginning of a sea change in music. There is much more chaff through which we must listen, but there are orders of magnitude more wonderful gems for us to discover. As musicians and listeners, we must take time to grow and learn from what we're seeing.

And, more importantly, JUMP IN. The water's fine!