"My Good Friend" by Kristin Hersh, October 3 2008 (originally published on kristinhersh.com)

My good friend George Howard recently wrote about something I feel is important. For so many years, I begged people in the music business to measure emotional impact rather than units sold. For the most part, my argument fell on deaf ears, as that didn’t appear to be a way to make money. What they didn’t appreciate was the potential revenue stream of an untapped audience. Not just the music connoisseur who rejects trends, but regular people who haven’t been told that they won’t “get” it. People like music. Period.

“listeners have an overarching desire to create connections and narratives, and to place their music into their own taxonomies that have nothing to do with genre or classification, but are instead based on emotional responses to music….the greatest…call them folksonomies…come from users making their own — ostensibly random, but deeply non-random — connections based on nuance and subtlety and things not easily articulated or measured. The sound of love, for example.”

Read the rest of George’s post here.