I met with a consultant about Meta ads. Lorenzo. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, because the internet enjoys arranging marriages between people who never met before. I have been looking for someone like Lorenzo. There are approximately nine million advertisements aimed at musicians, all promising to reveal the secret of online success. The secret generally costs $799 and is explained by a young man standing beside a rented sports car. I did not require the secret. I required one real person I could afford, someone who would sit and explain which button sends my music to listeners and which commits me to sponsoring pickleball throughout North America.

Lorenzo seems great. We started the work. He recommends I concentrate on growing my mailing list and leading people to my music, sign up as monthly listeners. Sounds reasonable. I’m in. I have learned something from the endless companies advertising they can organize a musician’s videos and social media: I can do it myself. Apparently, civilization has developed technology allowing us to make thirty-second videos in advance and schedule them to appear later, as though extremely efficient ghosts. I can make a month’s worth of tiny performances, stories, jokes and musical fragments, then arrange for them to emerge twice a day while I am somewhere else searching for a piano in the hotel lobby or learning that “complimentary breakfast” refers to the staff saying something nice about it.

An old friend, artist Syd Mostow, who moved to Europe called me. He expressed admiration that I still tour. Then he asked what I sell at the concerts. Once, musicians toured and sold records. This was an excellent question from the previous century. The concert was the advertisement and the record was the product. Now the music itself streams through the air for almost nothing, and the live event has become the product. You travel two thousand kilometres in order to sell someone the experience of your having travelled two thousand kilometres. I explained that people buy tickets. They may also buy books, T-shirts, mugs and tchotchkes bearing evidence that the evening occurred. The songs themselves are already loose in the world, living inside telephones and being paid fractions of pennies whenever summoned. The business model is perfectly clear. I advertise the music to attract listeners. The listeners join the mailing list. The mailing list tells them about the concert. I drive to the concert and perform the music they have been streaming for nearly nothing. Then I sell them a mug.

The mug cannot be streamed.