What if today you could go over to your neighborhood grocery, grab that cart and shop for anything your little ol’ heart desired, then, instead of getting into the checkout line, skip that and just head home with your groceries – steak, shrimp, Haagen Daz, salted cashews, throw in a little Kobe Beef, some chocolate truffles and perchance a tin or two of Almas Caviar.

When you got outside with your shopping cart overflowing, the police would be there, but would just look the other way as you passed by chuckling gleefully, licking your chops.

What a great idea!  Why don’t we do this?  Food should be free!  I think most of us would agree that things would be a lot easier if food were free.

Trouble is, after very little time, maybe the next time we went back to the supermarket, the aisles would be empty, the shelves bare.  “Hey, all the food is gone!” you might cry.  “Well, let’s go back to the farmers and get more,” the store manager would say.

So we’d go to the farmers and say, “Hey farmers, make more food!”  They would respond like this:  “Without getting paid, it’s just too hard.  Sorry, but there’s just no more food.  We’re gonna go do something else.”

Well, essentially that’s what just happened to the music business – except for one problem.  Of course the farmers equal the artists in this little analogy and the artists, who love to make music, are still saying, “Oh goodie, you like my music? You actually want to listen to my music?  OK, I’ll give it to you for free!”

So it’s gonna take a little time before this situation is righted.  Give it a little more time and the now starving artists are going to do just that – starve.   Then they won’t be able to make any more music no matter how much they love to do it.  Cuz we all gotta eat!

“This Christmas, give the gift of music” is our motto.  In the music industry, 40% of all music is sold in the month of December.  This year the industry prognosis is very bleak.  The fault lies in many places.  A couple of generations have now decided that music is free.  I still call it ‘stealing’, but unfortunately the rest of the world has pretty much moved past that notion.  It’s true that as an industry we’ve also shot ourselves in the foot and today the fault lies with all of us – the farmers, the distributers, the grocery stores and the customers.  In short, it’s a mess.

But the problem is real and if we don’t all do something about it pretty soon then the lyric in the iconic song, American Pie, is gonna come true and one day we’ll all be mourning “The day the music died”.

How do we fix it?  BUY MUSIC.

If you love music, you need to buy some now – in the month of December.  If you have to think of it as a charitable endeavor, so be it.  Just do it.  Buy music.

Support your local artists.  They’re the ones coming up.  When you go to their gigs, buy their CDs.  It’s how they survive.  They’re probably playing the gig for free – or worse, paying to play.

We’re almost all standing here in the rising tide with the water up to our noses now hoping against hope that this month of December will turn things around.  It’s up to you to make that possible.  We did our part.  We grew the crops, we distributed the tomato juice, we packaged the asparagus.

If you wanna eat it, buy it.  Don’t steal it out of the stores.

Hear my plea.

Support the artists who make the joy of music.

This Christmas.