"The iPod is the Elvis revolution but the iPod plus the phone will be the Beatles revolution." EG quote at Billboard Magazine Conference, Las Vegas. Sep 2006.

After years of being used to the sound of my voice coming out of a microphone I found speaking at conference panels on the subject of music quite comfortable and was lucky enough to be invited to the USA, Europe and even a University to expand my theory's.

The many opportunities include keynote speeches for the Amsterdam Dance Event in 2000, Chairing Panels in New York and Las Vegas for Billboard Magazine in 2004 and 2006. A keynote speech on the future of Media and Radio for MusicWorks at Glasgow University in 2004 plus various panels throughout the late '90's and every year to date..

One stand out was being invited to attend a Billboard Magazine Panel in New York in September 2002 where I predicted to a closed room session of top music business executives that the digital delivery of music would take over the distribution of music. Eight months later iTunes was launched to the world and the rest is history as by April 2008 iTunes became the biggest music retailer in the USA. (click tab Digital Downloads - the Future)

Another highlight was receiving a standing round of applause for telling a room full of students that from birth they belonged to the magic of music. That the two components that create music, rhythm and melody, are born within them.
(Read this speech below these links and the photo)

Billboard DMS 2003 - The (Internet) Revolution will be Televised Eddie Gordon (DJInTheMix.Com) said that the 5 majors are concerned about marketshares, but they have to get on the internet and dance with the kids or die. ... http://dancemusic.about.com/cs/features/a/BBDMSIntRev.htm

Billboard Dance Music Summit 2006 - Las Vegas Wrapup Eddie Gordon (Music 2 Mix) predicted this on a DMS panel more than five years ago to an almost dismissive audience, stressing the importance of building a ... http://dancemusic.about.com/od/conference/a/BBDMS2K6WU_2.htm

Winter Music Conference 2004 - Other Parties Future Music. Michael Paoletta,. Derek Graves, Seven. Eddie Gordon, Debra Eriksen. PlexiPR Party. Steve Porter. Betty Kang. Hed Kandi Party ... http://dancemusic.about.com/library/blwmc2k4/blwmc2k41.htm

Billboard Dance Music Summit 2006 - Panel Pictures (Page 2) Agostino Carollo, Darude, Eddie Gordon, Richard Bridge, Brandon Bakshi, The Loose Cannons (Kaiser Saucy & Lord Fader), Ricky Simmonds. Staying Alive ... http://dancemusic.about.com/library/bb2k6/blBBDMS2K6d.htm

and another thing (at the above mentioned ADE in 2000)

Eddie Gordon is the man behind the Manifesto, NEO labels and over 150 Top 40 UK hits singles. He has been instrumental in BBC Radio 1's dance music programming over the last fifteen years and is soon to launch Media2Radio an online radio promotions company in the USA. Here are his visionary views both past and present. MUSICWORKS, Glasgow 2004.


The purpose of this text below is to highlight that music is not a secret club. You don't one day learn to like music the way you learn to speak, swim or ride a bike. Music is our birthright - we are all born with music's two components, rhythm and melody, inside us, each and every one of us. So whether you want to be a musician, a singer, a producer or a DJ you don't need a certificate to enter the world of music. We are already members from birth.

I’ve spoken at Music Conferences in Europe, America and in Glasgow University. I've seen people dance to music in all corners of the world, on beaches in Thailand, Goa, Bondi, Cape Town, Honolulu, Rio, Miami, Dubai and in the dark days of Belfast with the Europa Hotel still smoking from a bomb the day before as Catholics and Protestants kids dance under the same roof oblivious to their elder's war mongering. I've witnessed over 1-1/2 million people on the streets of Berlin from many different countries, gay-black-straight-yellow-old-white and young locked as one united by music, seen numerous music weekenders, Ibiza, Glastonbury, Phoenix, Creamfields and the party at Formula 1's first Grand Prix in Bahrain with no alcohol, just music on offer. A good deal of BBC Radio 1's dance music ideas in the '90s through to 2009 came from me including the Essential Mix Show, BBC Radio 1 in Ibiza, the UK Love Parade and the BBC Radio 1 Millennium One World presentation.

My experience’s are from a global view - watching people enjoy and love music. By reading on you accept that it just my ‘opinion'

First and foremost please accept two (2) simple explanations.

A: practical.
B: spiritual.

A. In it’s simplest term. The distribution of music is the exchange of information/energy. The information recorded is delivered for sales as Vinyl, Tape, CD, MP3 etc - this is an exchange of information, these days Digital information. In Yesteryear it was analogue information (tape etc). When played on the Radio/TV if the information recorded is deemed good the information will be accepted and energise people to buy it. In a club/disco if the information is good people will be energised and dance to it. Today if the information on an MP3 file is good people will ‘burn/download’ onto their computer hard drives. The basics have not changed from listening to the 78rpm Bakelite recordings of the 1940’s to the MP3 music file of 2009. It’s an exchange of information. Information that can have life changing effects on people

B. MUSIC. The components. I have told this simple explanation to hundreds of people, including Keynote speeches at conferences and I will probably still be telling people when I’m ready for my last supper.

The two (2) essential components of music are Melody and Rhythm. Take them both away and what do you have left? Silence. Seriously, anything that forms a note is in the Melody camp and anything that hits a beat is in the Rhythm camp. So take away the beat then remove anything that hits a note and you've got silence. Melody and Rhythm - you can have one without the other but on the whole music is a combination of the two. So where does Melody and Rhythm come from?

Please allow me to explain.

Rhythm = You and your body are a mass of mathematics and rhythm. Everything balances. You see, hear, breath, eat, beat, walk, talk, love and dance (some do) in rhythm. The first thing you learn to do independently as a baby is to crawl and then walk - in rhythm. If you tried to walk three left steps then one right fast you’ll fall over. So rhythm is not a mystery as KKlass once sang - you, I, we are all rhythm. We build things in rhythm around us or our houses would fall down and our cars would not drive - we are totally formed around our ability to understand and create rhythm, its what separates us from the animal kingdom, plus the fact that we have fingers to build things made of rhythm.

Melody = This is an easy one to get your head around. It’s the first ‘language’ between yourself as a baby and your mother. For the first 20 months of your life your interaction with your family is soothing, cajoling, noises in melodic tones/voices. If an adult shouts at at a baby it will cry. If a mother la la la’s the baby warmly it smiles whether the mother is Aboriginal, Eskimo, African, Chinese, Norwegian any human mother the first language of love is melody and that 'language' is Universal. We all speak the same language the world over for nearly the first two years of our lives. Which is why we associate melody so strongly with affection. Hearing a great piece of melody people often react physically "oh I love this track, song, sound". The Melody of Love as Donna Summer once sang.

There’s a very logical reason for the chill-out/ambient music revolution - we need our fix of melody and these days clubbing is mostly a non-melodic experience. Over 15 million Cafe Del Mar albums for example. It's also one of the key reason's for the explosion of artists like Alicia Keys, Nora Jones, Jamie Cullum, Jamie Scott, Amy Winehouse, Katie Melua, etc.

HEREIN LIES OUR PROBLEMS.

On the whole the radio and record industry the world over does not understand why people listen to the radio or buy music. They know they do and if they hear certain records often enough they will want to own a copy of that music/song in numbers sometimes in millions of people.

Unlike the experience of reading your favorite book, watching a video/DVD or eating a favorite meal, we enjoy a loved song or record a hundred times over at the same intensity, sometimes in repeated plays. How many times have you heard White Christmas by Bing Crosby ? Yet still it resonates within us like a glowing fire. Music takes us to a special place and always will. People buying, wanting, loving music is not a mystery and they always will want it in their lives the world over. The British music industry needs to recognize this or it is in trouble. The answer is not serving writs on serial downloaders that's for certain. Understand why they need music in their lives first then cater for their spiritual relationship with music.

This is why the position and the health of the BBC in our lives, not just the UK but the world over, is vitally important because 99% of all other media is advertising revenue driven, the music is a necessary bait nothing more. Capital Radio want you to listen to as many adverts as they can get on air, they are not interested in breaking new artists in case it drives the listening figures down thus pulling their advertising revenue's down.

The BBC as a platform is the Gold Medal World Champion for new talent. The management of such an important part of the media in a world where people cannot rely on the truth of religion or politics* is as important as truth itself and should be a manifesto deemed sacrosanct. Both politics and religion are seen today to be money driven manifestations by the youth. Please watch this video. Ready for the hard stuff?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&feature=player_embedded

Both of these quotes apply to the immediate future -

Edward Fitzgerald to the Pop Idol/Fame Academy syndrome “Ah, fill the cup:- what boots it to repeat How time is slipping underneath our Feet: Unborn TO-MORROW, and dead YESTERDAY. Why fret about them if TODAY be sweet. (in a word - here today and gone tomorrow)

CP Scott quote from me to the now mis-managed BBC Radio 1 - where DJ's take preference over music. "The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. It’s primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred." C.P Scott. Aged 80. Manchester Guardian 6 May 1926. (in a word, honest content is good - monopoly is evil

Which just leaves me to say sorry.

To the lost generations of UK producers, singers, writers and musicians who unlike their elders in the early 90's are now clearly denied their rightful space to present their new creations because elitism has taken place of the freedom of expression. Thus it saddens me even more to witness, that by payment of their license fees have also been denied the chance to hear the records and songs that could/should have been on the 'air'.

BBC Mark Thompson hang your head in shame.

On a brighter note. At the Amsterdam Dance Event in 2001 I gave a keynote speech, not about hit records or artists I had worked with but how human beings have it within themselves to glow, that we are all capable to do so just that some people glow brighter, like Madonna for example. That we all have the tools to succeed. Well some of the audience thought I'd been eating dope cookies in one of the famous Amsterdam Cafes I think but years later this evidence came out below...you can be too far ahead sometimes.

Living things glow with visible light

Japanese scientist have shown how the human body glows with visible light. The quantity of light emitted is 1000 times too dim for our eyes to see, but the researchers imaged the glow with special cameras. The light is tied to metabolism, suggesting that measuring it could have medical applications, says Tohoku Institute of Technology scientist Masaki Kobayashi. Meanwhile, New Age aura-seers everywhere scream with "vindication." From LiveScience:

In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

(This visible light differs from the infrared radiation -- an invisible form of light -- that comes from body heat.)

To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.

The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

"Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light" (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

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