When you go to concerts today, you will find people looking at their phones. We could complain about that, or we could realize that there are two potential ways to deal with it.

The first way is to realize that, since they’re going to be looking at their phones anyway, you could just make them part of the show.

Some artists and venues already encourage fans to tweet pictures, upload videos and vote on song requests. This allows younger fans to scratch their gnawing phone itch while still participating actively in the show.

But why stop there? You could even have audiences download an app to interact with the concert: If everyone’s got a high-powered computing device in their pocket anyway, why not give each of them control over a handful of pixels of projected abstract image and see what might unfold?

There are brilliant and unrealized possibilities here. Good excuses to make better art.

The second path is to make music that’s more interesting than the phone. This is more difficult. But it’s a welcome challenge.

If you take this approach, you could even go as far as to prohibit people’s phone usage. (This is already common at the opera, symphonic concerts and anywhere an older audience can be found.)

But if you have moratorium on phone usage, and you find that people stop showing up because they can’t stand to be in the room with only your music to pass the time, then you can’t blame them for it.

Both of these paths are valid. Either one can spur you on to be ever-more creative and inventive than you have been. In either case, if people end up just scrolling through their Facebook feeds, you lose. And either way, just blaming them for it won’t change a damn thing.

It’s not enough to do work for work’s sake. Not in the long run, anyway.

I know, I know, work really can be its own reward. For a time.

But for work to be sustainable, and for it to feel meaningful, one of two things must be happening. We either have to be:

1) Making something that other people really want. Or,

2) Doing something that brings us closer to our goals.

This applies to anything, even the non-commercial. Why knit someone a scarf? Is it only so that you have something to do with your fingers? There are so many other things you could be doing with them. Why do you garden? Is it just so that you have some busywork to do during the summer and some mud on your jeans?

Even when the work appears to be its own reward, when it comes to the most satisfying endeavors, there is some other reason (maybe a multitude of them) buried deep underneath. Or at least there’s got to be, if you ever expect to keep it up.

Why do you practice an instrument? There has to be a reason. “Because my parents are making me” is a bad one. It rarely holds up in the long run. “Because I must” is barely better.

Why write a song? “Because I must express myself!” This sounds good, but it rarely holds up either. As a wise old professor of mine used to say: “Express yourself? You were going to do that anyway.”

If you want to be successful at anything, you have to be in it for the long haul. You have to be willing to keep on doing it even when no one else cares. You have to do it when there are other, intensely pressing things to care about too.

Find your reasons. (Better yet to pick several, in case one breaks.) Make them good.  You’re going to need them.

Music is built, to varying degrees, on repetition. With few exceptions, this is true not only of music’s structure and form, but of the way we interact with it, whether we’re practicing musicians or just listeners.

For most of us, there is a point in our younger lives when we watch the same movies and TV shows again and again, read through the same books until we almost know them by heart, and listen to the same songs hundreds of times.

We do this kind of thing to help us form our identities, to discover who we are, and at a certain point—believe it or not teenagers and college students—those sorts of questions start to get boring.

But aside from an annual tradition or two, as we get older, most of us tend to give up the practice of reading the same books and watching the same movies and TV episodes again and again. Music is a bit different. No matter how old we get, the music we love almost always bears repeating.

To me, a truly great piece of music is almost impossible to understand completely on the first listen. (And in the rare case that is, it just begs to be heard a thousand more times because of it.) Great movies, in my opinion, are different. Almost the opposite.

I saw There Will Be Blood once, and from that single viewing it is, and will always remain, one of my favorite movies. I don’t really need to see it again. I can think about it anytime I want. The moments of that film sit as part of my soul, almost like a personal memory of an event that I have lived. To see it again would only change that relationship.

I know that I’m not alone in this kind of thing. As an adult, Roger Ebert rarely ever watched a movie twice. Neither did The New Yorker‘s film critic Pauline Kael, who once said to an interviewer:

“I still don’t look at movies twice. It’s funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it’s different, although I realize that sometimes with classical works, I listen to them with great enthusiasm and excitement the first time, but I’m not drawn to listen to them again and again. Whereas with pop, it’s just the reverse. Give me Aretha singing “A Rose Is Just a Rose,” and I can play it all day long. And I can’t explain that.”

Earlier today, while doing research for a story on surround sound mixing, I came across an old article that appeared in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. It was written in August of 1941, shortly after Disney debuted the groundbreaking Fantasia, the first commercial picture ever to be released featuring surround sound. In it, the authors write:

“The art of sound-picture reproduction is about 15 years old. While an engineer familiar with the complications of sound reproduction may be amazed at the tens of thousands of trouble-free performances given daily, the public takes our efforts for granted and sees nothing remarkable about it.

Therefore, we must take large steps forward, rather than small ones, if we are to inveigle the public away from softball games, bowling alleys, nightspots, or rapidly improving radio reproduction.

The public has to hear the difference and then be thrilled by it, if our efforts toward the improvement of sound-picture quality are to be reflected at the box-office. Improvements perceptible only through direct A–B comparisons have little box-office value.”

Wise words then, wise words now. (And yet today, so many of us have become obsessed with differences not even perceptible in direct A-B comparison. Where are our heads?)

As the authors demand, “we must take large steps forward, rather than small ones.” They are right. And, as they say: “The public has to hear the difference and then be thrilled by it.” You have your challenge.

There have always been more books in the library than you could ever read. There have always been more magazines than you would ever be able to keep up with, and more newspapers than could ever be relevant to you.

There has never been a point in modern history where there weren’t more bands on the planet than you could ever follow, more composers than you could ever get to know intimately, or more radio shows than you could ever be interested in.

You’d have to spend about 60 years with your eyes glued to a screen 24 hours a day in order to watch the 270,000 or so commercial films cataloged by the IMDB alone. (Make that 80 years if you wanted to leave time for sleeping. And add a zero if you even want to start thinking about TV.)

For all practical purposes, the amount of media available to us has essentially been infinite for a very long time. (As long as any of us have been alive, anyway.)

Are things really that much different now, simply because 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? (In case you’re wondering, that’s about 52.6 million hours of video every year.)

When a number that is already infinity for all practical purposes, becomes a slightly larger version of infinity, does it really make that much of a difference in our lives?

Maybe it’s time to start seeing art and information for what they really are, and in some sense, have always had the potential to be: A constant stream; An unyielding current that we can tap into or out of at will.

What is finite is our time, our attention and our energy. A good question to ask is whether we’re spending them on the right things.

From one perspective, sure, there’s more noise. You also have more power than ever before to make an even stronger signal.

…To live, to eat, to visit, to shop, to see a concert or to walk around in.

They might not always be where we want or expect them to be, and they will rarely be in the same places they were a decade ago. But they’re always there.

Likewise, there will always be places that are expensive and worth it, places that are expensive and not worth it at all, and places that are cheap for a reason. (The reason being that they are terrible.)

Part of living artfully is to find those places and things that are cheap but amazing and advocate for them. Alternately, you could find places that are expensive and worth it, and help the us to appreciate them instead of taking them for granted and letting them fall apart, as we tend to do.

Sure. You could instead focus on the places that are expensive and overrated and aim to tear them down, or on those places that are cheap and terrible and shame the world that they exist. You could make it your life’s work to reveal them to us and simply make us indignant over the world’s many imperfections. But why? That’s easy. These days in particular, do you really think we need much help with that? Is there a shortage of that kind of sentiment that we’re not aware of? It doesn’t seem so from here.

We already know how to resent what we believe to be misplaced valuation. We know how to look down our noses at those things that are beneath us, and to take pity on the places  in the world that are just plain sad. Does that make us better or happier people? Does it lead to better art?

What we do need help with is discovering amazing things we’ve overlooked, and noticing the great old things that we’re taking for granted. If that’s not a role for art, I don’t know what is. Focusing exclusively on what’s wrong is for the tomato-throwers. It’s the easy part.

Why is your song seven minutes long?

Is it because it’s your song?

If so, re-evaluate.

What are you saying in seven minutes that you couldn’t say in six or five or two?

If a song is long because you keep on adding verses and choruses, it’s probably longer than it has to be. Sometimes, more song isn’t in order—A new one is.

Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” barely reaches the three minute mark. And every time it ends, I feel almost short-changed. If I’m able, I might just reach reach over to play it again. And again. And again.

That’s what your songs are supposed to do: Leave people wanting to hear them again.

If your song leaves me so satiated for its mood, its story and its colors that I feel like never have to hear it again, congratulations: You just lost a listener. I’ve already gotten what I came for. I’m done.

Of course, there are times when it’s right for a song to be 7 minutes long.

Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is like a tight little Swiss watch at just over 30 minutes. James Brown or Parliament can keep me going on a single riff for far longer than should ever make sense. Sonic Youth often did long well. So did Robert Fripp and Kraftwerk. (Sometimes they didn’t.) And Wagner’s Ring Cycle lasts about 16 hours. It can.

So, how do you know when a song is too long?

If you even have to ask, that’s a pretty good clue.

One thing that we can learn from history is that the strategies that worked the last time around are unlikely to be the strategies that are going to work this time around. And yet still, so many of us get caught up “fighting the last war.”

Want to make a debut album?

Maybe the best approach right now isn’t to find someone to fund it, work on it in secret over the course of a year and then present it to the world like a hot steaming lump, backed by a megabucks marketing campaign.

Maybe the best approach isn’t to book the big fancy studio for the whole project on your very first time out. Maybe that’s for later. For when it makes sense. For when you’ve proved you’re worth it by making things that are so good that they just can’t ignore you.

Maybe the heaviest phase of marketing your music isn’t so supposed to come after the release anymore. Maybe it’s supposed to come before. And maybe a few free songs aren’t lost revenue. Maybe they’re extremely cost-effective marketing.

A lot of “get” this by now. But what we tend to forget is that this won’t work forever either. The world will just change again.

People will get bored of free music. They’ll get bored of cheap-sounding debuts. They’ll get bored of thinking of their artists as the boy or girl next door. And then some day, they’ll get bored of whatever comes next.

Years ago, whenever someone said the words “free music” to me, my reaction was “alright!” Now it’s “ugh.” I know that I’m not alone. So that’s one trend.

But the beautiful thing about both commerce and art is that so many different worlds and so many different trends can exist all at once. Especially now.

Maybe some kinds of artists can pull a Beyoncé, drop an album into the middle of the room like it’s a heaping pile of sequined formal-wear and say: “You sort it out. It’ll be more fun that way.”

Maybe some artists can release their work bit-by-bit on video sites and blogs and through constant shows until they’ve built built up a reservoir of people who care. And then they can release the big one.

Maybe there are some artists who can say: “Here it is, it’s all yours. Just take it. You tell me what it’s worth.”

And maybe some of them can say: “This is what we’ve done. We think it’s valuable. If you want to be part of it, you have to show us that you value it too.”

Most of us will probably benefit from finding a blend between these strategies. A few of us can benefit from going hard one way or the other. And maybe changes in the culture or the economy will point us more squarely in one direction or the other from time to time.

But what I can say is that the tactics and strategies that worked best five years ago are unlikely to be the ones that will work best five years from now. Only the underlying principles will remain constant:

• Make it great. (And remember that it will never be perfect.)

• Make it often. (But not so often that it suffers.)

• Put it out there. (And remember that you get to decide on the terms.)

• Balance your checkbook. (But don’t be a cheapskate.)

• Be generous. (And don’t forget to demand what you’re worth.)

• And never stop practicing or learning new things about the world. (Ever.)

Has music ceased being cool?

These days, when someone tells me about some cool new thing that just came out that I absolutely have to experience, it’s almost always been a TV show: Breaking Bad. House of Cards. The Wire. Dexter. Mad Men. Girls. Game of Thrones.

When was the last time someone told you about an album or a song that you simply must hear, with the same kind of intensity that they’ve used to advocate for their favorite shows?

This is not to condemn or critique our culture for being obsessed with its TV shows. I get it. I’ve seen House of Cards. Kevin Spacey’s unconvincing southern accent aside, it’s as good as anything Shakespeare ever wrote. If it continues on its current track, it’ll be one for the history books.

The defensive reply I often hear is that music can’t be expected to compete with these formats: How can an album, no matter how great, stand up to the lure of five full seasons of Breaking Bad? What kid is going to get excited about a recording when there’s a new Avengers movie out? What kind of concert is going to tear someone away from a game console cued up with BioShock Infinite?

I think that’s nonsense.

It’s a cop-out. Why, when presented with a challenge like this would you ever run away? Because it’s hard? Because it’s easier to just watch the show, download the movie, give in to the game and give up? Because it’s easier to just stop believing in the power of music, simply because someone came out with a bigger, flashier way of making bigger, flashier things? Simply because a few people have learned how to tell engrossing stories in ever more engrossing ways?

There have long been great movies, cutting-edge TV shows and addicting games to play. Music has a different place. You have your challenge. Now rise to it.

Personally, I’ve refused to watch Breaking Bad, not because I don’t think it will be any good, but because I absolutely believe it’s as great as all my friends tell me, and I simply can’t afford to get sucked in.

There are books I want to read, songs I want to learn, records I want to hear, courses I want to take, concerts I want to attend, people I want to meet. Some day, years from now, maybe I’ll binge on all 5 seasons. I’m sure it will still be as relevant then as it is now.

But for now I sit here waiting. Desperately. Wanting to hear something good. And I’m not alone.

Well, I guess that’s not quite true: I have plenty of great things to listen to. We all do. I’ve been quite satisfied with my choices, just like TV watchers have been with theirs. And I’m not really sitting around, either. I’m seeking things and I’m listening for recommendations.

So here’s a better question: Why isn’t your music on that list? What would it take to get it there? What are you going to do to make me care?

There are millions of us just waiting for a song to be interested in. Make me care. Make it good. I’m even happy to pay you. Significantly more than you might think. What are you waiting for?