The PUSH Ecosystem
When a consumer pushes the third radio button from the left, the heart of the entire centrally planned, top-down, ass-kissed, palm-greased, inefficient economy of the music industry grunts.

A millisecond after that button is pushed, music bubbles out the speakers. Everything leading up to that point is part of one paradigm, and that paradigm is PUSH.

• The band finishes a new album, so they push an announcement out to fans.
• The band wants gigs, so they push press kits out to talent buyers.
• The band wants to get signed, so they push anything they can toward labels.
• The label needs to promote, so they push music onto a demographic.
• The label wants radio spins, so they push music into radio stations.
• The radio station needs market share, so they push most-common denominator playlists.
• The label needs to sell CDs, so they push crates of CDs upon stores.
• The band wants sales, so they push fans to iTunes.

For the last fifty years, every action, from the end of music creation to the insertion of music into the ears of consumers, has been about PUSH.

The Twilight of Push, The Dawn of Pull...
To imagine the end of Push, you have to take the entire previous section and invert it. Where the last fifty years was about PUSH, the next fifty years will certainly be about PULL. As a consequence, you will have to unlearn and ultimately forget everything that is PUSH, and then discover, invent and invest in everything that is PULL.

The Language of Pull... What's in Your Seed Song Bucket?
One of the first PULL concepts is the idea of a Seed Song Bucket.  A Seed Song Bucket is a concept that will enter the lexicon of the music industry, and probably displace or replace terms like radio station, genre, playlisting, file sharing and music promotion. "What's in your seed song bucket?" is a sentence you can expect to roll off the tongues of music fans everywhere.

What's in Your Seed Song Bucket?
The center button in the radio image above activates the Seed Song Bucket called Friday Night. There are ten songs in this fictional Seed Song Bucket.

1. Banquet by Bloc Party
2. The Chemicals Between Us by Bush
3. Electric Feel by MGMT
4. Flight by Jediah
5. Perfect Time of Day by Howie Day
6. Reptile by The Church
7. Rise by Samantha James
8. Sugar, We're Goin Down by Fall Out Boy
9. You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet by Bachman-Turner Overdrive
10. You're All I Have by Snow Patrol

Activating the Friday Night Seed Song Bucket starts an endless stream of related songs. Every song that's delivered is relevant to the other songs in the Seed Song Bucket.

Measuring Relevancy - a Primer
Every song can be converted into something that can be plotted on a three-dimensional grid. A seed song bucket looks like a cluster of points on this grid. All of the songs in the system will either fall within this three-dimensional cluster or outside of it. Distances between songs and the cluster can be simply measured. Songs falling within, or just outside the cluster, will be played first and according to a geometric distance from the cluster. In the two-dimensional diagram below, song B would be played prior to song A. Click this link if you would like to see more detailed graphical representations of this concept.

Better Than a Human Programming Director?
Entire MP3s are not stored in the brain; every song is converted into something that's remembered and plotted (an association). Programming directors read charts, follow trends and analyze songs. With enough metadata attached to songs, an expert (not me) could explain how a music relevancy engine could be constructed to function like a live radio programming director. Google is built upon a relevancy engine, and it does a far more efficient (not necessarily better) job at supplying you with search results, than any army of humans ever could; songs shouldn't be much different.  So, when you start hearing people ask, "What's in your seed song bucket?", then you know the world is transitioning from PUSH To PULL.