"Before, it was just at live shows, now you have to be able to do a great live show, you have to be able to do a great online interview, you need to have a great Facebook page, you have to have a great television performance," he said.
There's no arguing with that. Another sentence, however, proves that Diddy is onto something that the record industry as a whole still largely ignores: "You have to understand how to be able to brand yourself," he said. Exactly. As a musician, today you can do more for your image and your fans through simple, freely available tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, than an army of spin doctors hired by record companies. Learning to leverage these tools, as proven by musicians such as Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Josh Freese, Amanda Palmer and others, will be a crucial part of every musician's career, while record companies, in their current form, might become more or less irrelevant.