A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

Analysis: True. For 45 minutes on the morning of January 12, 2007, concert violinist Joshua Bell stood incognito on a Washington, D.C. subway platform and performed classical music for passersby. Video and audio of the performance are available on the Washington Post website.

“No one knew it,” explained Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten several months after the event, “but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.” Weingarten came up with the experiment to see how ordinary people would react.

And how did they react? For the most part, not at all. More than a thousand people entered the Metro station as Bell worked his way through a set list of classical masterpieces, but only a few stopped to listen. Some dropped money in his open violin case (for a total of about $27), but most never even stopped to look, Weingarten wrote.

The text above, penned by an unidentified author and circulated via blogs and email, poses a philosophical question: “If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?”

Which is fair to ask, and fair to answer that the demands of our fast-paced workaday world can indeed stand in the way of appreciating truth and beauty and other contemplative delights when we encounter them. But it’s equally fair to point out that there’s an appropriate time and place for everything. Was an experiment really necessary to determine that rush hour on a busy subway platform isn’t conducive to an appreciation of the sublime? Probably not, though it makes for an interesting story just the same.

Check out Newsweek’s Daily Beast 31 easy ways to get smarter in 2012. I don’t know if I even agree with them all. I mean, #14 is play violent video games!

Here’s my favorite for songwriters:

#24: Write by hand. Remember what that feels like? Brain scans show that handwriting engages more sections of the brain than typing. Bonus brain boost: it’s easier to remember something once you’ve written it down on paper.

Most of us are already doing #23. Here’s what they say.

#23 Play an instrument. Strum chords, tickle the ivories, play a jug. Learning an instrument boosts IQ and increases activity in parts of the brain controlling memory and coordination.

I guess for musicians, I would change that to, learn a new instrument.

Some other easy ones are eat yoghurt, hydrate and drink coffee. So are you supposed to drink water instead of coffee, or drink coffee instead of water or just drink more of both?

More of my favorites:

#2 Eat turmeric
#6 Sleep. A lot
#7 Download the TED app
#11 Eat dark chocolate

Read them all in detail here.

By Cliff Goldmacher at BMI.com,

1. Write down a song title every day. If you take a minute or two every morning to wake up your inner songwriter, you’ll be amazed at the cumulative results by year’s end. Keep a small notebook by your bed and write down a song title first thing every day. Don’t spend a ton of time on these; just write down the first thing that comes to mind. Some of your titles will be uninspired but others will be genuinely unique and song-ready. This notebook is a great way of not having to start from scratch when it’s time to sit down and write. Sometimes a title that seemed dull when you were writing it down will inspire a great song when you see it again later. It’s a small thing but it’s a reminder that inspiration is an active pursuit.

2. Find a new (or your first) co-writer. Carrying the weight of creating a song by yourself is both a worthwhile challenge and a discouraging burden, depending on the day. Sharing the load with a co-writer is a great way to stay motivated and explore different approaches to songwriting. Read the rest of resolution #2 here.

3. Write a song in a genre that’s new to you. As a country songwriting friend said to me once, “there are lots of countries.” In other words, try to write a song this year in a musical style that’s unfamiliar to you. Read the rest of #3 here.

4. Don’t give up. Songwriting is not a profession for the faint-hearted or the easily discouraged. It can be both exhilarating and demoralizing. Read the entire article here.

Cliff Goldmacher is a songwriter, producer, session musician, engineer, author and owner of recording studios in Nashville, TN and Sonoma, CA. Cliff’s site, Educated Songwriter, is full of resources for the aspiring songwriter and his company, Nashville Studio Live, provides songwriters outside of Nashville with virtual access to Nashville’s best session musicians and singers for their songwriting demos.

You can download a FREE sample of Cliff’s eBook “The Songwriter’s Guide To Recording Professional Demos” by going to http://www.EducatedSongwriter.com/ebook.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/EducatedSongwriter
Twitter: @edusongwriter

Print this one, frame it and post it on your wall. Or fold it up and keep it in your wallet. It’s a little long, but well worth your time. In this blog post Danny Barnes spells out some principles to live by. It’s clear he’s talking from experience.

I had not heard of Danny Barnes before, but after reading this post, I had to dig deeper. Now I dig his music, too.

Read the post and explore Danny Barnes and his music here.

This article by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers in Acoustic Guitar magazine includes 21 songwriting tips from Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, David Wilcox and others, as well as example videos and tabs.

Here’s tip 5, just to whet your appetite.

5. TUNE DOWN. Conversely, you can lower the tuning of all the strings a half step or a whole step to put the guitar into a less familiar range while still being able to play normal fingerings. When I was a beginning guitarist trying to learn “Yesterday,” I wish I’d known that Paul McCartney was playing in standard tuning down a whole step. Instead of wrestling, as I was, with F and Bb barre chords, he used easy key-of-G shapes that sounded in the key of F. Since then I’ve been repeatedly surprised to learn how many songs were written in lowered tunings, from John Fogerty classics (“Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son”) to more recent tracks by Keller Williams and Ben Harper.

Read the full article here.

…according to federal court documents filed by attorneys for Chuck D.

Found on Digital Music News. Read the full article and see a similar chart for ringtones here.

How much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace? Is it enough to live on? How many CDs would you have to sell to earn a living? How many iTunes downloads would you have to sell every month? How about albums or downloads on CD Baby, how about Spotify?

Someone has taken the time and the considerable effort to research this and present it in a stiking visual way. In addition they are making available all the numbers in a spreadsheet arrangement here. To see a sharper (readable) graphic image, click here for the original post.

Note: these figures do not include publishing royalties (paid to composers of songs). The full spreadsheet of data does though. You can see all the numbers and sources here:http://bit.ly/DigitalRoyalty

I figure if I write songs from my heart, about love, heartbreak and other things that are universal, then my potential audience is everybody, because everybody can relate to love, right? And that’s the goal, to get as big a number of listeners and CD buyers/downloaders as possible, no?

But Bob Baker says that’s casting too wide a net. He says that by picking one of my passions and writing about that, I will really zero in on a much smaller potential audience (and repel others), but that audience will be much more likely to respond (become fans). When it comes to fans, smaller is better, if it’s small but committed, as opposed huge and apathetic.

Bob Baker always seems to have a good idea. Read his article here.