The technique of paying trusted people to identify and recommend good independently-produced content can work just as well for music as it can for Magazines 2.0.

Over the years, lots of web services have appeared online, promising to connect unsigned bands with the public.  They've failed, though.  The main reason for this is that they haven’t been able to identify the best music, and position it first.  When potential customers visit these sites, they expect to find the best material at the top of the list. If they don’t hear something they like among the first few songs they listen to, they conclude—often incorrectly—that nothing on the site is very good, and they leave, never to return.

But if an army of people like our hypothetical WebMaven whose tastes other people respect starts beating the bushes for good music that’s been “undiscovered” by the conventional music industry, we can be pretty well assured they’ll not only find a lot, but also present it to us high on the list—not buried in 479^th place, where it currently tends to languish.  This is a business model that could transform the music business in a very positive way.

It could also give a more powerful boost than Magazines 2.0 to how we perceive today's world as operating.  People tend to spend more of their time in the realm of music than in literature. As a result, transforming the brutally harsh superstar-or-nobody dichotomy that currently prevails in music into something open to more aspirants is likely to have a correspondingly greater brightening effect on people’s sense of what the world in general is like—especially what kind of position people like themselves can have in it.