I was talking with a few friends the other day about business matters, and what they told me is that I have a lot of accumulated knowledge after twenty years in the music business, that people will pay money for. I was shocked to find that people are publishing 20-page e-books and selling them on Amazon, and astonished to find that people would pay for my catalogs of scores and CDs with reviews . . . all things that I had been working on privately. I can’t imagine what it will be like at my estate sale, especially since that will include the music from several other estates, like Ms. Olive Stoker Wall Hardin (if I’ve figured out the order properly. The New Yorker says it best: “Musicians lead complicated lives”).
And so what don’t you know? That I have thirty-five feet of shelf space devoted to sheet music, and a four-drawer lateral filing cabinet filled with CDs, three rows deep, in slimline cases. In addition, I have more than twenty gigabytes of sheet music digitized, at about 1 megabyte each, which adds up to a LOT of music! (One gigabyte is equal to 1024 megabytes. That’s over 20,000 files.)