the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I don’t even know what “asides” are. But let’s see what happens.
Aha, these are just little snippets that are displayed without a title. Interesting.
There is some logic in WP that uses the category you decide works for these and lets that drive how they’re displayed.
This isn’t so much prognostication as reporting on the facts as they’re happening.
This is HYSTERICAL! Is the pint-sized rocker truly going to get the last laugh?
Oh, you remember, when he changed his name, and painted “Slave” on his cheek. The big bad record company wasn’t allowing him to do what he wanted, which was to release more MUSIC!
For those who’ve forgotten, that was Warner Brothers, run by Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker, the most respected, the most credible label in the business.
But Mo was an accountant. This didn’t make BUSINESS sense! Releases had to be staggered, marketed and promoted, the public just couldn’t devour that much music.
But what about artistry, what about FANS!
So, Prince ultimately got his freedom and went on his own personal hejira. A walkabout. A journey in the desert.
He used the newfangled Internet to form a club.
Well, that didn’t work.
Prince was a joke, a has-been. Someone off the grid, that you no longer paid much attention to.
And then Prince executed a masterstroke. He decided to display his still prodigious skills on national TV, and then go on tour and GIVE his new album away!
Hell, the concert tickets were so expensive anyway (albeit cheaper than those of most long in the tooth rockers), what difference did it make if he threw a few pennies away if it got his new music in the HANDS OF THE FANS!
Yes, just a few pennies. Hell, the value of a plastic disc declined to almost zero, just like its cost, when AOL flooded the market with them.
Getting the music in the hands of fans. That’s what technology allows, cheaply. This is what has been driving the record labels INSANE! They’ve got a model. Not any different from the one Mo employed back at Warner Brothers in the nineties. You craft an album, run up the publicity and sell it for in excess of fifteen bucks. But is this serving the ARTIST, never mind the FAN!
A true artist desires one thing more than any other. To get his music EXPOSED!
Oh, the labels will say it’s all about the money. Well, maybe it is to the execs, who are sans talent and sans mission, that’s probably why they said that Napster would kill music. Maybe their PROFITS were threatened, but music would live on just fine. Because the people who make it, THEY’VE GOT TO MAKE IT!
Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff and Paris Hilton wouldn’t make music if it were free, but Radiohead would, and so would Coldplay.
So, if you’re a heritage act, and radio will have nothing to do with you, how do you get your message out there, how do you get people to hear your new music?
In one fell swoop, Prince has trumped McCartney. The “Daily Mail” is going to deposit TWO MILLION CDS in the hands of old fans and potential new ones, AS A PREMIUM, essentially COMPLETELY FREE TO THE CONSUMER, the disc comes with the newspaper. What’s even BETTER, Prince is getting PAID FOR THEM, by the “Mail”!
Win-win, wouldn’t you say?
Not if you’re a music retailer. Or a record label.
The retailers, they’re dropping like flies. The Fopp chain suddenly bit the dust in the U.K., and you’ve heard of Tower Records, haven’t you?
Think about this. Prince is going to reach MORE people, and ultimately make MORE MONEY, leaving traditional CD retailers OUT OF THE LOOP!
And what does he need the label for? He’s rich enough to record the music on his own, and who needs all the services they charge for, getting discs in the store, paying the retailers to stock them, trying to get tracks on the radio unsuccessfully, when he can accomplish ALL THIS BY HIS LONESOME AND KEEP ALL THE MONEY!
It took more than ten years, but the game finally caught up with Prince. He’s suddenly at the FOREFRONT!
Wal-Mart? The Eagles should have made a deal with a media company TO GIVE THE ALBUM AWAY! A f***ing bidding war, what’s a new Eagles disc worth as a promotional tool?
And suddenly, everybody’s got your music and you’ve gotten paid.
Radio didn’t play “Hole In The World” that much, it’s not like you can count on radio this time around, but maybe all the hoopla of giving the album away will CAUSE radio and TV to embrace new Eagles tracks.
I don’t want to beat Irving and his band up too badly. They were at the forefront LAST YEAR, when this deal was MADE! If Henley wasn’t such a perfectionist, the album would have been on sale MONTHS ago and they all would have looked like geniuses.
But who’s gonna be the first classic act that’s gonna give away their record in the U.S?
A new Police record?
The Stones would have been better off giving their album away, shit they barely sold any copies of “A Bigger Bang” and the band’s records never sold that well anyway!
Now if you want to get on the radio, if you want to build an act, this paradigm doesn’t look too good. You need the traditional label, with its infrastructure and ties to radio and other media outlets.
But do you really need THEM? Or, in the future, will you be able to OUTSOURCE these functions?
Better yet, let’s say you don’t make music that CAN GET ON THE RADIO! Which is seemingly everybody but rappers or pop airheads these days. Where does this LEAVE YOU?
Well, music shouldn’t be free, people should pay for it. But until the labels wake up and authorize new modes of acquisition, allowing more people to own more music at a cheaper price, should free be a part of YOUR STRATEGY?
It already is. Even at the most basic level, the ability for the audience to hear four tracks on MySpace.
Every band has a MySpace site. You have to. The public EXPECTS IT! They just put your name and “MySpace” into the Google field and presume you’ll come up. You’re THRILLED IF PEOPLE WANT TO LISTEN! That’s the HARDEST PART, getting people to LISTEN! That’s what the labels have f***ed up, the ability for people to HEAR the music. The old bait and switch, one good track that has to be purchased as part of an album of dreck, that paradigm is history, that’s done, the Net killed that.
And now the Net seems to have killed record stores.
And despite the long arm of the government, trying to kill small Web stations, the Internet is killing terrestrial radio.
And that free music, traded P2P and hard-drive swapped, it ends up on iPods, many people never even TOUCH the radio dial.
Right now, at the halfway mark in 2007, the revolution has finally begun.
EMI making a deal with SnoCap? Selling by track is economic death, never mind at $1.30. But notice they’re unprotected MP3s, UNTHINKABLE AS RECENTLY AS 2006! You see, EMI is DESPERATE!
Retail is f***ed.
Are the labels f***ed too?
It seems so. Their cash cows are going to do it themselves, like Prince and the Eagles, or extract heinous terms. And, if you’ve got no guaranteed sellers, HOW DO YOU MAKE YOUR NUMBERS?
By not even being in the new music game, by ceding that business to newcomers, functioning at a much lower economic level, and by selling the assets you already POSSESS!
Yup, trying to sell EVERY LAST ZEPPELIN track to people. Lower the price, and give people more.
Otherwise, the way we’re going, people are going to EXPECT, like with Prince, that the music be FREE!
Time to monetize P2P. Time to throw the long ball. Because the acts, and labels are always dependent on the acts, are getting RESTLESS!
In other words, the lunatics are taking over the asylum.
WHAT A GREAT F***ING MOVIE!
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall June 29, 2007 11:33 AM:
But the story in general has been out there for years, as well as a good number of the specifics, strewn over hundreds, probably thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, online and off.
In other words, when it comes to recognizing Cheney’s profoundly damaging effect on American constitutionalism as well as his guiding role in essentially all of the administration’s most disastrous policies, the train already left the station some time ago.
Sorry.
Seriously, from the moment he decided there was no better candidate for VP than himself, it’s been a non-stop power grab.
Aaargh. I have three brutal dead-in-the-water “archive and install” crash and rebuilds on two different systems, both G4s. What the . . . ?
Annoying, to say the least.
EFF: Privatunes doesn’t anonymize your iTunes files as promised:
Earlier this week, a bunch of posts popped up on sites including Slashdot and Wired Compiler about Privatunes, a free application that purports to anonymize DRM-free files you buy on iTunes.
Why would anyone need such an app? Well, because there’s been much controversy in recent weeks over allegations that Apple may be tracking personal information in the headers of these DRM-free files, in order to limit sharing.
I’m glad to see this finally called “anonymizing” since it has jack to do with privacy. Better to re-phrase the answer to “Why would anyone need such an app?” as “Because I don’t agree that copyright holders and their agents should be able to tell if distributed files can be traced back to me.”
This is interesting, since I am on a mailing list with a lot of musicians who were active long before the CD and digital reproduction and they are coming to grips with the fact that music is not the same high-value experience it once was, but at the same time, they’re pretty much against the “music should be free” ethos.
I really can’t relate to the BB’ers. They mostly derive income from being net.personalities and while that’s a great situation, most of us are not so lucky. How many people do you know whose business card could be as simple as their name and have that equal their name, title, job description, and in the Google-d age, their contact information? I don’t know of any.
Having read a bunch of the iPhone Naysayers, I’m struck by how much they miss the point of what Apple is trying to do with the device (in addition, I find myself wondering what the qualifications for becoming an IT Industry Analyst are, exactly).
Or more to the point, how do you keep finding work if you’re wrong as much as these yahoos are?
Technorati Tags: apple, technology, iPhone, design
well, since my kids are in summer swim league for 6 weeks, I am taking to the nearby high school track to try and work off some of this table muscle. I’m tipping the scales at about 190 (my scale sez 186, the MD’s is 191 and up: different times of day and clothing, I reckon) and I would really like to get to 180 or lower. BMI is around 24 or lower, so perhaps I’m not as lardy as I imagine.
So on Monday, I ran 1 mile, in 2 half-mile segments, and walked an additional half. Wednesday, I did 1.5 miles, with 3 laps of walking, and today, I did a mile with 2 laps of walking. So not too bad. The running parts are non-stop, so two laps is just that: two laps of admittedly slow running without stopping to catch my breath.
I am making an effort to pace myself and ensure I can do the distance without worrying about speed. I also have to get the heart rate monitor out and see how much good this is doing me there.
We’ll see how it goes over the summer. I could use the improved endurance and if any weight loss results, that’s good too. Determination and perseverance are easier to muster as I get older, it seems, and I feel some obligation to motivate my young charges to get out and get moving (only one of them needs any encouragement).
Rolling Stone : The Record Industry’s Decline:
It all could have been different: Seven years ago, the music industry’s top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs — including the CEO of Universal’s parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof — sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. “Mr. Idei started the meeting,” recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. “He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted.”
The idea was to let Napster’s 38 million users keep downloading for a monthly subscription fee — roughly $10 — with revenues split between the service and the labels. But ultimately, despite a public offer of $1 billion from Napster, the companies never reached a settlement. “The record companies needed to jump off a cliff, and they couldn’t bring themselves to jump,” says Hilary Rosen, who was then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. “A lot of people say, ‘The labels were dinosaurs and idiots, and what was the matter with them?’ But they had retailers telling them, ‘You better not sell anything online cheaper than in a store,’ and they had artists saying, ‘Don’t screw up my Wal-Mart sales.’ ” Adds Jim Guerinot, who manages Nine Inch Nails and Gwen Stefani, “Innovation meant cannibalizing their core business.”
Looks like a real failure to communicate. And it’s interesting that no one thought to differentiate between a listening experience (on the iPod) vs the physical experience (whatever kind of value-added items — art, games, interactive stuff) that could have shipped with the shiny disk.
“We have great records, but we’re less sure than ever that people are going to buy them,” he says.
The real threat to artists is obscurity, not piracy. The real goal should be for people to hear the music and let the artist do the rest.