Oh, I'm sure there are quite a few reasons that musicians go through record companies, and the bigger the better. If you look at the percentage of musicians that get those big record contracts, it's the kind of figures that a high school basketball player doesn't want to hear.. but he's still going to try for the NBA. It's that big elusive goal that says you've made it.
Especially today, there are alternatives. You can go indy, produce your own music, make it available on the web in free sites that will even pay you a wee bit for downloads, or personal sites with your own happy little store front. But the sad truth of the matter is, it takes a big machine with lots of money to communicate a message effectively in this country. And that's what makes Factory Music a success. Record execs pay someone to write songs, pay some pretty kids to sing them, produce the music, pay radio stations to play the music, advertise the music with tv/radio, sadden the world by buying Aerosmith to sing duets at high profile events with their Music-Muppets, and feature their artists in music industry magazines. Avoid seeing that. I dare you. Try to not know a few words to some Backstreet Boys songs.
And now compare an artists ability to make a successful career and retire comfortably in both situations. You just don't often communicate far enough without being backed by The Machine.
I have a friend who writes some pretty incredible electronic music. Has a record label and puts his own music out along with that of some friends. Plays local gigs on occasion. Really interesting website. (link avoided because it's dangerous to put a link on/.;) Gets some writeups in local/indy mags and 'underground' webzines. I expect he'll be coding some 80+ hours a week still for some time though.
Shrug. It's an ugly machine. But a big machine. And with all of the lawsuits and 'measures' being taken, it looks like they are going to die extremely slowly.
I dig your nub, sport. Methinks this fella is skipping past the point and fiddling with the specifics. Just as we can manipulate length, width and height quite easily in this world, and are slaves to time, some being operating outside of the realm of time (ie: one dimension greater than ours) would have time as a malleable tool, as well as those 'lesser' dimensions which we control. With that in mind, the idea of god as a 'being' is even plausable, or at least one decent conclusion, in that gods decisions are not immediate (ie: ignoring time) but work within the realm of time. If god, a being with its own purposes, decided to for example sink the titanic, something that it sees Always (being outside of time), it could do so, via millions of years of manipulating the physical realm of our universe such that icebergs would be 'naturally' present right in the path of that ship, at the time that it passed by. But I'm digressing or something. Following the previous thought, there could be a God, if the number of existant dimensions is finite. Or for those infinity buffs, God is a being operating above and outside of all the infinite possible dimensions.
In my humble opinion, infinity is silly to work with. I like numbers or concepts that aren't in so much motion =) So I call God the 'absolute'. We can quite easily observe that this universe is relative, and all things exist, and exist separately, only in so much as they can be described in relation to other things. I don't like the '2 universes colliding' theory, in that it doesn't offer us any real answers to the 'why and how are we here' question.. the one science and religion in some part are both trying to resolve. The big bang offered us a drill-down to a single point, leaving only that one question. Now we've opened up the bag again and decided that our universe is just a 'thing' along with other 'things' inside of a bigger 'something'. Like a planet in a solar system. A solar system in a galaxy. Etc. Doesn't help solve the problem.
I think our existance is the absolute contemplating itself, and thus being experienced as relative. In personified terms, all of our existance, since the 'dawn of time' until time is long forgotten by All Things, are made up in the one divine instant that God said, "I."
Talk to the fish?
An attempt has been made to access a restricted URL.
/
Reason : profanity 1 nudity 1 fullnudity 1 sex 1 gross 1 racist 1 satanic 1 drug 1 militant 1 gambling 1 alcohol 1
Bad fish.
Dirty fish.
If a behaviour is so bad that you want to stop it, criminalize it. But, that won't work, because outright criminalization of certain activities, like tobacco use or alcohol consumption would cause an uproar in the populous, not to mention raise serious constitutional challanges
Actually, taxes have been used to effectively criminalize activities, and the entire drug war started that way. I read an interesting piece regarding the history of marijuana laws in this country, and you'd be shocked at some of the actual things said in courtrooms which led to the prohibition of marijuana. More pertinent though, you'll see how taxes were used to 'criminalize' drugs. Prohibition Article
Personally, I think that no candidate out there is going to match anyones views entirely. Nader, however, has fought for individual rights for a long time, and I think that in four years in the big chair (which won't happen during this election), the changes that he would put into place would be those that tend towards individual rights, and shrinking corporate influence in politics. These are good things, in my humble opinion. I'm outraged at the idea that the police can physically bar a presidential candidate from being on the same college campus that the largest political media event for the presidency is being held on. Now that's not even to mention being barred from the debates themselves, but illegally being barred from a side-event that he held a ticket for.. and there's no riots? There's no uproar? We are a placid generation, perfectly content to think we are a golden nation, yet able to criticise other countries for doing less then this to their '3rd-party candidates'.
As for 'we', well our government has been founded on a big ol' happy "we the people". It may have meant 'we the white male land-owning people' at the time, but we like to think that it did intend to include all of us. I don't feel like it does right now. Neither do quite a few people. If 'we' meant all of us, then there'd be a few changes in the way the country works.
we would care about politics
we would educate each other about politics
we would become personally involved in local and national politics
we would vote
we would do everything we could to ensure that others cared about, were educated about, and felt personally responsible for the political state of our country.
Finally, and most importantly, we would feel like there was no such thing as a 'wasted vote'.
Our system currently is not designed this way. There are a few candidates out there who would like to change that. I feel that Nader is one of those. God, there are so many *voters* out there that don't know who Ralph Nader is, that I'm afraid to mention the slew of other candidates for the highest political office in our country.
I emailed the link to this thread to Contentville to see what they had to say about it.
Thank you for your e-mail. We appreciate your concern. We regret that there has been some confusion about our efforts to bring so much underused, valuable content to the consumer market place for the first time. Let me assure you, we have no intention of selling anything in a way that precludes the rights holder from his or her appropriate share of any revenues we receive. We have the listings of dissertations from UMI/Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. Excerpts from the UMI Dissertation Abstracts database are being used by Contentville, which, in turn, collects orders for full-text dissertations. Dissertation orders are fulfilled and any earned royalties are tracked by UMI Dissertations Publishing. If you would like to contact UMI regarding the agreement you or your school may have signed with them, they can be reached at #1-800-521-0600.
It seems that this is an issue of your Universities agreement with UMI, whether you were privy to it or not. If you think you've been hornswaggled, you might want to check out that phone number.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm sure there are quite a few reasons that musicians go through record companies, and the bigger the better. If you look at the percentage of musicians that get those big record contracts, it's the kind of figures that a high school basketball player doesn't want to hear.. but he's still going to try for the NBA. It's that big elusive goal that says you've made it.
/. ;) Gets some writeups in local/indy mags and 'underground' webzines. I expect he'll be coding some 80+ hours a week still for some time though.
Especially today, there are alternatives. You can go indy, produce your own music, make it available on the web in free sites that will even pay you a wee bit for downloads, or personal sites with your own happy little store front. But the sad truth of the matter is, it takes a big machine with lots of money to communicate a message effectively in this country. And that's what makes Factory Music a success. Record execs pay someone to write songs, pay some pretty kids to sing them, produce the music, pay radio stations to play the music, advertise the music with tv/radio, sadden the world by buying Aerosmith to sing duets at high profile events with their Music-Muppets, and feature their artists in music industry magazines. Avoid seeing that. I dare you. Try to not know a few words to some Backstreet Boys songs.
And now compare an artists ability to make a successful career and retire comfortably in both situations. You just don't often communicate far enough without being backed by The Machine.
I have a friend who writes some pretty incredible electronic music. Has a record label and puts his own music out along with that of some friends. Plays local gigs on occasion. Really interesting website. (link avoided because it's dangerous to put a link on
Shrug. It's an ugly machine. But a big machine. And with all of the lawsuits and 'measures' being taken, it looks like they are going to die extremely slowly.
-=rev=-
I dig your nub, sport. Methinks this fella is skipping past the point and fiddling with the specifics. Just as we can manipulate length, width and height quite easily in this world, and are slaves to time, some being operating outside of the realm of time (ie: one dimension greater than ours) would have time as a malleable tool, as well as those 'lesser' dimensions which we control. With that in mind, the idea of god as a 'being' is even plausable, or at least one decent conclusion, in that gods decisions are not immediate (ie: ignoring time) but work within the realm of time. If god, a being with its own purposes, decided to for example sink the titanic, something that it sees Always (being outside of time), it could do so, via millions of years of manipulating the physical realm of our universe such that icebergs would be 'naturally' present right in the path of that ship, at the time that it passed by. But I'm digressing or something. Following the previous thought, there could be a God, if the number of existant dimensions is finite. Or for those infinity buffs, God is a being operating above and outside of all the infinite possible dimensions.
In my humble opinion, infinity is silly to work with. I like numbers or concepts that aren't in so much motion =) So I call God the 'absolute'. We can quite easily observe that this universe is relative, and all things exist, and exist separately, only in so much as they can be described in relation to other things. I don't like the '2 universes colliding' theory, in that it doesn't offer us any real answers to the 'why and how are we here' question.. the one science and religion in some part are both trying to resolve. The big bang offered us a drill-down to a single point, leaving only that one question. Now we've opened up the bag again and decided that our universe is just a 'thing' along with other 'things' inside of a bigger 'something'. Like a planet in a solar system. A solar system in a galaxy. Etc. Doesn't help solve the problem.
I think our existance is the absolute contemplating itself, and thus being experienced as relative. In personified terms, all of our existance, since the 'dawn of time' until time is long forgotten by All Things, are made up in the one divine instant that God said, "I."
But that could just be the acid talking.
-rev
Talk to the fish? An attempt has been made to access a restricted URL. / Reason : profanity 1 nudity 1 fullnudity 1 sex 1 gross 1 racist 1 satanic 1 drug 1 militant 1 gambling 1 alcohol 1 Bad fish. Dirty fish.
Actually, taxes have been used to effectively criminalize activities, and the entire drug war started that way. I read an interesting piece regarding the history of marijuana laws in this country, and you'd be shocked at some of the actual things said in courtrooms which led to the prohibition of marijuana. More pertinent though, you'll see how taxes were used to 'criminalize' drugs.
Prohibition Article
Personally, I think that no candidate out there is going to match anyones views entirely. Nader, however, has fought for individual rights for a long time, and I think that in four years in the big chair (which won't happen during this election), the changes that he would put into place would be those that tend towards individual rights, and shrinking corporate influence in politics. These are good things, in my humble opinion. I'm outraged at the idea that the police can physically bar a presidential candidate from being on the same college campus that the largest political media event for the presidency is being held on. Now that's not even to mention being barred from the debates themselves, but illegally being barred from a side-event that he held a ticket for.. and there's no riots? There's no uproar? We are a placid generation, perfectly content to think we are a golden nation, yet able to criticise other countries for doing less then this to their '3rd-party candidates'.
As for 'we', well our government has been founded on a big ol' happy "we the people". It may have meant 'we the white male land-owning people' at the time, but we like to think that it did intend to include all of us. I don't feel like it does right now. Neither do quite a few people. If 'we' meant all of us, then there'd be a few changes in the way the country works.
Finally, and most importantly, we would feel like there was no such thing as a 'wasted vote'.
Our system currently is not designed this way. There are a few candidates out there who would like to change that. I feel that Nader is one of those. God, there are so many *voters* out there that don't know who Ralph Nader is, that I'm afraid to mention the slew of other candidates for the highest political office in our country.
hope you dig my nub.
-rev
-rev