It would do us well to get somewhat used to the idea of bartering for the things we need. When economies collapse, everyone falls back to the barter system. Not saying that the U.S. economy is on the brink or anything (although it's certainly a lot closer than it was 30 years ago) but most younger people seem to have no concept of bartering for goods and services or look at it with incredulity. My uncles, all older tradesmen (carpentry, electrical, plumbing) all worked on the barter system occasionally over the course of their careers, especially with other tradesmen, where it's a lot more common for people to work out deals like that under the table. They're retired mostly, now, but they still do the odd job here or there, usually in trade (my carpenter uncle, for instance, recently did a small job for someone in exchange for a few cords of seasoned firewood).
While I can't ignore the tax-dodging aspects of arrangements like this, it's hard for me to see a negative in reviving the barter system to a certain extent in the collective consciousness. Maybe it would even have a positive impact on wastefulness, when people realize that the stuff they're tossing might be worth something they could actually use in trade to the right person. This guy started trading with a single paperclip and ended up eventually getting a house. Obviously not typical, but still demonstrative of the value in trade.
Pretty much this. Although, I admit, Australia seems to have problems with bullshit bandwidth caps that we don't have here in the U.S., generally speaking, so I can see how this could be a non-viable option.
American bacon is bad enough even before they slice it to molecular thickness and fry it in cheap crappy oil until it's quite thoroughly burnt.
This will probably blow your mind, but there are actually different places where one can purchase bacon here in the U.S., across varying levels of thickness. My grandmother used to get hers from a local butcher in Philly that cut it twice as thick as the average Oscar Mayer crap you'll find in a chain grocery store. Also, I prefer my bacon chewy, although I admit I am in the minority.
Don't know if you guys only get once choice over there in Europe or what, but there are vast differences in local cuisine across the United States. For instance, I would almost kill a man for an authentic, New York style pizza, but alas, I am stuck in the upper-Midwest where everyone prefers the goddamned Chicago style that requires a knife and a fork to eat. Also, I haven't had a proper cheese-steak since I left Philadelphia 20 years ago, although many, many places sure advertise their own piss-poor version of "Philly Cheese-Steaks".
They should really trademark that, like France did with Champagne, so that those of us that have actually had an authentic Philly cheese-steak (on Amoroso rolls, of course) no longer have to be insulted by places passing off their own steak-um bullshit as a cheese-steak.
The implication was that there shouldn't be regulation as concerns insider trading and I felt that needed to be addressed directly.
Come on, you can't tell me you missed those implications in that post. "Why do they have the SEC at all...?" "Why is "insider trading" illegal?" "Why shouldn't people be able to get inside information and then make well-timed stock trades?"
Just another bitch about the government cloaked in thoughtfulness. I feel those sorts of posts demand retort.
Why is "insider trading" illegal? Why shouldn't people be able to get inside information and then make well-timed stock trades?
Because insider trading is only profitable if someone is being scammed, i.e., the guy that doesn't have the insider information.
The more information all actors in a given market have, the healthier it is. Insider trading goes directly against that and makes a market unhealthy, as no one will participate in a market that allows bullshit like that to occur because they're probably going to get screwed by someone in the know.
You can't really say Caveat Emptor when one of the parties in a trade had no fucking clue that $STOCK was going to be worthless in 3 days because the company is getting ready to go bankrupt and nobody but a select few knows.
I'm curious what exactly makes a user "active". I know so many people with Facebook accounts that abandoned them ages ago...they didn't go through the bullshit hassle of deleting the account, but they stopped logging in.
This is one of the reasons why I really wondered about Facebook's valuation being accurate or not. I know for a fact that I had multiple accounts (before I deleted them), so to FB, I was 3 separate people (work, play, and politics). I know many other people that have a work account and a personal account to keep their private lives private.
Based upon my own off-the-cuff observations in my circle of friends and family (obviously not scientific, but just for the sake of estimation) I would guess that 2/3, maybe 3/4, of the active users are actually real, individual people. When you're talking about 900 million "active users", that's 225-300 million bogus, worthless accounts. How would an advertiser know that they were targeting ads at real people and not an alternate account? How would they know that all their "likes" were legitimate potential customers and not someone just fucking around on a throwaway account they don't care about?
The mobile customers are probably legitimate, I'll grant that, because most people aren't going to tie a troll account to their mobile device. But that still leaves 450 million accounts that are very questionable in my opinion.
I know Facebook would never really release numbers on the numbers of people that have abandoned their service or the number of potentially duplicate/troll accounts because it's just negative publicity with no positive gain for FB in doing so, but it would be nice to know if I'm completely off my rocker or if I just happen to know an inordinate number of people that have multiple accounts.
The thing I don't understand with Netflix is why the fucking PS3/360/Wii clients are so godawful. Why the hell do they not just give you a goddamned alphabetical list of everything they stream? Because it would be too easy for people to find what they really want to watch?
I refuse to watch Netflix on my Windows PC because fuck silverlight in it's stupid ass, but the arbitrary beshittedness of the console clients has me utterly perplexed because I can think of no reason why they would release a client like that in the first place. It's ridiculous that I have to use a 3rd party site to browse their offerings like someone that isn't only interested in shows related to the last goddamned thing they watched or some ridiculously specific categories ("Ooh, let's browse the 'heartwarming family films from the 80's' category, that's bound to have a wide selection to choose from for streaming!").
A much larger problem is going to be the rumored requirement of a cable subscription in the near future. That will be the death of Hulu and those bittorrent figures will jump back up again immediately after.
Why shouldn't someone whose music is listened to by millions of people be able to earn a living out of it?
Who fucking said that? There is an enormous difference between "earning a living" and becoming ridiculously rich. The people that get into music expecting to become ridiculously rich are retards.
The trouble with people like you is that (whatever your claims about being a composer) is that you don't take art seriously. You just think it's a hobby
Oh, fuck you. I take my music very seriously. I'm just not under any illusions that I'm owed a fucking living doing it. No other career choice comes with a guaranteed salary, so why the fuck should music?
Like I said in a previous comment, people are basically whining because so many new musicians out there are content to give their music away in order to gain exposure. They can't figure out how to compete with that. What is your solution? Ban giving away music? Force them to charge for their music? Yeah, right.
No matter how much the musicians of yesteryear can't understand it, there are just too many great artists out there that are willing to give their shit away for free and now, thanks to the internet, we can all find it just as easily as we can find their own overpriced shit. A garage band can now honestly compete head to head with the major label darling. For music lovers, there is absolutely no downside to that. For the assholes getting driven around in limos there probably is, but again, hard to feel sympathy for them. Not when some kid actually has a shot at getting recognized when, in years past, they never would have.
I bet, thanks to modern technology, there are far more people "making a living" off of their music than there ever has been before. They're not becoming rich doing it, but they're earning their living.
But for the most part I'd rather listen to music generated by people who do it for a living, than those who do it in their spare time.
Why? The music will speak for itself regardless of whether the person making it is doing it in hour long chunks over the course of 6 months or getting paid to spend a week in a major label's studio.
Let's not pretend that quality of a given piece of music is related to whether it's generated by a "professional" musician or not. As I said above, some of the most amazing musicians I have heard play have been buskers playing on a street corner. Obviously, we're also all familiar with the major label darling that fucking sucks but looks good in a skin-tight outfit.
The barrier to entry is now so low in music that the playing field has effectively been leveled. The majors can no longer throw millions at pimping out their newest whore and have a guaranteed hit, because they're competing with a kid making music in his garage in his spare time giving the shit away for free because he wants the exposure more then the money. How can a music lover see anything wrong with that? The quality of the music is actually starting to mean something again.
Do you think that they would actually do something so retarded as to price themselves right out of the market?
They're not only competing with other networks, but they're competing with their own shit that is being pirated without any of the bullshit ads attached. Price HBO at $100 a month, and everyone will cancel their HBO subscription and start pirating. Even the few people that had a moral issue doing so before will be much more amenable to the idea if the cable providers turned around and tried to fuck their market that way. Hell, I'd bet HBO would fucking sue any cable provider that did that, because it would basically torpedo their share completely in that market.
We need to call their fucking bluff on this shit. They need us a hell of a lot more than we need them, and they know this. Lily Allen gets pissed off about people torrenting her album, says she's quitting music because of all the filthy pirates, a few years later, she's back in the studio working on a new album. The networks are laying all the groundwork for this crap themselves. "Oh, those pirates are destroying our bottom line! We can't afford to make quality programming anymore!!" BULLSHIT. The first network to actually do something like that, the "we're taking our ball and going home!" crap, will have a backlash overnight and both viewers and advertisers will run, screaming from that network, and then it will be dead permanently. They know this, which is why it's all blustering and empty threats.
There was another article posted yesterday talking about how there's no money in music anymore. Despite how ridiculous that notion is, it seems like the people doing the whining are more pissed off about all the musicians out there giving their music away for free on the internet because it's cutting into their ability to charge premium prices for their own content and live like the rock stars of old. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for someone who's entire fortune was generated due to artificial scarcity? And are we really supposed to vilify the artists out there giving music away for not properly "monetizing" their product because it's cutting into the profits of one of the greedy fucks mentioned above? Come on.
The old media giants are dying and they're fighting it every step of the way, but their extinction is inevitable, and I can't believe that even they don't see the writing on the wall.
I thought wrestling was the coolest fucking thing in the world, I used to watch it incessantly back during the Hulkamania era, mid-80's to early 90's...we were poor, so I had to be content with getting copies of the Pay-per-views from friends who taped it and watching the show they had on Saturday mornings on FOX since we couldn't afford cable (Never any real matches on the show, though, which kinda sucked, all the stars just "fought" nobodies and obviously always won).
I grew out of it around when I turned 12, but I can see the appeal in it for kids. The adults, on the other hand, that I see walking around with WWE T-shirts on...that's a little sad. To a kid it's as real as can be, but in flipping through channels and seeing it as I got older, it's so ridiculously fake I just can't understand how people suspend disbelief when they get old enough to know better.
How long will it be before we see something similar on anything with a front facing camera? I wonder if Microsoft has plans to build this into their next Kinect? This is where these assholes are going with this, and then they'll bitch and complain when even more people just pirate their shit. God, how ridiculous...
For me, what sucks isn't that John Doe or Jane Schmoe don't make a living at music; it's that seemingly nobody does anymore.
That's ridiculous. There are tons of people still making money in music these days. They may not be making as much for just the music anymore, but the shows still bring them in a pretty penny. The merchandise still makes them money. There's still plenty of money to be made in music, even if you completely remove the proceeds from selling the music itself, there are other avenues to make money in that business. Just the advertising hits on a Youtube channel, in the right hands, can bring in a decent amount of money. How many fucking bloggers are out there making a living doing nothing but blogging and now vlogging? And you're trying to tell me that musicians aren't making money anymore? Come on...
It's not that people aren't making money anymore, it's that the barriers to entry are much lower so the pie is getting cut into smaller pieces all around, but there are still people making a decent living doing what they love. We may never see another Elvis or Beatles or Michael Jackson, 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice' artist again, but I really can't feel too bad about that. There are equally talented artists out there that didn't make diddly squat when the RIAA was doing everything they can to make sure we only hear the artists they want us to hear that now have a shot to actually make a decent living, thanks to the internet.
This is not due to illegal downloads (despite what the RIAA says) this is about a fundamental shift away from the antiquated distribution methods and business model that the RIAA members themselves created solely to drive profits into their own pockets. We don't need to buy a 45 to hear a single anymore, we can go to Youtube and hear it whenever we want, not to mention view a video that we likely never would have seen (MTV being just as bad with the Payola-esque bullshit as the radio; towards the end of the days when they actually played videos, remember how often they would play the same tired bullshit video over and over and over? Ja Rule and J-Lo and fucking Puddle of Mudd and godawful Nickelback 24/7). They no longer get to monopolize the market and shove that shit down our throats, and we're supposed to feel bad for the people that were the ancillary beneficiaries of that twisted crap?
David Lowery of Cracker benefited from that shit just as much as the other "grunge" artists that had videos on MTV. I bought a copy of Kerosene Hat solely because I loved the song "Low" so much and the rest of the album sucked in my opinion. I wonder how many other millions of people out there bought that CD for that one song that was endlessly pimped on MTV over and over and over again back in '93. Also, remember how often the production values across even a single CD would be dramatically different? Three polished singles and bunch of filler garbage that was recorded on a 4-track in some dude's garage (listen to Tracy Bonham's The Burdens of Being Upright for a good example of that, but there are many to choose from that originated in the grunge era like Cracker). Anyway, their label may have eaten 99% of the $20 I dropped on that CD, but it's not like I had any other alternative. Not like today. Now I get to preview an entire album before I buy it, although honestly, I usually pirate the CD (especially if it's a major label) and buy some of the band's merchandise instead. I've got a ton of posters and band T-shirts to show for it. Know why? Because the artist gets a large percentage of the merchandise proceeds, and not only that, it allows me to pay it forward a bit by advertising on their behalf as I'm wearing their shirt in my day to day life. They get next to nothing from their label, unless they're one of the dozen artists the label actually gives a shit about. That's been true for
No, they need to be prepared to accept the fact that it is literally a roll of the dice whether or not they're going to make it in the arts. Period. It is the career equivalent of hitting the lottery. You can work your ass off your entire life and never make a living doing what you love. Talent != success. At least, not to the degree that it does in most other fields.
Nowhere did I say that they couldn't make a living at their craft. I said that they need to accept the reality that they probably won't. The odds are against them. There is nothing anyone can do to change that. Never before in history has it been easier for an indie artist to get a widespread following as it is today, but even given the tools they have today, it's still just as much of a dice roll as it ever was. I've seen some amazing musicians on Youtube that only had a few hundred views; meanwhile, Rebecca Black had like 800,000,000 views within what, a few months? I mean, yeah, it was all a joke, ha ha...but that girl's got a fucking career in music now.
I have nothing but respect for the starving artist, and I've been playing guitar almost daily for 20 years and writing/composing songs almost as long so I know how much work is involved with honing a craft and creating music firsthand, but anyone that really expects to make a living at it based on their desire to do so is ignoring reality for the sake of wishful thinking.
It almost seems like people are pissed off that there are musicians out there willing to give their art away, or at least, pissed off that musicians that are content just giving their music away are able to do so to an equally large audience (i.e., the entire world) and thus make it difficult to compete, but once again, that's a reality they're just going to have to face. The only way to change that would be to suppress those artists like the RIAA fuckheads did and there is no fucking way in hell I would ever support that at all.
No, he's saying that it's time to come back to reality and realize that we can't all be fucking professional football players, ballerinas, astronauts, rock stars, movie stars, stand-up comedians...
I'm a amateur musician myself but I've played in a few bands that did live shows and even done a little work as a session musician for others in the studio. I didn't pick up the guitar when I was 10 because I wanted to be a rock star, I picked up the guitar because I wanted to learn how to play; the instrument fascinated me. I know I will never in a million years make a living playing music, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw the guitar in a closet like a fucking child. I still play often, still record my own little ideas, and I do it for myself. If I never earn a penny on music again, I'm totally okay with that. I have a real job that pays my bills. I play guitar because I love it.
The people that "make it" in the industry (and while I know this is true in music, it's probably true in film and other arts as well) aren't necessarily very good at their given craft anyway. Most of the time, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Conversely, I've met some of the most ridiculously talented musicians busking for spare change on street corners and, from the looks of them, probably spent their nights sleeping on a street corner as well. This is just as much fault as the industry as anything else. Ask yourself, how many ugly pop stars are there? A person could sing like an angel and never do more than sing jingles in commercials because they weren't lucky enough to be born with the right set of genes for physical attractiveness while some empty-headed chick with big tits and a great ass will become the next Britney Spears thanks to Auto-Tune and the support of a major label.
When the hell did people stop creating art for the sake of creating art? That's what I want to know. All this bullshit about how "downloading is killing music"...since when? I'm still doing my thing, and I know many other musicians that are still out there creating music, many of whom don't earn a dime doing it...are they supposed to just throw in the towel because they're not going to be the next Metallica? Better yet, if they DO throw in the towel because they're never going to be the next Metallica, why the hell were they playing music in the first place? Go get an MBA and earn 6 figures with the rest of the clowns on Wall Street.
Probably the same reason that whenever someone criticizes Obama, there is always someone at the ready to throw Bush and/or Reagan into the conversation.
Which also has nothing whatsoever to do with the previous comment. Maybe you should bitch at the guy who brought up the Reagan defense in the first place, since it obviously eats you up enough to keep this stupid shit going.
You're the one that interjected the Obama bullshit in the first place, the burden is on you to ask him, not me. Go ahead and give him a call...
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It would do us well to get somewhat used to the idea of bartering for the things we need. When economies collapse, everyone falls back to the barter system. Not saying that the U.S. economy is on the brink or anything (although it's certainly a lot closer than it was 30 years ago) but most younger people seem to have no concept of bartering for goods and services or look at it with incredulity. My uncles, all older tradesmen (carpentry, electrical, plumbing) all worked on the barter system occasionally over the course of their careers, especially with other tradesmen, where it's a lot more common for people to work out deals like that under the table. They're retired mostly, now, but they still do the odd job here or there, usually in trade (my carpenter uncle, for instance, recently did a small job for someone in exchange for a few cords of seasoned firewood).
While I can't ignore the tax-dodging aspects of arrangements like this, it's hard for me to see a negative in reviving the barter system to a certain extent in the collective consciousness. Maybe it would even have a positive impact on wastefulness, when people realize that the stuff they're tossing might be worth something they could actually use in trade to the right person. This guy started trading with a single paperclip and ended up eventually getting a house. Obviously not typical, but still demonstrative of the value in trade.
Pretty much this. Although, I admit, Australia seems to have problems with bullshit bandwidth caps that we don't have here in the U.S., generally speaking, so I can see how this could be a non-viable option.
American bacon is bad enough even before they slice it to molecular thickness and fry it in cheap crappy oil until it's quite thoroughly burnt.
This will probably blow your mind, but there are actually different places where one can purchase bacon here in the U.S., across varying levels of thickness. My grandmother used to get hers from a local butcher in Philly that cut it twice as thick as the average Oscar Mayer crap you'll find in a chain grocery store. Also, I prefer my bacon chewy, although I admit I am in the minority.
Don't know if you guys only get once choice over there in Europe or what, but there are vast differences in local cuisine across the United States. For instance, I would almost kill a man for an authentic, New York style pizza, but alas, I am stuck in the upper-Midwest where everyone prefers the goddamned Chicago style that requires a knife and a fork to eat. Also, I haven't had a proper cheese-steak since I left Philadelphia 20 years ago, although many, many places sure advertise their own piss-poor version of "Philly Cheese-Steaks".
They should really trademark that, like France did with Champagne, so that those of us that have actually had an authentic Philly cheese-steak (on Amoroso rolls, of course) no longer have to be insulted by places passing off their own steak-um bullshit as a cheese-steak.
The implication was that there shouldn't be regulation as concerns insider trading and I felt that needed to be addressed directly.
Come on, you can't tell me you missed those implications in that post. "Why do they have the SEC at all...?" "Why is "insider trading" illegal?" "Why shouldn't people be able to get inside information and then make well-timed stock trades?"
Just another bitch about the government cloaked in thoughtfulness. I feel those sorts of posts demand retort.
Why is "insider trading" illegal? Why shouldn't people be able to get inside information and then make well-timed stock trades?
Because insider trading is only profitable if someone is being scammed, i.e., the guy that doesn't have the insider information.
The more information all actors in a given market have, the healthier it is. Insider trading goes directly against that and makes a market unhealthy, as no one will participate in a market that allows bullshit like that to occur because they're probably going to get screwed by someone in the know.
You can't really say Caveat Emptor when one of the parties in a trade had no fucking clue that $STOCK was going to be worthless in 3 days because the company is getting ready to go bankrupt and nobody but a select few knows.
I'm curious what exactly makes a user "active". I know so many people with Facebook accounts that abandoned them ages ago...they didn't go through the bullshit hassle of deleting the account, but they stopped logging in.
This is one of the reasons why I really wondered about Facebook's valuation being accurate or not. I know for a fact that I had multiple accounts (before I deleted them), so to FB, I was 3 separate people (work, play, and politics). I know many other people that have a work account and a personal account to keep their private lives private.
Based upon my own off-the-cuff observations in my circle of friends and family (obviously not scientific, but just for the sake of estimation) I would guess that 2/3, maybe 3/4, of the active users are actually real, individual people. When you're talking about 900 million "active users", that's 225-300 million bogus, worthless accounts. How would an advertiser know that they were targeting ads at real people and not an alternate account? How would they know that all their "likes" were legitimate potential customers and not someone just fucking around on a throwaway account they don't care about?
The mobile customers are probably legitimate, I'll grant that, because most people aren't going to tie a troll account to their mobile device. But that still leaves 450 million accounts that are very questionable in my opinion.
I know Facebook would never really release numbers on the numbers of people that have abandoned their service or the number of potentially duplicate/troll accounts because it's just negative publicity with no positive gain for FB in doing so, but it would be nice to know if I'm completely off my rocker or if I just happen to know an inordinate number of people that have multiple accounts.
The thing I don't understand with Netflix is why the fucking PS3/360/Wii clients are so godawful. Why the hell do they not just give you a goddamned alphabetical list of everything they stream? Because it would be too easy for people to find what they really want to watch?
I refuse to watch Netflix on my Windows PC because fuck silverlight in it's stupid ass, but the arbitrary beshittedness of the console clients has me utterly perplexed because I can think of no reason why they would release a client like that in the first place. It's ridiculous that I have to use a 3rd party site to browse their offerings like someone that isn't only interested in shows related to the last goddamned thing they watched or some ridiculously specific categories ("Ooh, let's browse the 'heartwarming family films from the 80's' category, that's bound to have a wide selection to choose from for streaming!").
A much larger problem is going to be the rumored requirement of a cable subscription in the near future. That will be the death of Hulu and those bittorrent figures will jump back up again immediately after.
Thanks for the tip...
Why shouldn't someone whose music is listened to by millions of people be able to earn a living out of it?
Who fucking said that? There is an enormous difference between "earning a living" and becoming ridiculously rich. The people that get into music expecting to become ridiculously rich are retards.
The trouble with people like you is that (whatever your claims about being a composer) is that you don't take art seriously. You just think it's a hobby
Oh, fuck you. I take my music very seriously. I'm just not under any illusions that I'm owed a fucking living doing it. No other career choice comes with a guaranteed salary, so why the fuck should music?
Like I said in a previous comment, people are basically whining because so many new musicians out there are content to give their music away in order to gain exposure. They can't figure out how to compete with that. What is your solution? Ban giving away music? Force them to charge for their music? Yeah, right.
No matter how much the musicians of yesteryear can't understand it, there are just too many great artists out there that are willing to give their shit away for free and now, thanks to the internet, we can all find it just as easily as we can find their own overpriced shit. A garage band can now honestly compete head to head with the major label darling. For music lovers, there is absolutely no downside to that. For the assholes getting driven around in limos there probably is, but again, hard to feel sympathy for them. Not when some kid actually has a shot at getting recognized when, in years past, they never would have.
I bet, thanks to modern technology, there are far more people "making a living" off of their music than there ever has been before. They're not becoming rich doing it, but they're earning their living.
But it should be possible to earn a living as a musician if you are providing something that a lot of people want and enjoy.
It absolutely is. It's just becoming harder to become ridiculously wealthy doing it. You know, like 99.99999% of the careers out there?
Sounds tasty.
But for the most part I'd rather listen to music generated by people who do it for a living, than those who do it in their spare time.
Why? The music will speak for itself regardless of whether the person making it is doing it in hour long chunks over the course of 6 months or getting paid to spend a week in a major label's studio.
Let's not pretend that quality of a given piece of music is related to whether it's generated by a "professional" musician or not. As I said above, some of the most amazing musicians I have heard play have been buskers playing on a street corner. Obviously, we're also all familiar with the major label darling that fucking sucks but looks good in a skin-tight outfit.
The barrier to entry is now so low in music that the playing field has effectively been leveled. The majors can no longer throw millions at pimping out their newest whore and have a guaranteed hit, because they're competing with a kid making music in his garage in his spare time giving the shit away for free because he wants the exposure more then the money. How can a music lover see anything wrong with that? The quality of the music is actually starting to mean something again.
all his senior people can die in a tragic dildo accident.
Boy, wouldn't that be an awesome headline in the newspaper...
Do you think that they would actually do something so retarded as to price themselves right out of the market?
They're not only competing with other networks, but they're competing with their own shit that is being pirated without any of the bullshit ads attached. Price HBO at $100 a month, and everyone will cancel their HBO subscription and start pirating. Even the few people that had a moral issue doing so before will be much more amenable to the idea if the cable providers turned around and tried to fuck their market that way. Hell, I'd bet HBO would fucking sue any cable provider that did that, because it would basically torpedo their share completely in that market.
We need to call their fucking bluff on this shit. They need us a hell of a lot more than we need them, and they know this. Lily Allen gets pissed off about people torrenting her album, says she's quitting music because of all the filthy pirates, a few years later, she's back in the studio working on a new album. The networks are laying all the groundwork for this crap themselves. "Oh, those pirates are destroying our bottom line! We can't afford to make quality programming anymore!!" BULLSHIT. The first network to actually do something like that, the "we're taking our ball and going home!" crap, will have a backlash overnight and both viewers and advertisers will run, screaming from that network, and then it will be dead permanently. They know this, which is why it's all blustering and empty threats.
There was another article posted yesterday talking about how there's no money in music anymore. Despite how ridiculous that notion is, it seems like the people doing the whining are more pissed off about all the musicians out there giving their music away for free on the internet because it's cutting into their ability to charge premium prices for their own content and live like the rock stars of old. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for someone who's entire fortune was generated due to artificial scarcity? And are we really supposed to vilify the artists out there giving music away for not properly "monetizing" their product because it's cutting into the profits of one of the greedy fucks mentioned above? Come on.
The old media giants are dying and they're fighting it every step of the way, but their extinction is inevitable, and I can't believe that even they don't see the writing on the wall.
I thought wrestling was the coolest fucking thing in the world, I used to watch it incessantly back during the Hulkamania era, mid-80's to early 90's...we were poor, so I had to be content with getting copies of the Pay-per-views from friends who taped it and watching the show they had on Saturday mornings on FOX since we couldn't afford cable (Never any real matches on the show, though, which kinda sucked, all the stars just "fought" nobodies and obviously always won).
I grew out of it around when I turned 12, but I can see the appeal in it for kids. The adults, on the other hand, that I see walking around with WWE T-shirts on...that's a little sad. To a kid it's as real as can be, but in flipping through channels and seeing it as I got older, it's so ridiculously fake I just can't understand how people suspend disbelief when they get old enough to know better.
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised at all. Next thing will be NoScript getting declared the tool of terrorists and child pornographers and banned.
Also, lets not forget about Apple's patent on software that would basically freeze our device unless we were demonstrably watching the ads they serve to us, making us answer questions about products featured and even using the camera to make sure that our eyes are focused on the screen.
How long will it be before we see something similar on anything with a front facing camera? I wonder if Microsoft has plans to build this into their next Kinect? This is where these assholes are going with this, and then they'll bitch and complain when even more people just pirate their shit. God, how ridiculous...
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR? What the fuck is a VCR? Both can be used to circumvent commercials.
Man, I hope they get their ass smacked down for this, just as those other idiots did in the past in the other lawsuits.
For me, what sucks isn't that John Doe or Jane Schmoe don't make a living at music; it's that seemingly nobody does anymore.
That's ridiculous. There are tons of people still making money in music these days. They may not be making as much for just the music anymore, but the shows still bring them in a pretty penny. The merchandise still makes them money. There's still plenty of money to be made in music, even if you completely remove the proceeds from selling the music itself, there are other avenues to make money in that business. Just the advertising hits on a Youtube channel, in the right hands, can bring in a decent amount of money. How many fucking bloggers are out there making a living doing nothing but blogging and now vlogging? And you're trying to tell me that musicians aren't making money anymore? Come on...
It's not that people aren't making money anymore, it's that the barriers to entry are much lower so the pie is getting cut into smaller pieces all around, but there are still people making a decent living doing what they love. We may never see another Elvis or Beatles or Michael Jackson, 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice' artist again, but I really can't feel too bad about that. There are equally talented artists out there that didn't make diddly squat when the RIAA was doing everything they can to make sure we only hear the artists they want us to hear that now have a shot to actually make a decent living, thanks to the internet.
This is not due to illegal downloads (despite what the RIAA says) this is about a fundamental shift away from the antiquated distribution methods and business model that the RIAA members themselves created solely to drive profits into their own pockets. We don't need to buy a 45 to hear a single anymore, we can go to Youtube and hear it whenever we want, not to mention view a video that we likely never would have seen (MTV being just as bad with the Payola-esque bullshit as the radio; towards the end of the days when they actually played videos, remember how often they would play the same tired bullshit video over and over and over? Ja Rule and J-Lo and fucking Puddle of Mudd and godawful Nickelback 24/7). They no longer get to monopolize the market and shove that shit down our throats, and we're supposed to feel bad for the people that were the ancillary beneficiaries of that twisted crap?
David Lowery of Cracker benefited from that shit just as much as the other "grunge" artists that had videos on MTV. I bought a copy of Kerosene Hat solely because I loved the song "Low" so much and the rest of the album sucked in my opinion. I wonder how many other millions of people out there bought that CD for that one song that was endlessly pimped on MTV over and over and over again back in '93. Also, remember how often the production values across even a single CD would be dramatically different? Three polished singles and bunch of filler garbage that was recorded on a 4-track in some dude's garage (listen to Tracy Bonham's The Burdens of Being Upright for a good example of that, but there are many to choose from that originated in the grunge era like Cracker). Anyway, their label may have eaten 99% of the $20 I dropped on that CD, but it's not like I had any other alternative. Not like today. Now I get to preview an entire album before I buy it, although honestly, I usually pirate the CD (especially if it's a major label) and buy some of the band's merchandise instead. I've got a ton of posters and band T-shirts to show for it. Know why? Because the artist gets a large percentage of the merchandise proceeds, and not only that, it allows me to pay it forward a bit by advertising on their behalf as I'm wearing their shirt in my day to day life. They get next to nothing from their label, unless they're one of the dozen artists the label actually gives a shit about. That's been true for
No, they need to be prepared to accept the fact that it is literally a roll of the dice whether or not they're going to make it in the arts. Period. It is the career equivalent of hitting the lottery. You can work your ass off your entire life and never make a living doing what you love. Talent != success. At least, not to the degree that it does in most other fields.
Nowhere did I say that they couldn't make a living at their craft. I said that they need to accept the reality that they probably won't. The odds are against them. There is nothing anyone can do to change that. Never before in history has it been easier for an indie artist to get a widespread following as it is today, but even given the tools they have today, it's still just as much of a dice roll as it ever was. I've seen some amazing musicians on Youtube that only had a few hundred views; meanwhile, Rebecca Black had like 800,000,000 views within what, a few months? I mean, yeah, it was all a joke, ha ha...but that girl's got a fucking career in music now.
I have nothing but respect for the starving artist, and I've been playing guitar almost daily for 20 years and writing/composing songs almost as long so I know how much work is involved with honing a craft and creating music firsthand, but anyone that really expects to make a living at it based on their desire to do so is ignoring reality for the sake of wishful thinking.
It almost seems like people are pissed off that there are musicians out there willing to give their art away, or at least, pissed off that musicians that are content just giving their music away are able to do so to an equally large audience (i.e., the entire world) and thus make it difficult to compete, but once again, that's a reality they're just going to have to face. The only way to change that would be to suppress those artists like the RIAA fuckheads did and there is no fucking way in hell I would ever support that at all.
u mad?
Not at all. It takes a lot more than inserting Obama into a conversation that has nothing to do with him at all to make me mad.
No, he's saying that it's time to come back to reality and realize that we can't all be fucking professional football players, ballerinas, astronauts, rock stars, movie stars, stand-up comedians...
I'm a amateur musician myself but I've played in a few bands that did live shows and even done a little work as a session musician for others in the studio. I didn't pick up the guitar when I was 10 because I wanted to be a rock star, I picked up the guitar because I wanted to learn how to play; the instrument fascinated me. I know I will never in a million years make a living playing music, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw the guitar in a closet like a fucking child. I still play often, still record my own little ideas, and I do it for myself. If I never earn a penny on music again, I'm totally okay with that. I have a real job that pays my bills. I play guitar because I love it.
The people that "make it" in the industry (and while I know this is true in music, it's probably true in film and other arts as well) aren't necessarily very good at their given craft anyway. Most of the time, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Conversely, I've met some of the most ridiculously talented musicians busking for spare change on street corners and, from the looks of them, probably spent their nights sleeping on a street corner as well. This is just as much fault as the industry as anything else. Ask yourself, how many ugly pop stars are there? A person could sing like an angel and never do more than sing jingles in commercials because they weren't lucky enough to be born with the right set of genes for physical attractiveness while some empty-headed chick with big tits and a great ass will become the next Britney Spears thanks to Auto-Tune and the support of a major label.
When the hell did people stop creating art for the sake of creating art? That's what I want to know. All this bullshit about how "downloading is killing music"...since when? I'm still doing my thing, and I know many other musicians that are still out there creating music, many of whom don't earn a dime doing it...are they supposed to just throw in the towel because they're not going to be the next Metallica? Better yet, if they DO throw in the towel because they're never going to be the next Metallica, why the hell were they playing music in the first place? Go get an MBA and earn 6 figures with the rest of the clowns on Wall Street.
What the fuck is it with people suggesting "get a Tablet" to almost every single question that comes up these days?
"My car has trouble starting in the mornings..."
"Get a tablet!"
"My pool filter seems not to be doing it's job very well lately..."
"Dude, tablet!!"
"What's the best product to get stains out of concrete?"
"TABLET!!!!!!!!!!!"
Tablets are great for some applications, but not every application that involves tech in any way, shape, or form.
Probably the same reason that whenever someone criticizes Obama, there is always someone at the ready to throw Bush and/or Reagan into the conversation.
Which also has nothing whatsoever to do with the previous comment. Maybe you should bitch at the guy who brought up the Reagan defense in the first place, since it obviously eats you up enough to keep this stupid shit going.
You're the one that interjected the Obama bullshit in the first place, the burden is on you to ask him, not me. Go ahead and give him a call...