"Theres this game I play with my girlfriend, but it's not a video game.... try it"
Yes, but if she's a noobie at that one too you will still have to show her how to operate the joy-stick.
One more comment: the article states "Despite the over 30% drop in shipments, the music industry still managed to ship over 750 million CDs in 2005." It is interesting that they are using the numbers of CDs SHIPPED rather than SOLD now. A few years ago they also switched from units sold to units shipped as the standard for recognizing, gold, platinum, double-platinum etc. albums. So before this change, a gold level album meant that there were X number of copies of that album in individual persons' hands, while now it just means that X number of copies of said album made it to the stores, but many of them will not get sold and will end up as coasters, or recycled, or whatever. This change makes it harder to compare the health of the industry before and after.
I think the article is incomplete. They ask the question "Is the Physical CD Still a Viable Market," but then go on to explore only the technical aspects of the issue, not mentioning the quality of the music. Ten years ago or more, and especially now, people who bought CD's often bought them because they were expecting a solid album, ie little or no filler songs, a lot of good songs, one or two excellent songs or hits. Those kind of CD's made it worthwile to go to the store and put down $15. I get the impression that such albums started to become more and more rare in the mid-nineties. At that time I was in my late teens, so I was very eager to buy good, new music, but it started to die after the Seattle scene began to fizzle-out. Instead I went back in time and started "discovering" old bands, to the effect that now out of the 150 CD's in my collection, less than five were released after 1995. The whole music industry is struggling, not just CD sales. If you look at revenues from live performances, they must have gone down significantly too. Almost no-one plays football stadiums alone anymore, and it seems that the only ones who can fill big arenas CONSISTENTLY are the old bands that made their reputation over ten years ago: Pearl Jam, Metallica, and the old fogies like Elton John and the Stones. So it seems that the quality of material affected the medium: people did not want to buy a whole CD with one hit and nine other pieces of crap on it by some new band, so instead they went to find that one song they liked on the net.
The interesting question then is will the medium affect the quality of the material, ie will bands now concentrate on making good, single songs that will quickly grab the listeners' attention and instantly gratify them, rather than concentrating on making a whole great album that fewer people will have the inclination to go out and buy, or even to listen to front to back through the web. I am very afraid that this may be the case, it's too bad because some of my favourite pieces of music were entire albums that had great character throughout, without necessarily having a big hit, eg: "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, "Exile on Main Street" by the Stones, or "London Calling" by The Clash.
Yeah, cool, but it got him banned. He should have used one of those little, swinging, water-drinking, wooden birds with the funny hats, they're harder to detect.
Funny how history repeats itself, though that should mean that we can lear from it. A good place to start would be Frank Zappa's testimony to congress about the music censoring episode in the 80's that you mentioned. He questions if the comitee that appointed itself to do that moral work could really be fair and unbiased, he states that it was all cooked up as a smokescreen for passing an anti-piracy tax (is there a similar initiative brewing right now?), and he offers an alternative: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/06/tech/gam ecore/main924513.shtml It's also worth checking out his appearance on Crossfire over 20 years ago: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/01/10.html (about 3/4 of the way towards the bottom of the page). The details are slightly different, but the core issue is basically the same: the freedom of speech and expression vs. helping parents raise their children.
You were not that impressed by Fahrenheit 9/11 either, huh? I thought it was a good activist movie that explored one side of the issue nicely, but it was definitely not a documentary. I will check out the movie that you posted the link to, and another good documentary that explores the relationship between the Bushes and the Bin-Laden's, along with giving a good insight into W's mindset, is "The World According to Bush" which can be downloaded here: http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/10/117873.php The website is pretty complimentary of Moorer's film, but its own offering is much better, in my opinion.
"Religion is not the opposite of science." The last pope, John-Paul II, had a similar attitude. He said several times that the book of Genesis in the Bible (creationism, Adam and Eve) is just a metaphor, and he had no trouble accepting evolution. I wonder if the Vatican will stay that course under the new Pope. Either way, the people in Kansas and most US states are not Roman-Catholic, but perhaps they should think about why the most popular and powerful Christian leader of recent times saw nothing wrong with teaching evolution.
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"Theres this game I play with my girlfriend, but it's not a video game.... try it" Yes, but if she's a noobie at that one too you will still have to show her how to operate the joy-stick.
One more comment: the article states "Despite the over 30% drop in shipments, the music industry still managed to ship over 750 million CDs in 2005." It is interesting that they are using the numbers of CDs SHIPPED rather than SOLD now. A few years ago they also switched from units sold to units shipped as the standard for recognizing, gold, platinum, double-platinum etc. albums. So before this change, a gold level album meant that there were X number of copies of that album in individual persons' hands, while now it just means that X number of copies of said album made it to the stores, but many of them will not get sold and will end up as coasters, or recycled, or whatever. This change makes it harder to compare the health of the industry before and after.
I think the article is incomplete. They ask the question "Is the Physical CD Still a Viable Market," but then go on to explore only the technical aspects of the issue, not mentioning the quality of the music. Ten years ago or more, and especially now, people who bought CD's often bought them because they were expecting a solid album, ie little or no filler songs, a lot of good songs, one or two excellent songs or hits. Those kind of CD's made it worthwile to go to the store and put down $15. I get the impression that such albums started to become more and more rare in the mid-nineties. At that time I was in my late teens, so I was very eager to buy good, new music, but it started to die after the Seattle scene began to fizzle-out. Instead I went back in time and started "discovering" old bands, to the effect that now out of the 150 CD's in my collection, less than five were released after 1995. The whole music industry is struggling, not just CD sales. If you look at revenues from live performances, they must have gone down significantly too. Almost no-one plays football stadiums alone anymore, and it seems that the only ones who can fill big arenas CONSISTENTLY are the old bands that made their reputation over ten years ago: Pearl Jam, Metallica, and the old fogies like Elton John and the Stones. So it seems that the quality of material affected the medium: people did not want to buy a whole CD with one hit and nine other pieces of crap on it by some new band, so instead they went to find that one song they liked on the net. The interesting question then is will the medium affect the quality of the material, ie will bands now concentrate on making good, single songs that will quickly grab the listeners' attention and instantly gratify them, rather than concentrating on making a whole great album that fewer people will have the inclination to go out and buy, or even to listen to front to back through the web. I am very afraid that this may be the case, it's too bad because some of my favourite pieces of music were entire albums that had great character throughout, without necessarily having a big hit, eg: "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, "Exile on Main Street" by the Stones, or "London Calling" by The Clash.
Yeah, cool, but it got him banned. He should have used one of those little, swinging, water-drinking, wooden birds with the funny hats, they're harder to detect.
Funny how history repeats itself, though that should mean that we can lear from it. A good place to start would be Frank Zappa's testimony to congress about the music censoring episode in the 80's that you mentioned. He questions if the comitee that appointed itself to do that moral work could really be fair and unbiased, he states that it was all cooked up as a smokescreen for passing an anti-piracy tax (is there a similar initiative brewing right now?), and he offers an alternative: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/06/tech/gam ecore/main924513.shtml
It's also worth checking out his appearance on Crossfire over 20 years ago: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/01/10.html (about 3/4 of the way towards the bottom of the page). The details are slightly different, but the core issue is basically the same: the freedom of speech and expression vs. helping parents raise their children.
You were not that impressed by Fahrenheit 9/11 either, huh? I thought it was a good activist movie that explored one side of the issue nicely, but it was definitely not a documentary. I will check out the movie that you posted the link to, and another good documentary that explores the relationship between the Bushes and the Bin-Laden's, along with giving a good insight into W's mindset, is "The World According to Bush" which can be downloaded here: http://la.indymedia.org/news/2004/10/117873.php The website is pretty complimentary of Moorer's film, but its own offering is much better, in my opinion.
"Starts with?" I thought that "Hold my beer and watch this" were the most common LAST words of Texan rednecks.
"Religion is not the opposite of science." The last pope, John-Paul II, had a similar attitude. He said several times that the book of Genesis in the Bible (creationism, Adam and Eve) is just a metaphor, and he had no trouble accepting evolution. I wonder if the Vatican will stay that course under the new Pope. Either way, the people in Kansas and most US states are not Roman-Catholic, but perhaps they should think about why the most popular and powerful Christian leader of recent times saw nothing wrong with teaching evolution.