Thursday, August 14, 2008

Music industry - you suck

When are the corporate fools in the music industry going to realize that it's not the listeners fault that their huge companies are tanking? ITS THE BUSINESS MODEL, STUPID! To paraphrase the best president of my lifetime. Haven't they noticed that there are tons of companies out there making great money giving away content? And that the cost of producing really high quality music is low enough that records are being made on laptops in the garage? I did some production work in the late 90's, and we thought it was cheap back then. Only $1,000 for a digital 8 track recorder? Wow! Anyone under 21 who just read that sentence is laughing hysterically. Can they continue to spend millions on CD releases? No. Do they even need to? No. Start thinking, boys.

1) What are the promoters doing? These guys work, but they make a ton of money for the work that they do. Why are the labels not locking up the touring contracts of their artists? Sorry, promoterman, but until you guys start advancing the artists and paying for production, you get the short straw.

2) Clothes, posters, stickers.... the list goes on. Labels are farming this stuff out for royalties. Spend some money, buy the businesses that make this stuff. Anybody seen the traffic in Hot Topic on a Saturday afternoon?

3) Encourage Torrent. Imagine the ad revenue potential of a legal Torrent tracker site. Right now thepiratebay.org and isohunt.com have ads from shady operators and porn sites. The labels have the money to make the best, fastest, and most comprehensive site. So, do it and start selling space to the big time advertisers. What else attracts almost exclusively 12-35 year old consumer traffic? 90% of the companies in America consider that the prime demo.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I suck

Yep, no excuses. Just been too damn lazy to actually post anything. I was mad at Google for not indexing this thing for like 3 weeks after I created it. All those servers, you'd think they could be faster than that. Whatever.

In case anyone missed it - the Flobots rock! Handlebars is one of the worst songs on the album. Check it out. Unless, of course, you are a neo-facist, Bush loving, moron. Then you really won't like them. And you should also quit reading this, because you won't like me much either. And I really don't care.

Another note. The Sansa e200 series player is a great replacement for the iPod, for those of us who don't like/trust all the control Apple insists on having over the device even after it has been purchased. Last I checked, when I buy something that means it is mine and I should control it. Hello...is anyone at the iTunes software department listening? Anyway, bought an e270 - great deal at Newegg - added Rockbox, and really like it. The video encoding for the Rockbox mpeg player leaves something to be desired, but at least I don't have to use the proprietary Sansa software and tie up my machine for chunks of time encoding. Online encoder sites do mpeg great. If you try it, use mpeg1 not mpeg2. The sound works better and the files are actually smaller. Go figure.

Quick survey: Does Bush go to war with Russia, or does he look into Putin's eyes again? Rememebr that quote? The former KGB chief clearly is a great guy.