First off, since you are surely all wondering, let me just say, yes, my first week without the Adam Carolla Show was difficult, but I made it through. I did it with the help of an old friend named Terry Gross. I rediscovered Fresh Air, a show I used to listen to regularly "live" on the radio, back in the days of yore. It's a solid show. Sure, occasionally you have to skip past a review of a book you've never heard of, and sometimes you get Dave Davies filling in for Terry Gross (always a let down), but for the most part it's good listening. Terry's recent interview with Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette on Boyhood was particular interesting. I love that movie. I get the main criticism -- nothing happens -- but that's part of its charm for me. For the most part it's a completely mundane story, and yet somehow it kept me rapt the entire time. That's tough to pull off, but Linklater does it.
So, I don't have anything big to talk about, so I'll just toss out a few things on my mind and call it a post. Sound good? Good.
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On Facebook, a video of a buffalo fighting a rhino is making the rounds. I started to watch it, just because, and then after thirty seconds of some buffalo-on-rhino head-butting, I thought, "wait, why do I want to see animals getting hurt?" so I turned it off. From the description, I ascertain the rhino won because it says something like, "buffalo chooses wrong animal to try take its anger out on!" It's weird when we try to ascribe humanity to animals. Because the buffalo (presumably) loses the fight and gets hurt, we want to frame things as if the buffalo is some sort of bully getting its comeuppance, instead of a dumb, confused beast fighting out of survival instinct.
You see this sometimes in nature videos, where they'll show the poor, innocent gazelle getting run down by the wolf, and everybody feels bad for the gazelle. But that wolf is starving -- it's gotta eat! Or they flip the script and show you an emaciated polar bear trying desperately to get at a baby walrus, and as the adult walruses fend it off, you think, "c'mon, you've got a whole litter, just give him one!"
--------------------
In general, what do you think the success rate is for stories or videos you open on Facebook? 20%? 10%? Something around there. It's low. Sometimes I feel like putting up a post saying, "Hey Facebook friends, be more interesting!" But that would probably just make me look like a dick.
--------------------
One thing that I do find interesting, in a very "something is wrong with society" sort of way is the whole kerfuffle with Tom Brady and his slightly deflated footballs. I can't believe this is a top news story -- not a top sports story, a top news story in general. Google "deflate-gate" and you get over 12 million hits, including links on the first page to ABC News, NBC News, Fox, and TMZ. (Did you see what I did there with Fox?) The term "Salman Saudi Arabia" returns fewer than 11 million Google hits. Apparently we care more about the air pressure of footballs used in the first half of a 38-point blowout than we do about the succession of leaders of a country with which we have extremely complicated and important relations.
However, I'm glad deflate-gate is a big deal, because I find it funny. For one thing, people are taking it SO seriously. For another, it gives us non-New England football fans more fodder with which to troll Patriots fans -- and trolling Patriots fans is very enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, the Patriots are legitimately shady -- I think part of the reason Bill Belichick is such an effective coach is because he's pathologically competitive and views rule-bending in a very amoral way -- but I don't think under-inflated footballs should crack anybody's top-50 of things about which they should give a fuck.
I'm mean, if you're interested in cheating in sports, you've got much better options: Read about Rosie Ruiz or check out the 30 for 30 films Playing for the Mob and The Price of Gold. I mean, let's not forget that just two decades ago, the husband of an Olympic figure skater and his buddy clubbed a rival figure skater in the knee a few weeks before the Olympics in an attempt to knock her out of the competition. If we remember that, a football being two P.S.I. under regulations really doesn't seem so bad, does it?
--------------------
I heard my wife use the word "frauded" several times on the phone the other day while talking to a coworker, and I had to struggle to resist the urge to tell her that it's defrauded; frauded is not a word. She does a lot of work with non-Americans, so I can only hope that whomever she was talking to that English is not their first language.
In her defense, de- is a very weird prefix in English. It means to get rid of -- debug, delouse, decamp, declaw, etc. -- except for when it means the exact opposite, like in defraud and debar and denude and so on. It's an auto-antonym affix.
--------------------
I read an article in the New Yorker about the music service Spotify. It's been in the news a bit lately because Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalog from it. Apparently, she was willing to allow her music to be behind a paywall (Spotify has a free and a subscription service), but didn't want it to be streamed for free, because, she said, "In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work". Uh ... I have nothing against Taylor Swift, but give me a break. This is pretentious superstar drivel. The value of one's work, monetarily speaking, is determined much more by the market than it is by how much "heart and soul" one puts into it. And if you want to get all artsy on us, then how about this, Ms. Swift, how about instead of paying you in money, your fans pay you back in appreciation? That seems like a fair exchange: your heart and soul in making your art, your fans heart and soul in appreciating it. From now on, you only play for applause, deal?
I hate when performers do shit like this and then try to play the artist card. Taylor Swift pulled her catalog because she wants more control and more money, which is fine. She's a big enough star to pull it off. Just don't feed us some bullshit line about how much blood you put into your work. Plus "artist" is a very generous way to describe Taylor Swift. I've heard "Shake It Off"; it ain't exactly Beethoven's 5th.
I'm of three minds on streaming sites like Spotify. They're good, neutral, and bad. The good part is that they turned the music industry from one that was extremely consumer-unfriendly into one that is consumer-friendly. It used to be that if you wanted to buy a song, you had to buy an entire album for $15 or buy the single (with five shitty dance mixes) for $7 -- and this was in 1993, those prices would be more like $25 and $12, today. That's exorbitant. Now you can buy single songs for $2 or get access to huge catalogs on-demand for "free" (i.e., for listening to a bunch of commercials) or for something like $10 a month. That seems much more fair to the consumer.
The neutral part is that musicians bring in less money from direct music sales now than they used to. I have no problem with people making a little money off their music; I have no problem with people making a lot of money off their music. But I have no problem with people not making any money, as well. There is no law that says if you put a lot of time and effort into something that people have to buy it. (If there was, I'd be a billionaire off my crossword puzzles.) Maybe you're just not that good, and it has nothing to do with the state of the music industry. And if you're a musician and you don't like the streaming services, don't use them. There are other ways you can monetize your wares. You can sell music exclusively from your own website; you can "sell out" and license your work for commercials; or you can give your music away for free as a way to advertise for your live shows. As I once heard Chuck D say when he came to talk at my alum mater Western Washington University, (I'm paraphrasing) "If you want to make money in music, come to WWU and play a show, if you're good, people will pay to see you." And if people don't pay to see you, then maybe you should look into taking some actuarial exams or something like that.
The bad part is that these streaming sites are not transparent in their payments and are apparently very difficult to audit. In every article I read about Spotify, they claim they pay the artists x amount and the artist say they receive y amount where y << x. Something isn't right. It's one thing if people don't want to pay for your art. It's another if they do, but the money isn't going to you. David Lowery, Cracker frontman (and apparently skilled mathematician), has been advocating fervently for years for more royalties from streaming sites. (Although in the linked article he gives some tepid praise to Spotify because of their paywall option. His issue is more with Pandora.) I completely understand why this upsets artists -- if people are making money off of your art and you aren't getting much of the cut, then that's obviously not right. But this seems more like a general corporate-greed problem than it is a music-streaming problem.
And with that, it seems appropriate to end this entry with an embedded YouTube clip of Cracker's Teen Angst. Don't worry Mr. Lowery, I'm certainly not making any money off of this.
Until next time ...
So, I don't have anything big to talk about, so I'll just toss out a few things on my mind and call it a post. Sound good? Good.
--------------------
On Facebook, a video of a buffalo fighting a rhino is making the rounds. I started to watch it, just because, and then after thirty seconds of some buffalo-on-rhino head-butting, I thought, "wait, why do I want to see animals getting hurt?" so I turned it off. From the description, I ascertain the rhino won because it says something like, "buffalo chooses wrong animal to try take its anger out on!" It's weird when we try to ascribe humanity to animals. Because the buffalo (presumably) loses the fight and gets hurt, we want to frame things as if the buffalo is some sort of bully getting its comeuppance, instead of a dumb, confused beast fighting out of survival instinct.
You see this sometimes in nature videos, where they'll show the poor, innocent gazelle getting run down by the wolf, and everybody feels bad for the gazelle. But that wolf is starving -- it's gotta eat! Or they flip the script and show you an emaciated polar bear trying desperately to get at a baby walrus, and as the adult walruses fend it off, you think, "c'mon, you've got a whole litter, just give him one!"
--------------------
In general, what do you think the success rate is for stories or videos you open on Facebook? 20%? 10%? Something around there. It's low. Sometimes I feel like putting up a post saying, "Hey Facebook friends, be more interesting!" But that would probably just make me look like a dick.
--------------------
One thing that I do find interesting, in a very "something is wrong with society" sort of way is the whole kerfuffle with Tom Brady and his slightly deflated footballs. I can't believe this is a top news story -- not a top sports story, a top news story in general. Google "deflate-gate" and you get over 12 million hits, including links on the first page to ABC News, NBC News, Fox, and TMZ. (Did you see what I did there with Fox?) The term "Salman Saudi Arabia" returns fewer than 11 million Google hits. Apparently we care more about the air pressure of footballs used in the first half of a 38-point blowout than we do about the succession of leaders of a country with which we have extremely complicated and important relations.
However, I'm glad deflate-gate is a big deal, because I find it funny. For one thing, people are taking it SO seriously. For another, it gives us non-New England football fans more fodder with which to troll Patriots fans -- and trolling Patriots fans is very enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, the Patriots are legitimately shady -- I think part of the reason Bill Belichick is such an effective coach is because he's pathologically competitive and views rule-bending in a very amoral way -- but I don't think under-inflated footballs should crack anybody's top-50 of things about which they should give a fuck.
I'm mean, if you're interested in cheating in sports, you've got much better options: Read about Rosie Ruiz or check out the 30 for 30 films Playing for the Mob and The Price of Gold. I mean, let's not forget that just two decades ago, the husband of an Olympic figure skater and his buddy clubbed a rival figure skater in the knee a few weeks before the Olympics in an attempt to knock her out of the competition. If we remember that, a football being two P.S.I. under regulations really doesn't seem so bad, does it?
--------------------
I heard my wife use the word "frauded" several times on the phone the other day while talking to a coworker, and I had to struggle to resist the urge to tell her that it's defrauded; frauded is not a word. She does a lot of work with non-Americans, so I can only hope that whomever she was talking to that English is not their first language.
In her defense, de- is a very weird prefix in English. It means to get rid of -- debug, delouse, decamp, declaw, etc. -- except for when it means the exact opposite, like in defraud and debar and denude and so on. It's an auto-antonym affix.
--------------------
I read an article in the New Yorker about the music service Spotify. It's been in the news a bit lately because Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalog from it. Apparently, she was willing to allow her music to be behind a paywall (Spotify has a free and a subscription service), but didn't want it to be streamed for free, because, she said, "In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work". Uh ... I have nothing against Taylor Swift, but give me a break. This is pretentious superstar drivel. The value of one's work, monetarily speaking, is determined much more by the market than it is by how much "heart and soul" one puts into it. And if you want to get all artsy on us, then how about this, Ms. Swift, how about instead of paying you in money, your fans pay you back in appreciation? That seems like a fair exchange: your heart and soul in making your art, your fans heart and soul in appreciating it. From now on, you only play for applause, deal?
I hate when performers do shit like this and then try to play the artist card. Taylor Swift pulled her catalog because she wants more control and more money, which is fine. She's a big enough star to pull it off. Just don't feed us some bullshit line about how much blood you put into your work. Plus "artist" is a very generous way to describe Taylor Swift. I've heard "Shake It Off"; it ain't exactly Beethoven's 5th.
I'm of three minds on streaming sites like Spotify. They're good, neutral, and bad. The good part is that they turned the music industry from one that was extremely consumer-unfriendly into one that is consumer-friendly. It used to be that if you wanted to buy a song, you had to buy an entire album for $15 or buy the single (with five shitty dance mixes) for $7 -- and this was in 1993, those prices would be more like $25 and $12, today. That's exorbitant. Now you can buy single songs for $2 or get access to huge catalogs on-demand for "free" (i.e., for listening to a bunch of commercials) or for something like $10 a month. That seems much more fair to the consumer.
The neutral part is that musicians bring in less money from direct music sales now than they used to. I have no problem with people making a little money off their music; I have no problem with people making a lot of money off their music. But I have no problem with people not making any money, as well. There is no law that says if you put a lot of time and effort into something that people have to buy it. (If there was, I'd be a billionaire off my crossword puzzles.) Maybe you're just not that good, and it has nothing to do with the state of the music industry. And if you're a musician and you don't like the streaming services, don't use them. There are other ways you can monetize your wares. You can sell music exclusively from your own website; you can "sell out" and license your work for commercials; or you can give your music away for free as a way to advertise for your live shows. As I once heard Chuck D say when he came to talk at my alum mater Western Washington University, (I'm paraphrasing) "If you want to make money in music, come to WWU and play a show, if you're good, people will pay to see you." And if people don't pay to see you, then maybe you should look into taking some actuarial exams or something like that.
The bad part is that these streaming sites are not transparent in their payments and are apparently very difficult to audit. In every article I read about Spotify, they claim they pay the artists x amount and the artist say they receive y amount where y << x. Something isn't right. It's one thing if people don't want to pay for your art. It's another if they do, but the money isn't going to you. David Lowery, Cracker frontman (and apparently skilled mathematician), has been advocating fervently for years for more royalties from streaming sites. (Although in the linked article he gives some tepid praise to Spotify because of their paywall option. His issue is more with Pandora.) I completely understand why this upsets artists -- if people are making money off of your art and you aren't getting much of the cut, then that's obviously not right. But this seems more like a general corporate-greed problem than it is a music-streaming problem.
And with that, it seems appropriate to end this entry with an embedded YouTube clip of Cracker's Teen Angst. Don't worry Mr. Lowery, I'm certainly not making any money off of this.
Until next time ...
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