https://shorturl.at/F1xh8

I don’t want the Ellisons and Bari Weiss in charge of CNN, I don’t want Zaslav to get three-quarters of a billion in payment, but that does not mean this merger should be stopped.

Funny how those in Hollywood are freaking out over this merger, I didn’t hear them go ballistic when Disney purchased the assets of Fox. And the filmmaking division of Disney is such a minor part of the operation that the company no longer breaks out revenues separately.

But no one fears the future as much as those in the creative industries.

Tilly Norwood starring in a movie? Let me know how this is different from a Pixar production.

As for AI in music…enough with the freak-out, at this late date we’ve lived through digital disruption again and again in the past two and a half decades and the end result is after a period of turmoil, caused to a great degree by the major labels’ refusal to accept the future, suing not only distributors but their customers, the fans, to try and keep everybody in an overpriced CD for one good track world, revenues have returned as a result of streaming, sans all the costs of physical distribution.

As for the book business, they did a good job, along with the federal government’s antitrust division, in raising the price of e-books, going to the agency model, and the end result is not only have the sales of e-books been hampered, but the overall business is stagnant. Jeff Bezos was trying to build a business, growing the overall pot for books, and the publishers and writers didn’t want to give a techie power and ended up shooting themselves in the foot.

Then again, book publishing is a gnat on the ass of the music and movie industries.

So we had consolidation in the music business, Universal has in excess of a 30% share. More than Paramount would have after the merger. Turns out the major label game doesn’t have the power it once did. Which was based on distribution. Now anybody can get their music on streaming services essentially for free, competing with the big boys and girls. As a matter of fact, indie share keeps increasing! As for breaking new music… It’s not only the indies who are having trouble here, but the majors themselves. Actually, a good case can be made that the majors are only interested in moonshots, leaving so many genres to indies.

As far as you not getting paid what you feel you deserve, chances are you wouldn’t have been able to play at all in the old world, never mind getting a deal, but getting your music in a retail shop, and good luck getting paid as an indie if you did! You can now make the music on your laptop, essentially for free, and you can promote it online for free. This is a disaster? Then again, everybody believes they’re entitled to make a living in music. Furthermore, as a result of pure demand for a unique experience, concert ticket prices have gone into the stratosphere, far exceeding inflation. If you think you can set an artificially high price for concert tickets you’re uninformed, no one is forcing people to go, and people want to go so badly that they’ll pay a scalper much more than face value to attend. 

Has the landscape changed, are winners bigger and losers smaller? Absolutely, but this is not only in music. As a result of the flattening of distribution, the removal of friction, all music is available to all people at the same price in the same place and people gravitate to hits.

Now what will the music landscape look like in the future? We’re in a period of evolution, but one thing is for sure, by refusing to enter the future, the business only hurt itself.

As for AI…

Where’s Frank Zappa when you need him? AI labels are akin to PMRC labels, only the acts of yore are the censors of today. AI is a tool. Rightsholders should be paid for the ingestion of works, one could argue that they should be able to refuse the ingestion of works, but that ship seems to have already sailed. As for the result… Demos are cheap, pros love this. As for fully AI productions, so far none has been a hit. Oh, ignore the headlines about manipulated projects where the company buys a de minimis number of tracks and the song goes to number one at the iTunes Store. That’s like having the most productive horse at the Central Park Carriage Rides.

Then again, misinformation, as well as disinformation, is a greater force than ever. This is a problem, but this does not mean we should return all power to the usual suspects of yore.

As far as Bari Weiss at CBS… She installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor on the “CBS Evening News” and not only are ratings half of those on ABC, and nowhere close to those on NBC, they’re shrinking to boot! This is what happens when people are in over their heads, when amateurs gain power, they end up destroying what they’re in control of and leaving holes for new players. Can you say “60 Minutes”?

As for news… There are more places than ever to get it. Who even watches the network TV news? And CBS got rid of its radio news division… It’s shrinking, not growing. And if you tune in CNN you get constant arguments more than hard reporting of facts.

As for the movie business…

Despite the legacy press being fascinated with film, the big story in visual media today is the encroachment of YouTube in terms of viewing share. Even Netflix is freaked out.

But YouTube is not like the movie business and not like Netflix. As a matter of fact, YouTube tried to do this and failed, green-lighting big budget productions to crickets and abandoning the business. No, YouTube is about user-generated content. Which is not what theatrical movies are, and is not what big outlet streaming is, but the public is cottoning to it.

So the major challenge to movie theatres is not consolidation of studios, but the alternatives, both TV streaming and YouTube. Who says story needs to be produced for tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars when you can shoot an entire flick in 4k on your iPhone. And two of the biggest movie hits of the summer were made by young YouTubers!

So if there is consolidation of studios…

There are fewer places for people to work. The Ellisons say they’ll make 30 movies a year, but even if they don’t… Workers don’t understand, studios make what the market can hold. And theatre revenues keep going down. This is a declining business. Maybe it will survive for event pictures, but irrelevant of this merger theatres will close, there are just not enough desirable movies to keep them in business.

So what is going to happen in visual entertainment? Indies will soar and continue to eat up market share.

I mean look at Netflix itself. With no portfolio it became the biggest online streamer completely in plain sight. The studios were asleep, licensing their product as Netflix built a monolith. Should we sustain these studios at the expense of Netflix? I’m not in favor of that, and I’m sure you’re not either.

That’s what you get when you try to live in the past.

So maybe visual entertainment changes. Made by a plethora of indies on smaller budgets. Who says an actor or director should be entitled to so much per film? Look at recording budgets, they’ve fallen through the floor.

As for the canard that with one fewer studio prices to theatres will be leveraged… First, there are still four major studios left, one more than in the music business, and this is an industry that is based on customer desire. This is not milk or shoes. It all depends on hits. Raise the prices on mediocre films and what happens? NO ONE GOES!

Actually, these same people railing against this merger are the same ones who complain about RottenTomatoes… Talk about harming the consumer, they want everybody to spend their hard-earned bread to find out if a picture is good enough, wasting their time. You can research products on Amazon, all over the web, but movies are sacrosanct?

So what we’ve got here is a bunch of both above the line and below the line professionals in Hollywood who believe they’re entitled to continue to flourish at the same level of remuneration as they have in the past. Auto workers can lose their jobs, but not them. Why?

Opportunity is rampant.

Content is not king, distribution is. And on YouTube…DISTRIBUTION IS FREE! Where is the problem? You can build a new business using the new tools but that would require you to re-evaluate everything you know and get back into the trenches and do the hard work. This is almost laughable. Do I want everybody in Hollywood to be out of work? Of course not. But maintaining the old model would truly hurt the consumer.

Seems the smarter and richer you are, the more educated you are, unless you’re in tech, you’re railing against the future, wanting everything to stay the same. Yet these same people are bitching about Trump and the MAGA movement wanting to return to a fictitious past.

Where is it written that the cheese can’t be moved, no one can ever lose a dollar. That certainly ain’t America.

So when you leave emotion out, you’re left with the law.

Yes, the Trump administration has rubber-stamped mergers that needed more investigation, but that does not mean they’re wrong here.

Remember the Biden administration? They prevented Amazon from purchasing Roomba, the maker of iRobot… Yeah, that’ll show ’em, don’t let the Seattle behemoth become any bigger! But the end result is Roomba went bankrupt and now the computerized floor cleaning business is owned by the Chinese.

And then there was the blocking of the JetBlue/Spirit merger. Yup, American and United are too big already, let’s not let there be any more consolidation of power! End result? Spirit went bankrupt, out of business, and Jet Blue is struggling.

Why do Democrats always get it wrong on this stuff? They can see the issue, but not the future. If the Democrats had been in power, they would have prevented the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint…and the end result would have been Sprint going bankrupt!

But got to keep consolidation from happening…

Now creating a new telecom company would be a heavy lift. But making art and distributing it? God, the problem is that there’s now too much of this stuff! And the movie studios are always on the back foot, innovation comes from elsewhere.

As for the merged Paramount/Warner company controlling basic cable channels… They’re worth little and every day they’re worth less. What next, protecting the market for 78 RPM records?

The future cannot be stopped. And every operation that has tried to do this has ended up behind the 8-ball. Never mind those who were oblivious to the future, like Kodak. Huge market share and then…essentially nothing.

Not that I’m endorsing Trump’s killing of alternative energy and his elimination of electric car subsidies. 20% of new autos in Europe are electric. And China is eating the lunch of the European carmakers in their home territory, because they were busy banking profits rather than being nimble and investing in the future. Yes, you can buy an electric VW in China today, but it’s got fewer features and less efficient software. What’s the market demand for that?

Of course China subsidized battery and electric car development. But the U.S. used to be the leader on this, now funds for scientific discovery are being cut.

Clowns to the left of me.

Jokers to the right.

Here I am stuck in the middle with you.

Today you’re selling streams, not physical product, and they’re doing a piss-poor job of it.

There are two issues in today’s music business: attention and friction.

The Stones have the attention element down pretty well, but they’re flummoxed by friction, how are they going to get people to actually listen to “Foreign Tongues”?

Now the hype used to be a set-up for sales. And with physical product as an overweighted part of the chart equation, maybe the Stones can eke out a number one, before the album crashes into the troposphere. But that’s a circle jerk. You get press attention, but that press doesn’t generate many streams, just ask Paul McCartney.

But as good a job as McCartney did promoting “The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” the Stones’ press campaign is of a scorched-earth variety we haven’t seen for a classic rock act since the days of Tom Petty’s last studio album, and maybe Steely Dan’s comeback 25 years ago.

You remember that comeback, wherein Donald revealed the story of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and…

That was a quarter century ago. The Dan wen ton late night TV. You were exposed to the music. Today?

I mean an interview in the “New York Times” is key if you want to sell tickets, but streams? I don’t think it has much of an effect.

Now let me be clear, unlike a lot of old acts, the Stones are all over TikTok. However, most of the clips are interview segments. I searched earlier and found there was a live gig in London a few nights back where the Stones played…

Oldies.

Is this a good way to sell new music? I can’t see how.

Once again, it’s about streams, not sales. And the dirty little secret is the Stones sold poorly anyway. They were in your face, but albums might have gone platinum, diamond records were for others. Richard Branson signed the Stones to a rich deal at Virgin so he could sell the company, the buyers not aware of how poor their sales actually were.

So, I wouldn’t expect sales to be great this time around. In an era where sales mean so much less.

The first thing they needed was a single.

Now let me be clear, I’m not forcing you to have one, but if you want your attention campaign to ignite you must have a track that is a one listen smash. So far, I haven’t heard one on “Foreign Tongues.” Which is fine, but sans said hit, how are you going to get the masses involved? You’re not!

It’s not only the Stones, everybody faces this question, even some of the younger stars, how are you going to get people to actually listen to the music?

By using online platforms to expose them to it.

The Stones clips shouldn’t be conversations with Zane Lowe or the “Times,” they should be one or more members sitting in the studio explaining how they wrote this song, how they came up with it, how they built it. Then people would be forced to listen to the new music, assuming they cared, and many do. Talking about music, isn’t that like dancing about architecture?

Now if there is a single, a one listen smash, every clip should focus on that one track. I mean come on, you expect the audience to immediately grasp an entire album? I don’t care who you are, that’s a heavy lift. Bash me over the head with the track again and again, you’re your own radio station today.

The biggest mistake the Stones made was not going on Rick Beato’s show. Beato is not subject to the algorithm, his fans are dedicated. They tune in just for him. And Beato specializes in the music itself, how it was created. That’s the kind of information that needs to be spread if you want people to actually stream a song. Go DEEPER!

Otherwise, it’s all a wank.

I mean this could be the last time, so the fact that the Stones seem to be revealing that which they held back previously… I mean how do you hype the next album? After you’ve shot your wad?

And one thing is for sure, we know the hype campaign is not working.

Morgan Wallen or Taylor Swift drop a new album and it dominates the Spotify Top 50 immediately. But the Stones are nowhere to be found on that chart, whether it be the U.S. or the U.K.

Now if the Stones really care about this new music…

They’ll promote it for longer than this week.

Want to promote it?

Create mania.

Starting live.

Show up and open for acts. For Olivia Rodrigo. For Morgan Wallen (after all, country is the new rock and roll). Play only the new album, and if you think that will bore people, play only four songs. Once again, you should be hyping the new stuff. Such that when people shoot YouTube videos, that’s what people will see and that’s what they’ll hear!

As far as social media…

The oldsters are on Facebook and Instagram, the youngsters are on TikTok. Focus accordingly.

But in truth, it’s youngsters who keep a band alive. How do you reach them? WITH A HISTORY LESSON!

Who knows more about the blues?

The Stones should have clips tracing their new material to the Delta blues, or whatever roots they’ve got. Thread the needle, don’t exist in a vacuum. And you must focus on the MUSIC!

All the interviews online, they’re talking about Mick’s personality, whether we know the real him. About his physical condition and dancing. What has that got to do with the music? Once again, it might sell tickets, but they’re not going on the road.

Now tomorrow, the media genuflecting to the Stones, up the band’s ass, will be on to something else. That’s the way the news business works. Once again, you’ve got to promote yourself.

And the Stones should do this by appearing to be outsiders.

And stunting.

Stunts? It’s so easy. Forget the inane press party in London, the Stones should have worked up two numbers for the Sphere. Either appeared on a dark night or during the afternoon. After all, it’s the STONES! And the new music would be helped by the visuals.

Right now the Stones look like aged grandpas with their edges shorn off deigning to talk to us plebes for a week until they go back to their mansions. Rock, especially the Stones, is supposed to be rough and savage, to the gut, it’s something you feel more than talk about. Where is it in this hype campaign, where is something new? An AI video? Not a bad idea, but it’s not really pushing the envelope to blow our minds. And it doesn’t require repeat viewings. For that, the music must hook you immediately!

I mean if the Stones don’t care about whether anybody listens to their new music, fine. But that’s not the way they’re approaching it, this isn’t a stealth operation like the U2 EPs.

And speaking of U2, the new track “Street of Dreams” starts off quietly, but if you stick with it it revs up and becomes hooky, in a way “Beautiful Day” did back in the day. I might sound like a heretic, but they should just chop off the first thirty seconds of “Street of Dreams,” especially in an era where most people only give new material a few seconds anyway. I won’t say “Street of Dreams” breaks new ground, but after that first half a minute when the music plays out you’ll find yourself nodding your head, a fan will be satiated, will want to hear the track again. Bono is a student of the business. He knew he needed something hooky and easy, just like he did with the aforementioned comeback single, “Beautiful Day.”

So far I haven’t heard an equivalent track on “Foreign Tongues.”

Then again, I haven’t listened to the whole thing. How are the Stones gonna get me to listen to the whole thing?

Not by blabbing about their past career ad infinitum to talking heads, but by actually playing the new music and dissecting it.

I mean this is a band that was built on riffs. Couldn’t they have gone back into the studio and just written one that closed people? Wasn’t there anybody involved who could tell them they just didn’t have that one track, and if they wanted more than attention, if they wanted people to actually listen more than once, they needed it?

Focus on the music first. The story is irrelevant unless it relates to the  music itself.

You’re selling repeat listens and longevity, that’s the streaming game. Focus there first. The Stones seem to have it reversed, they want attention on the band itself for a week and then…

Exactly what?

Tune in July 11th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

The number no longer makes sense.

Forget lying to others about your age, can you lie to yourself?

It was really our grandparents who were the last generation to get old and accept it. It was a natural stage of life. As for our parents, they were flummoxed. The sixties were unfathomable, some got on the bandwagon but most stayed on the sidelines. And then everything their children augured for, believed in, became de facto. The end of the war, casual clothing, music everywhere. I don’t know when your parents started to wear jeans, but I was shocked when my dad showed up in a pair in the late seventies, prior to that, he didn’t own any.

And it’s not so much that we had a good run, but that the run is over.

As Solters calls them, the “civilians” are all retired. And those still in this business are running things, or got squeezed out. You can hire youngsters with more passion for fewer bucks.

We stopped going to the movies, now we cotton to streaming TV. After all, they don’t even make movies for us anymore. We remember the last true heyday, the seventies, which contained the birth of the blockbuster, but began truly in the late sixties with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” but ended in 1979 with “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Imagine a film like that getting greenlit today! Never mind the younger generations get divorced less than us. Then again, it’s a class thing, the less wealthy and educated often don’t get married at all!

We still go to see our favorite bands live. Not like the younger generations… For them it’s a gathering, an event, the music is almost secondary, it certainly doesn’t strike their soul the way ours did. We want to remember those days.

But we don’t recall video games, and as far as tech… If our generation even knows how to do more than surf the web and text, they decry it. Social media is the devil. Why won’t those damn kids get off the lawn! And while they’re at it, get off the phone too!

But our kids played all those video games and they survived. What makes us think that Gen-Z won’t survive the smartphone?

But really, it’s the feeling that the world is passing you by.

I don’t know about you, but over the past couple of weeks, the tsunami of Trump traffic just doesn’t hit me the same way anymore. I just don’t get worked up about it as much. I know some people cheer on the Orange “Genius,” but they’re not friends of mine. Yup, I’m a college graduate, a member of the so-called “elite,” I believe in facts and truth and I laugh when someone whips out a conspiracy theory.

And the funny thing about being over seventy is you stop correcting people. You realize it’s not worth it. You can send them the report that the government quashed, about the benefits of the Covid vaccine, but this is how people feel powerful, with their own ideas and viewpoints, they’re sick of everybody getting rich and being powerful other than themselves. I mean there are many costs of the plethora of billionaires. Sure, everybody would like to be rich, but they know that most of these guys, and almost all of them are guys, pay few taxes, think their sh*t doesn’t stink and…

That’s another thing about getting older, you no longer have any heroes. You’ve realized everybody is human. I guess when someone my age starts testifying about believing in certain musicians… You mean the one with the plastic surgery, who hasn’t had a hit in eons? I mean give Bob Dylan credit, he’s doing it his way. But giving him hosannas for his shows is literally the Emperor’s New Clothes.

But those are fighting words. Because Boomers have so little to believe in that that which they do they’ll defend to their death, their icons can’t be questioned.

So yes, some Boomers wear blinders and are delusional, and this is hard for me to handle.

They’re still trying to impress. How could they not know no one cares what kind of car you drive, where you went on vacation? You reach seventy and society is no longer fluid, it’s set. If you’ve got a bunch of bucks, feel free to spend them, but don’t tell me that makes you better than me.

But the rat race, society, you reach seventy and you feel strangely estranged. There are those alta kachers who won’t give up their jobs in D.C. Are they that delusional, do they think that’s what their life is about, their title? I mean they’re not accomplishing much. No one is as hollow at the core as a politician.

But there’s so much info coming down the pike. Is the feeling of being overwhelmed the nature of life in the twenty first century or is this a particular side effect of being old? I mean you used to be able to be comprehensive, see all of the movies, know the hit records, now that seems impossible, and you wonder why you’d want to anyway. Meanwhile, the media are like that Who song, meet the new hype, same as the old hype. We literally can’t be fooled again. If something is truly great and it sustains, we’ll find out about it, we don’t need to be teased and foaming at the mouth in anticipation.

So some of us are self-satisfied, some in a good way. They own their own home, they’ve got grandchildren, they’re living day by day.

While they’re not going to the doctor.

And then there are others who just can’t let go of the mores. Is this a function of being a Baby Boomer, or is it just a consequence of getting old?

And no one will admit all this. Everybody thinks they’re as hip and up to date as ever. But unlike when they were young, they pooh-pooh the new rather than embrace it.

And the younger generations want us to move on down the line and we refuse to. We won’t leave politics, and not only that, we’ll denigrate those with youth, they just haven’t lived long enough to understand! Isn’t that what they told us, isn’t that why we got the voting age lowered to eighteen? I mean if you’re old enough to go to war, you’re old enough to vote.

And the whole world changed and we’re frustrated when people don’t know it or acknowledge it. We couldn’t beat the North Vietnamese and now we see how Ukraine is standing up to Russia with drone warfare and the machine is busy telling everybody that we’re the biggest and baddest while we’re running out of ammunition, having spent so much cash to build Patriot missiles to blow drones out of the sky in the Middle East.

And we didn’t exactly declare victory when we left Vietnam, but there’s no way to portray the fracas in Iran as anything but a loss. And as bad as we perceive the religious government in Iran to be, so many did come out this past week to mourn their lost leader.

Begging the question what we know.

Never mind the shifting image of the United States.

Back in the seventies, when we all went to Europe on cheap flights and used our Eurail passes, we had to defend our nation, the locals wanted to chide us for Vietnam. I don’t even hear about college students doing that today, and how many Americans even have passports? We’ve been sold a bill of goods, that America is the tippity top in every vertical, when this is patently untrue.

Socialism is pretty damn good in Scandinavia. Free college? Our national hero St. Reagan changed the California college system from nearly free to expensive. Then again, California is now in the doghouse, a national punching bag. What can you do but throw your hands in the air?

So you can try and go on like it’s the same as it ever was, or you can own your age and get freaked out and try to adjust, even though no one ever talks about this.

Yup, you can get riled up about the issues of the day, from Meta to AI to…they’re endless.

Or you can see that your time on the planet is limited and take an alternative path.

But there’s no context. We used to all be in it together, of one mind, leaning on each other. Now we’re all in our own private Idaho not admitting that we feel lost and don’t know what to do.

And believe me, we know so much of what we see going on is B.S. But we used to care, we used to believe in change, now we see it all as cyclical, we’ll vote, but don’t ask us to believe.

After all, the game is rigged. That’s one thing we’ve all learned. But we’re trying to pull the wool over the eyes of younger generations who know this. Telling them to let us continue to rule, that we know what is going on.

But the truth is we’ve lost the passion.

We just don’t want our power usurped.