It used to be you functioned in a vacuum.  If you didn’t agree to national TV or print, nobody knew what the fuck you were doing.

Those days are through.

The e-mail bell just keeps on ringing.  Got these in the last two minutes:

Martin Dean Ross:

God Almighty Bob!    I am surfing the TV channels and The Goo Goo Dolls are selling their dvd /album on ….QVC!!!  I would like to know what your take is on this!

Bridget Nolan:

For every positive (Prince at SB)….an atrocity….Goo Goo Dolls on QVC….tune in now….they are shilling a DVD live from the 930 Club in DC….more of these to come, I!m sure….PUKE

The most important player in the food chain is now the manager.

In the nineties, the label became the manager.  It dictated.

If you throw in with the label now, you’re going to last about as long as a Capitol Records employee…NOT LONG!

The labels are desperate.  They’ll do whatever it takes to sell a record TODAY!  Tomorrow?  That doesn’t exist!

When you commit a faux pas today, in a matter of hours your rep takes a hit.  One night out sans panties and Britney Spears goes from victim to tramp.

You’d think she’d know that there are CAMERAS out there.  But no, she lives in an airhead world of her own device.  Where daffodils and lollipops rule.

And you wonder why Lindsay and Paris are jokes.

Used to be we didn’t know much about our stars.  And that which filtered down we were envious of.  WE wanted a chance to fish for mudsharks from the windows of the Edgewater Inn.  Even more, we wanted to interact (well, more than that) with the females in the rooms of Zeppelin.  We didn’t want to make FUN of Led Zeppelin, we wanted to BE Led Zeppelin!

Who’d want to be Sheryl Crow?

I laid off her for a while, in light of her breast cancer experience, but it was the talk of our Super Bowl party, THE WOMEN, will Sheryl Crow do ANYTHING?  Can you pay her and she shows up at your kid’s party (oops, all the stars do that now…)

Sheryl Crow’s hawking the "Wall Street Journal".  And hair products.  She’s so whored out she hasn’t got TIME to live the life of a debauched rock star.

Oh, Sheryl tried to make a personal album.  When that stiffed, she decided to go to Plan B, lowest common denominator sell-out all the time.  And based on that gig in Hartford where headliner John Mayer cancelled, the number interested in partaking in her life experience…is dwindling.

How did it come to this?  How did stars get so overexposed?  How did they make such bad choices?

By taking advice, career direction, from baby boomers.  Who are not Net savvy.  Who have no concept of the new communications tools.

You’ve got to protect your act’s image.  You’ve got to shoot for credibility, especially if you want lifespan.  They’re not athletes, when done right music is a missive from the soul, that the audience believes in.  Who can believe in someone who will do ANYTHING for the money, ANYTHING for the exposure.

The fat cats say that selling out can’t hurt you.  They’re just buying their own line of bullshit.  Based on my e-mail, the public is offended, and they want to tell EVERYBODY they know.

Why is Dell in the dumper?  Partly because their shitty service was blasted ALL OVER THE WEB!

You think you control the game.

But those days are through.  Now the PUBLIC is in control.  You’ve got to play by ITS rules, not TV’s or radio’s.  If you don’t respect the public, you’re gonna have a very brief lifespan.  Hell, that’s what the major labels did, abused their customers, and now they’re paying the price.