Hi Bob,

I read all of your emails, you shoot from the hip and that’s the way I like to get information. I wanted to share an experience with you that I had today.

I’m a student at Berklee College of Music and we had Bruce Lundvall, CEO of Blue Note Records Group come and lecture the Music Business/Management Major, the largest at Berklee (530+ kids).

First, I must say he had several stories to tell us, nothing really inspiring, I took them more as "I’ve signed, this and that person" or "I made Michael Jackson hold and took Dexter Gordon’s call instead".  It was cute at first, but slowly it became evident that he is just a figure head. I mean, he’s 71! In fact, he brought Michael Cuscuna with him.  He showed us lots of great pictures that Frances  Wolf had taken of Doug Watkins, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and Miles Davis. Lundvall deferred any question that he a) couldn’t hear or b) had to do with technology. The kicker was, collectively, they didn’t even know what DRM was (by name) we had to explain it to them. Lundvall came clean and said that he didn’t get along well with technology and couldn’t remember what to call the song that played on his cell phone when it rang, then once we reminded him, he referred to it as a "ring tune".

I didn’t even want to ask questions/make statments for fear that I’d stump the poor guy. The whole experience left quite a bit to be desired.

I have no desire to work for a label. Management is where I want to be.

I don’t mean to come off as hot head, but I can only say that there, in a room full of hungry MBM majors we were faced with the very problem that is holding back this industry.