Much ado about nothing. Grandstanding. A joke.

In reality the order says nothing. Other than ticket scalpers make a lot of money and they must pay taxes on their revenue.

Oh yeah, DOGE just gutted the IRS…who’s going to enforce that? Where are all the IRS engineers with time to dedicate to researching the receipts of brokers.

As for the BOTS act… It’s been on the books for years, but it’s been ineffective because there’s been no money/assets delegated for ENFORCEMENT!

And in a government where Musk is cutting willy-nilly, where is the extra manpower to focus on…TICKET SCALPING?

Let’s be clear, scalpers provide a service. If you can’t get in line online and waste hours trying to purchase what oftentimes is a bad seat, you can pay a premium after the fact to the scalper to get the ticket you want. Hell, a lot of the great tickets are not available on the on sale to boot! There are pre-sales and holdbacks and… I’ll admit the scalpers and their bots are a huge problem, but no one is forcing anybody to buy a concert ticket. And the dirty little secret is almost all of the people paying exorbitant prices for secondary market tickets were thrilled to be at the venue, THEY ENJOYED THE SHOW!

So, once again, where is the problem?

High prices for concert tickets? Well, if the acts themselves try to capture that revenue the public bitches that they’re greedy. As for paperless/tying the ticket to the purchaser…the public is against that, because they want to be able to scalp their tickets themselves!

Concert ticket pricing and availability is a problem, but nothing in Trump’s executive order is going to address this.

Price transparency? Big evil Live Nation has been arguing for this for years. It’s a game, no different from buying anything in America today. There’s the price of the car, and what you pay when you walk out the door. And there’s no addressing the breakdown of these fees… So the acts can hide behind the “face value” of the ticket and accuse Ticketmaster, which gets little of the fees, for being greedy! Talk about not having clean hands.

The FTC proposing regulations? Isn’t this what Trump and the Republicans want to get rid of? Don’t they want to simplify all processes?

As for a report… That ain’t never going to pass the DOGE smell test. Isn’t this what they’re getting rid of, soft costs? You’re going to spend all that money creating a report? And it does cost money. And usually nothing happens thereafter. This is antithetical to the DOGE and Trump ethos!

But Trump owes Kid Rock a solid. And this was as much as he could deliver.

Rock has a long history of trying to rein in the abuses in the ticketing world. I applaud him for that. But this executive order is a joke.

Too many people are making too much money off of concert tickets for there to be any change. And the government doesn’t have enough money and manpower to solve this problem, because how big of a problem is it? Very tiny.

We’ve got ignorant fans who believe they’re entitled to sit in the front row for twenty bucks. Since they listened to the music, a seat should be guaranteed!

Forget the law of supply and demand. This is kind of like the inane advocates of a penny a stream at Spotify. Did they learn any math? Spotify doesn’t take in enough revenue to pay every artist a penny per stream, nowhere even close, the company would be bankrupt nearly instantly.

But it feels good to beat up on Spotify. It feels good to beat up on Ticketmaster. People can’t handle the truth.

And all this executive order does is obfuscate. It makes people believe something is being done when in reality…

It’s the same as it ever was.

You need a direct relationship with your audience.

Let me give you an example. In the last century and the beginning of this one, if you were on terrestrial radio, if you were on MTV, you were part of a community.

That paradigm is kaput.

There’s a conception that if you just get enough publicity, if you just break through into this world or that, you’ll be golden.

But that is untrue.

I’ll give you an example. Taylor Swift. She’s in her own business, her own vertical, she competes with NO ONE! It’s not buying a ticket for a Swift show or someone else, either you want to go see Swift or you don’t.

That’s at the top. But what I’m really concerned with here is the bottom.

People are looking for an express train. They want to get on it and journey to greatness. But that train does not exist. Nowhere. A late night TV appearance is meaningless unless it’s on SNL. And the SNL brand has been fifty years in the making, acts come and go, but SNL remains, it’s bigger than any act on the show. Used to be people tuned in SNL to see a specific act. Now they watch SNL and then view an act. Because this is not the only place you can see your favorites…they’re everywhere, assuming you’re looking!

Let’s take the movie business as an example. Which is cratering, off 11% so far this year. Its problem is it is reinventing the wheel with every film. No one is a fan of the movie theatre itself. Sure, there are some exceptions, but the defining factor of whether you go to the flicks is whether you want to see that particular movie.

Used to be you found out about movies Thursday night, mostly on NBC, with a bombardment of advertising. Now, the target audience doesn’t even watch network television. And everybody hates ads, they’re easily avoidable.

People are fans of Netflix and the product comes and goes. Netflix gets you with its monthly fee.

How do you get your audience hooked?

Oh, you can try a moonshot. Getting a big story in the paper, on some TV news show, even ginning up a fakokta story for the gossip columns. But it’s one and done, you need a continuous story.

When you have a direct relationship you cannot let it lie fallow. You must constantly feed it, or people will go elsewhere. Forget the brands of yore that made it in a prior era, the dinosaurs of rock and metal. They can get away without new music, announcing a big tour every year or two. But if you’re a new act, having developed in the last couple of decades, you not only need new music, you need YouTube clips, you’ve got to burnish the relationship with your audience, which will probably grow slowly, if at all. You milk the audience you have, you don’t fantasize about an audience you’d have had in the last century.

This is the fallacy of the bitching about streaming payments. Acts don’t realize their status. They think since they’re professional, everybody should be listening to them. But they’re not. Only a very few are. At least there are many more ways to monetize than there were in the last century.

You must adjust. You must realize that the public is overloaded. The internet may have burgeoned, but people’s brains have not. They can only handle so much. How do you penetrate them?

The tsunami of news is overwhelming. Just check out Apple News+, and everybody competing for attention has a clickbait headline.

If you’re a student of the game you know more than the average person, but even you don’t know everything. Used to be the music business was comprehensible, but if you know every act today you’re lying.

So you need to change your focus. You must build upon what you have.

Hell, don’t even bother to follow the top-line news. Does it really affect you if Spotify makes a new deal with Universal? It really doesn’t affect you if Ticketmaster signs up a new account. But rather than focus on your own career, it’s easier to follow the business, and too often people complain about it. YOU’RE IN YOUR OWN BUSINESS! Take care of your home and then everything will turn out all right.

But you want someone to make it easier. Everybody wants it easier. But the paradigm of today is harder, because there’s so much in the pipeline. You’re competing against TikTok, YouTube, video games…you must be more interesting to a certain sliver of the public than these outlets. You must be more interesting than the hits of the past, because they’re easily accessible.

The lift is heavier than ever before. You can declare yourself a musician, but establishing a career is nearly impossible.

So, there are scapegoats. Spotify, Live Nation…

Those are just vessels. They are tools that you employ.

But you must have enough success to take advantage of them.

Have I discouraged you yet?

Good. I’m the antidote to all those websites taking your money and telling you they’ll help you have success.

Making music for a living is harder and slower than it’s ever been before. Even the major labels can’t establish hit acts, and they’re trying to do this 24/7.

You must be innovative. You must be focused.

And you must dedicate an incredible amount of time to the process.

Does this sound boring?

Then music is not for you. Go to college and follow a path. Music is the great unknown. Sure, people need it, but they don’t need YOU! 

How do they convince them they need YOU?

You must be unique. Maybe your music, maybe your stage show, maybe your online personality, MAYBE ALL OF THEM!

There are very few stars, everything is cottage industry these days.

But the upside is anybody and everybody can play.

But not everybody can succeed.

But the internet allows you to get your music out there and play by your rules.

But people would rather have a defined path.

There is no defined path. That was blown up years ago.

We are living in the wilderness.

But people are foraging. How do you hook them and keep them? 

That’s your job. Go micro, not macro. That’s the route to success and survival.

“Tune Out the Noise”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T98825bzcKw

I’m intrigued by finance, but I’m not interested in it.

Meaning I want to know how it works, but I don’t want to spend any mental energy in investing.

I don’t want to become a day trader, which is a fool’s errand. I don’t want to buy and sell stocks because I’m not a professional, and it’s a professional market. Furthermore, today everyone knows you should just put your money in index funds.

These are the guys who did the research proving this is the right way to invest.

Now I read about this documentary in the “Wall Street Journal.”

“A Billionaire and an Oscar Winner Have Made a Hit Movie. It’s About Investing – The new documentary from Errol Morris makes index funds and passive investing thrilling”

Free link: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/investing-david-booth-errol-morris-documentary-4dd7ff80?st=tuJdM1&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Not that you have to read the article. But I do recommend you watch the first half of this movie.

Documentaries are all the rage, but too often they’re about topics I experienced live, or nooks and crannies featuring crazy people. “Tune Out the Noise” is educational, without being didactic, without beating you over the head.

What we’ve got here is nobodies who find their way to the University of Chicago for disparate reasons. These are not today’s finance bros, wearing tailored suits who are in it only for the money and the attendant lifestyle. No, what we have here are ACADEMICS!

Can you imagine being so intrigued by finance that you want to teach it? Mostly these are oddballs who don’t fit in who find their way to this educational institution…

I know, I know, everybody’s down on universities and college education today. However, at the bleeding edge of any enterprise is the intelligent, trying to figure out the unknown. And that’s thrilling. We’re all excited by the new. But most of us are playing it safe, never all-in, especially in enterprises that appear difficult and don’t rain down money.

But David Booth decided to employ all this academic research to prove a point and make a ton of money. Which is why the University of Chicago’s business school is now named “Booth” (well, he donated $300 million for the privilege).

It’s exciting to see people driven by the data, the science, the theories, as opposed to the modern paradigm of working your way back from the money. How do I get rich? That’s where most people start.

This is history. And that’s where documentaries shine. Errol Morris makes finance come alive.

Until somewhere in the middle of this flick where the focus ends up being on small cap companies and multi-dimensions and conceptually you get it, but something is lost in the process.

But before that…

You’ll be riveted. Because Morris is a professional documentarian, and he knows how to make a subject interesting.

Of course if you’re a newbie, if you’re wet behind the ears, if you truly think you can beat the market yourself…your eyes will be opened. The math says otherwise! That’s the genius of these people… They collected the data and analyzed it, instead of just talking out of their rear ends.

And then there’s the concept of the theory. The data is meaningless unless you’re using it to prove or disprove… This is the kind of stuff you learned in junior high school that rarely comes up in your everyday life, but it’s the essence of progress.

You should put your money in an index fund. Sure, round out your portfolio with bonds, maybe real estate, don’t go all-in on the index. But if you’re going to own equities, this is the way to go. This movie proves it.

As to which index fund you should own with which philosophy… This is where the film gets hazy.

But until that point, you’ll be focused and edified. Even those in the industry may not know a lot of these historical details.

And did I mention that the movie is FREE?!

Yup, just click the YouTube link above.

You’ll be intrigued.

I haven’t been this focused since Napster. Every morning I turn on my phone and am…

Stunned, horrified.

Not that everybody agrees with me. Kind of like those days back in the beginning of 2000. The label execs told us they had it under control. After all, the law was on their side. You had acts and the industry telling its fans/customers to stop…and nothing did. We never did return to normal. And an outsider saved the recording industry. Yes, that’s what Daniel Ek did, and the labels know this, but acts consider him a pariah because in the process he got rich and they did not.

Trump is the antidote to not only Biden, but the entire Democratic party. You probably saw the Jon Stewart clip wherein he talks about Schumer waiting for Trump’s approval rating to go down to forty and then counters with the fact that the Democrats’ is TWENTY SEVEN!

Then again, I don’t think elected officials saw this. They’re not on TikTok, where this clip exploded. That’s the goal of late night TV, not to get you to tune in, but to create viral content that explodes online.

So…

Trump has stopped border crossings, they’re down to a trickle. The Democrats could have done this, but somehow this was anti…exactly what? This reminds me of trans women in sports and pronouns… The Democrats lost touch with the will of the people and catered to a cabal that was often vicious. At the end of his term, Biden looked nothing so much as afraid. Never mind the entire fiasco of Joe running again.

Joe’s home in the dementia ward. Kamala seems to realize no one likes her and has been licking her wounds off the radar screen. And who is leading the Democrats?

Maybe late night hosts and comedians. And there’s Gavin Newsom with his excoriated podcast…doesn’t he realize these people are the ENEMY!

And then there’s Bernie and AOC…

But nobody in D.C. takes them seriously. They’re cranks with little power. No, they’re in touch with the heartbeat of the country! Dissatisfaction with not only the government, but life in these United States!

I loved that TikTok video I saw yesterday with the young female tax attorney who explained how the rich pay no taxes. They borrow against their assets. YOU HAVE NO ASSETS! Or if you do, you’re probably one of those Democrats who keep telling the electorate how dumb it is. How did that work out? Not well.

So there’s this level of agitation and discontent and other than Bernie and AOC, the Democrats are not tapping into it. All they’re saying is their hands are tied. These doofuses have been in D.C. so long that they’ve lost touch with their jobs. They’re elected by US! They work for US! How about coming down from their thrones and interacting with US!

I’m not talking about listening tours. F*ck that. No, I’m talking about stirring up the populace, eradicating our depression. Sure, the right may not have liked Black Lives Matter demonstrations after George Floyd, but boy did those gain the attention of the people and the press. At least some progress was made, before Trump came along and undercut it.

The Democrats should leave D.C., where they keep telling us they have no power, and return to their burgs and stir up the public. Have rallies. Otherwise, everybody’s going to just go on with their own life until we’re living in Hungary.

This is what I don’t understand. How countries shifted into authoritarianism and life went on, the people accepted this. This couldn’t happen in the United States, BUT NOW IT IS!

Tap into our anger. Show Elon and Trump that we’re all not in agreement. Force the issue, either they have to stop the train or own the consequences of their actions. And right now they’re doing neither.

Keep the fever up. Make us believers in change. If you think the only way to make change is at the ballot box, you’ve been in Washington too long.

This is the lesson of Napster. Outside forces can change the world. At first most people had no idea what Napster was. Then they were aware and didn’t care. And then they got high speed connections and used the service and were convinced, smiling!

Who is going to lead the populace out of the wilderness? Who is going to disrupt the tsunami of destruction Elon and Trump have executed?

WE ARE!

That’s right, you and me. We’re the nation’s only hope. I want to know who is on my side, who is not afraid, who is willing to stand up for this country as opposed to focusing on lifestyle.

This is the most important issue of YOUR LIFE!

This is the turning point.

Are you going to be somnambulant?

All we need is leaders. This is the opportunity for the Democrats. Don’t forget, Trump stirred up his fans, gained constituents before he even ran for office! Trump spoke plain English. You learn the lessons of the enemy, you don’t just throw them all away.

The press isn’t going to save us.

As for the courts… They ruled against Napster and then we got KaZaA and then lockers. The will of the people could not be tamped down.

So far the courts haven’t stopped Trump.

The only thing that can stop him are you and me.

This is like Vietnam, but with much greater consequences. As for all those Trumpers… They were for Vietnam until they too realized the war was fruitless.

Because you can’t fight hearts and minds. Hearts and minds always win.

Dissatisfaction is rampant. Back in ’68 it was Eugene McCarthy who tapped into this. Ultimately Hubert Humphrey, the Chuck Schumer of the era, was nominated AND HE LOST! Because he didn’t have the fervor of the populace behind him.

Your entire way of life is being changed and you’re forced to shrug your shoulders because your leaders have let you down.

Something is happening here, and it sure ain’t exactly clear.

Either it will happen spontaneously or it will be led by the Democrats or…

It won’t happen at all. That’s what I’m most worried about. We don’t know who each other is. We don’t think we have enough people. We don’t think we have enough power.

BUT WE DO!

For what it’s worth.