What I want to understand is why when oil producers announce a price hike the cost of gasoline goes up at the station on the very same day. But didn’t they buy that gas LAST WEEK?

Culture issues. If you’ve been paying attention, the latest furor is over grooming. And I’m not talking about hair and makeup. You need to live for the news to understand the petty wars being fought between the political parties. And they’re almost always cultural issues, because D.C. is bought and sold to the corporations, companies are people, don’t you know? And the corporations have the money and keep the officials in business. Go against the corporations and you forgo the big money you need to get elected, especially in a world where it’s nearly impossible to reach your constituents.

But corporations are our common enemy. This is one thing Americans agree on. They focus on cultural issues because they believe they have some control there. But when it comes to corporations? They appear to have none.

So with the abdication of the power of musicians, corporations have become idols. Come on, you’ve got to believe in Apple more than any act on the hit parade. Furthermore, Apple is looking out for you, with its privacy controls. But elected officials uninformed on the issues hounded by the makers of apps want to open the door to more app stores on the Apple platform. I mean lower the percentage Apple gets, sure, but letting anybody in? That will wreck Apple’s walled garden that its customers believe in, that immunizes them against viruses and scams.

So maybe you don’t like Apple. Not everybody does. Which is why others do. If everybody likes it, nobody can believe in it, you need the anti to get your fervor up.

But now at an Atlanta Apple Store the employees are talking about unionizing. They get a minimum of $20 an hour, they get health benefits, tuition too, BUT THERE’S NO UPWARD MOBILITY! You can work behind the Genius Bar until you’re retirement age, never called up to the bigs in Cupertino.

Before that was Amazon.

And Starbucks.

And it gets even worse. Prices are going through the roof and the corporations are making proportionately more and what are they doing with this excess cash? Buying their own stock back. It’s a financial game and the everyday person is being screwed.

This is the issue the Democrats should be focusing on. The economics. This is why Bernie Sanders is a hero, and Elizabeth Warren was. It’s about standing up to the behemoths, doing what is right as opposed to expedient.

Someone e-mailed me about attending his first graduate class in journalism. The professor brought in a brown paper bag. And ultimately this teacher said as soon as they buy you lunch, they own you, you should bring or pay for your own. And that is true. That’s the American way, shared relationships and obligations. But that’s not how government is supposed to work.

I mean if I read about one more exec making triple digit millions a year I’m going to tear my hair out. You’re working for a corporation you didn’t start, why are you entitled to those insane bucks? Which hurt us all. That buying power draws attention while the poor individual loses any previous focus. What do they say in Washington? Poor people don’t vote! But last time around more people voted than ever before. Because they wanted to weigh in on Trump, pro or con.

And they care just as much about economics, their future, and the future of their kids. They seem to be the only ones looking out for themselves. They don’t seem to matter enough to those who can make change, can make a difference.

You’ve got to read the story in today’s “New York Times” about the manager of a Dollar General store in the south. There was no one working there! Corporate wouldn’t allow her to assign enough hours. As a matter of fact, they cut them! There was no one to put away the boxes in the aisles, the customers complained. Meanwhile, Dollar General is burgeoning. The CEO made $16,452,823 last year. It’s not like Todd Vasos founded the damn company, as a matter of fact he’s only been working there since 2015! How can these men, and they’re almost all men, make all this money while their employees are overworked, harried and in some cases even starving!

Plenty is wrong in America. And it’s got little to do with LGBTQ issues. Or critical race theory. All these ginned-up issues to make sure you don’t pay attention to what’s really going on.

But now the public has a voice. The manager of that Dollar General store spread the word on TikTok. She was immediately fired, but she stirred up the employees of the rest of the Dollar General stores.

And as soon as we start talking about realigning economics, those with the money, and those on the take, scream SOCIALISM! I hate to tell you, but we’ve already got socialism in America. And our biggest issue is income inequality. Socialism schmocialism. That’s just a trigger word. The rich have all these bogus points they wave in our faces. Like how many taxes they pay. Yeah, but as a percentage of overall income it’s less than the average working stiff! And Congress won’t even change the carried interest rule. You probably have no idea what that is, but it lowers the taxes of those who run hedge funds to capital gains rates, even though it’s regular compensation. I’d like that deal.

Something is brewing.

Unfortunately so many people feel powerless and are frustrated that they want a strongman to run the country. All I can tell you is to look at Russia, you want to live under Putin? That’s a strongman. You’ve got the appearance of order, but underneath you’ve got endless corruption.

Used to be we relied on musicians to speak truth. Now it’s the average citizen, which is why social media is so popular.

There’s something happening here. If only those with some power would wake up and realize there are more of us than there are corporate fat cats. Didn’t Bernie Sanders prove you could get more from individual donations online?

Thank god for these people unionizing. They want a better life, they don’t want to be dictated to, they want to have a seat at the table, at negotiations. Without the hoi polloi the whole country doesn’t work.

Yet the hoi polloi get no respect.

We’re all on the same side. At least those of us not working for the man making seven, eight or nine figures a year. We need to organize. We need to wrest our power. And now some faceless people who are sick of being wronged are.

Thank god.

“How a Dollar General Employee Went Viral on TikTok – Mary Gundel loved managing a store in Tampa, Fla. But when she detailed its challenges on social media, the company — and fellow employees — took notice.”: https://nyti.ms/3v5Cojt

Robert Scovill is a front of house engineer who has worked with everybody from Rush and Def Leppard to Tom Petty and Kenny Chesney. He did the sound for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He’s the go-to guy. Listen and you’ll hear not only how he got from there to here, but the evolution of equipment, from the desk to the flying speakers… If you’ve ever wondered what that person standing behind the gear in the middle of the arena is doing…THIS IS THE PLACE!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/robert-scovill/id1316200737?i=1000558245725

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/b963fb6e-260f-4277-a051-f599e335bc79/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-robert-scovill

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/episode/robert-scovill-202546615

Netflix isn’t in trouble, Wall Street is.

Now let me get this straight, you’ve got “professional” investors and analysts, focusing on money, not art, not the service Netflix provides, who consistently get it wrong in their own field telling us what is going to happen in another field? Hogwash. They’re barely worth listening to. They can’t predict what is going to happen in their own world, how can they predict what is going to happen with Netflix?

Netflix is the market leader with first-mover advantage, it’s got the most customers with the most product and in one quarter it doesn’t blow the doors off and not only do we hear streaming must be questioned, but that ads must be inserted…that’s like asking Apple to put every port in existence on the Mac, when Steve Jobs famously excised legacy ports and pushed the customer into a better future.

Like Reed Hastings.

Let’s go back here. Hastings said he was making Netflix a streaming company as opposed to a DVD by mail company and the public freaked out. Turned out Hastings knew more than the public. When was the last time you played a DVD? Do you even have a DVD player in the house? Hastings blinked, backed away from his statement, re-emphasized DVDs for a minute and then went full speed ahead in streaming and revolutionized TV in the process.

Let’s see… Cable subscriptions dropped. Other legacy companies eventually jumped in. And bingeing became a worldwide pastime. But somehow Netflix is in the dumper. Give me a break.

America is addicted to story. It’s a human desire. TikTok, YouTube, they fulfill a different need, except when they try to follow the same paradigm, have you heard about Snapchat Stories???

So Netflix is bedrock. It’s never going to go to zero. It’s like saying food is on the way down. Or air or water.

Well, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.

Yes, Netflix broke the price barrier. To the point where customers started thinking about what they were paying. It used to be cheap, but once it exceeded fifteen dollars…

This is psychology, this is why everything you buy ends up shy of a round number, with some dollar amount and ninety nine cents. This is why music subscription prices should not be raised. You don’t think about $9.99, but once you go a penny over that, you do. And you might cancel.

Investors have no idea what is going on with the hoi polloi. Did you see that online ad guy slated to make $835 million? And David Solomon, head of Goldman Sachs, rejiggered payments on investments so he will make more. Turns out he’s angry that he’s not making as much as the tech titans. So he’s giving himself a bigger cut, screw the investors.

Life is hard at the bottom. Which accounts for password sharing… Can I say that I share a password for Hulu? I’m sick and tired of being pecked to death by ducks. I’m paying for Netflix, Amazon, HBO…it’s an insult to pay for one more.

We solved this problem in the music business, we deliver all the music for one low price. But in visual entertainment? They took the cable model, imported it to streaming and charged just as much. This is progress? What we need is a streaming bundle, give me all the services for a lower price. But no, these nincompoops don’t want to live in the future, they want to import the past!

Bottom line… Inflation is raging. And despite the great employment numbers, look at how much most Americans are making…bupkes! When you have a nonessential service (and I know this sounds like a contradiction to what I said above, but when you’re broke only food and shelter are necessary) you don’t insult the customer by raising the price, which Netflix did. As for HBO…most people get it with their cable package. It’s just one element in the overall price. As for Disney… It’s cheaper and not only does it have children’s fare, it’s got “Star Wars.” Which is like the New York Yankees of visual content, at least the Yankees of yore. You can raise the price of gasoline and food and get away with it, but entertainment has a ceiling. And oftentimes what looks like a victory is actually a loss. Overpriced CDs with one good track paved the way for Napster. People felt so ripped-off they didn’t give a hoot about file-trading, they had no guilt. And then the RIAA started suing customers. That’s right, instead of looking to the future they tried to reassert the past. How does that look today, from a streaming world where revenues are going up and up? It’s a worldwide business now. Latin is flourishing. Whereas in the past physical world music was to a great degree Balkanized, but streaming, an advance in distribution, opened the floodgates.

Just like in visual entertainment. “Squid Game”? “Money Heist”? Those international hits are on Netflix, not the competitors. The competitors are way behind, they have a de minimis amount of product, especially Apple, tell me why people are going to pay for that service again? Most people are still getting it for free, at least it’s cheap.

And then Jason Kilar comes along and puts theatrical movies on streaming and Hollywood flips out. Hollywood is like Wall Street, they don’t even know there is cheese, never mind having it moved. Come on you investors and analysts, when was the last time you went to a movie theatre? That’s for kids!

As for ads… Don’t tarnish the service. That’s like asking Tesla to make a $20,000 car. SiriusXM doesn’t have a free tier and it does quite well, subscription separates it from the vast wasteland of terrestrial radio. It’s a psychological benefit. As for Hulu…it’s a fading service, with providers pulling their content, and to use it as an example is like listening to the wankers with no audience complaining they’re making no money from Spotify.

And one thing we’ve been taught over the last twenty years, over and over and over again, is you give the public what it wants or you pay the price. The public does not want to be spoon-fed content. What is here today is gone tomorrow in news, in every walk of life. But not in entertainment? If you don’t deliver it all now, chances are it will fade away with almost no one seeing it. Waiting week to week for product is an old model, instituted at the advent of television, waiting week to week for a show these days is like delaying orgasm for months, and no one likes that. Immediate is everything these days, but not in streaming TV? Come on!

As for week to week… Yes, it might work for big hit shows, anointed as great, but those are very few in number. Sure, we have “Ted Lasso,” but have you forgotten “The Morning Show”? Which still hasn’t recovered from being released week by week? Everyone who saw the entire first season raved, but most people didn’t get past the first episode or two, which were substandard. Don’t take the outlier and make it the paradigm for everything. Netflix was built on bingeing, you don’t want to remove that aspect. As for me, I pay for HBO but I don’t watch their hit shows, always geared to adults, I can’t bother to watch an episode at a time, never mind forgetting what happened previously. And when the series is done the buzz is over and I don’t even bother, I’m behind the curve. Whereas when the episodes are all released at once a series is a time bomb, a cult item that can be discovered any time in the future. I binged “The Americans” and loved it, I didn’t bother when it was on TV. I binged “Prisoners of War” on Hulu (which is why I borrowed the password), it was rated the best foreign series of the decade by the “New York Times,” but I didn’t bother watching the English remake “Homeland,” even though I pay for Showtime (as part of the mysterious cable bundle). Now if every season had been released at once, I would have.

I could go further, proving my point, but the truth is the business people have no idea what the youngsters do, they’re out of touch. All those week by week “hits” are adult shows, the youngsters don’t bother (except for “Star Wars”/”The Mandalorian”). This is just like music and CDs and Napster, Hollywood and Wall Street are out of touch with the customer.

Netflix must stay the course. People are still adjusting to looking for new product on the service as opposed to cable. And it could figure out how to address password sharing. Come on all you oldster analysts, don’t you remember when everybody stole HBO and other services? You just took the filter off your cable, or paid your installer to do it. Then cable went digital and that was over. If people want it bad enough they’ll pay for it. But don’t make the price too high and… Come on, college students don’t watch cable, and they’re going to forgo Netflix? Don’t be ridiculous. And maybe have a lower price for students, as long as you can prove that people are students. Young people are not too concerned about privacy, they’ll enter their digits for a deal.

And there is a ceiling to how many people will subscribe to streaming TV outlets. Eventually everybody had a smartphone, it became a mature business. But still, there is headroom for Netflix. As for the company losing 35% of its value… God, imagine if these stockpickers and analysts were publicly traded and if they didn’t make as much as they did the previous quarter their net worth would drop a concomitant amount, i.e. 35%.

And why is it no one can stumble or make a mistake at a publicly traded company? Why do profits have to keep going up and up and up?

You know who did this best? Jack Welch, at GE. He essentially cooked the books to satisfy Wall Street. And then what happened? GE cratered, it couldn’t continue. I could delineate chapter and verse but this is one story Wall Street knows. And GE Capital? Looked brilliant before the market crashed. Talk about foresight…THERE WAS NONE!

As for what to watch on Netflix…

I point you to my list from over a year ago:

“Best Series On Netflix-In Order”: https://tinyurl.com/26k9zwxx

There, that’ll keep you going for months, if not an entire year. And they’re all blue chips!

And how many hours can someone watch television anyway. So we were all home during lockdown and…

The country may be in trouble, but not Netflix… Netflix is forever!

“Bill Browder’s New Book | Lefsetz Letter. This has got to be one of the best reviews of Freezing Order yet. And for anyone wondering, I’ve never met the reviewer before in my life.”

@Billbrowder

_______________________________

From: H H Burnham

Subject: Re: The Coachella Backlash

My Coachella was 2005. A fucking lifetime ago. When Trent demanded we be on the bill right before New Order and then NIN.  Tony Wilson introduced us. It was glorious. but, of course, we had an asshole Tour Manager who gave the All Access passes to his bitch friends while my wife and 5 year-old daughter had to stay stuck backstage. But it was a blast. Ask Flea….he was bopping up and down at the side of the stage. We’ll do it next year, if they have a clue. My daughter is singing with us now – with an AAA pass around her neck. We haven’t sold out – we still fucking deliver, no compromise – no sell out. And loud.

Shit still matters, still resonates, when you do it right.

Hugo

from my damn phone

_______________________________

From: Michael Symonds

Subject: Re: John Martyn

Hey Bob,

Devoted subscriber since the mid 2000’s.  I rarely reply to your emails but thought I would in this instance.  I remember seeing John Martyn perform at the Mountford Hall in Liverpool, England around 1980.  I took my school friend, Richard, with me on the back of my motorcycle, (can’t remember if it was a Yamaha XT 500 or  Kawasaki 500 H1 “Widowmaker”).  It was just John on stage with his guitars, a copycat device and a six pack which he consumed between songs . He really was an incredible singer/guitarist and gave a wonderful performance that night which I have never forgotten.

Nine years later, I’m working for a record company in London. A dear friend asked me to help put on live music at the Chelsea Arts Club Ball.  We recruited a few members of the lighting and audio crew from the Royal Albert Hall and they created something truly amazing. I helped them install a massive lighting rig in the main room where the bar was located.  The bar remained open and staff continued to serve drinks to a large crowd of members as we struggled to raise four extremely heavy 8 feet tall uprights. If we dropped one I am sure we would have killed some of the patrons who were milling around us, seemingly completely oblivious to the danger around them.   Two of the uprights were located at each end of the bar and I was detailed to hold one steady while the crew worked to secure it. I turned my head to listen to a tech who was trying to give instructions from the balcony above us (not easy in a noisy bar).  It was then that I noticed that standing next to me was someone who I immediately recognized as John Martyn. Super nice and friendly to me, he introduced himself , then bought me a pint while I was holding on to the upright for dear life.   I remember telling him about the Liverpool show and how much I loved his music and in particular his album “One World” . Off he went to join whoever he was with and as soon as I got the all clear to let go of the secured upright, I took care of that pint.

Best wishes,

Michael

_______________________________

Subject: Re: John Martyn

Great to be reminded that Richard Griffiths was John’s agent before me (starting approx 1978) and I later became his manager (’83’-’88).

 

He was hugely talented, brilliant when on stage and delightful when sober, but with an undercurrent of anarchy. 

 

Selling out two major London venues back-to-back (5,500 people) and good Piece By Piece album sales unnerved him and he told me he’d rather go back to playing pubs and getting cash in his hand each night, with no pressures.

 

Also, I’m sure Ed Sheeran must have studied his unique (in those days) guitar technique.

 

Steve Parker.

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Subject: Re: Spotify’s Share

Hi Bob,

As an independent artist, we never see any cash from Spotify. The threshold is too high.

But the reason it’s got the leg up on Apple Music is the quality of the algorithms.  People DISCOVER so much music on Spotify.  Depending on your search, it will continue to feed you similar music that you will genuinely like.  It leads you down your chosen rabbit hole and makes you an expert in that niche.  When the whole Rogan thing hit I tried to get buy-in from our kids to change our family music plan from Spotify over to Apple.  Teenage son kicked up a huge stink.  He spends probably 12+ hours a day listening to music.  I said: “But the sound quality..!”  He said I don’t care about hi res sound, I can’t live without Spotify.  It knows what I like and I always hear the new music first, before my friends.

Have a great week!

Mara Weiss

New Zealand