“TV Ratings: Oscars Fall to All-Time Lows”

I didn’t watch.

Who needs to see a throng of self-important lefties revel in their fabulousness while they promote their fatuous work?

Yes folks, movies have become baseball in a land of football that is being challenged by soccer.

In other words, the theatrical experience doesn’t hold a candle to the home/flat screen one and series are much more appealing than two hour snoozefests and shoot-em-ups.

So it’s not only the paywall of theatres, it’s also the form, it doesn’t fit today’s world where if you’re into something, you want to go deep, if you stop and smell the coffee you don’t want a cup, but the whole pot.

Used to be the Oscars were a religious experience, at least for me. I’d gather with friends in front of the screen, which was much smaller back then, and there would be no talking as we watched the shapers of culture vie for victory, even though Woody Allen refused to attend because he believes competition in the arts is pointless, which is true, but everything needs to be quantified in today’s society, no matter how fallacious the judging.

Movies drove the culture. We wanted insight into those in front of the camera and behind. We learned the lingo. We knew the studio heads (quick, name one today!) and had to go to the theatre not only for the experience, but in order to participate in conversation at parties.

But then the producers went solely for the bucks and everybody we knew stopped going and we did too. Talk to friends, either they go all the time or not at all. I’m in the latter category, it just takes too much time, and I hate the audience and the timing…I want to watch when I want to watch, we live in an on-demand culture, that’s what streaming is all about!

As for rallying around the set with your brethren…

We call that the Super Bowl. And it’s about the ads and the ability to discuss the halftime presentation more than the game, if the game is good it’s a bonus. The Super Bowl is now a national holiday, if you’re not invited to a party you feel like a loser.

But the mainstream media did not get the memo that things have changed. The L.A. “Times” has its inane “Envelope” section, puff pieces published to satisfy clients that their publicists are doing the work.

And then there are the endless ads in both the aforementioned L.A. “Times” and “New York Times.” Who are these for? Oh, I get it, oldsters who still get the physical newspaper, the same ones who won’t vote for women and people of color.

Not that I think sexism or racism or even politics are the reasons people don’t watch, but the fact that THEY HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIES!

There, that’s the number one problem. Believe me, if they premiered a new movie every Friday night on a streaming service I’d watch it, because I’d want to be part of the conversation, feel like I belong in a culture where we’re all on our own avenue.

That’s why awards show ratings are going down, they’re out of time, just like variety shows and westerns. We don’t want to be glued to the screen in an era where we avoid commercials at all costs, come on, you use an ad-blocker don’t you? You should, your web pages will load that much faster! And Amazon is so cluttered with ads you can’t even find what you’re looking for anymore. Never mind Google, with all its paid ads on top.

But ain’t that America, where you sell, sell, sell.

But movies used to be different. Before it was all about the tie-ins, the sponsorships, the merch. When you oversell you deplete desire.

And the content in the awards shows? People with personal trainers and plastic surgery acting like everything they say is so important while they break for a musical number almost no one has heard to fill in the broadcast.

Want me to watch? Make it like the original Academy Awards, just the awards, twenty minutes, half hour top. I’d watch that, but I’m not dedicating an evening only to find out I consumed empty calories and want all that time back.

And it’s true that if anything happens, we’ll find out about it immediately online, if we care, and we can consume the entire show in a matter of minutes, if that long. Kinda like SNL.

But no one wants to mess with the formula, no one wants to blow the show up.

Or the movie business itself, other than Netflix, which can’t stop being excoriated by the wankers who produce and attend this fiasco.

Netflix will make your movie. Netflix will green light you. Because that’s the agreement they have with their audience, you pay us and we make a cornucopia of new stuff. And they know it’s about mass and niche. As in you need a mass of subscribers but many verticals of product. If they only made supernatural and superhero programming, I’d unsubscribe, but I can watch “Narcos” (coming back this week!) and “Money Heist” and a bunch of personal stuff I dig, like the films of the Duplass brothers, who are at least trying to reflect reality, where we all reside the last time I checked.

Oh, there’s a business in making two-dimensional dreck for international consumption by youngsters and nitwits, but it’s kinda like terrestrial radio, it gets the biggest slice of an ever-decreasing pie. So, these Marvel movies make more than any other ones, but most of us never bother to go to the movies anymore, we’ve been ignored and we checked out.

And don’t tell me about the grosses… If you want to talk about grosses, let’s talk video games, which can be a billion in a matter of days!

Everyone thinks their world is forever.

And long after the innovators are deceased, people without the same drive or understanding prop up the carcass until it dies. Yup, everything dies. Thomas Cook, Atari, 3-D…everything gigantic is a fad these days, everybody stops to look at the train-wreck and then they mash the pedal and continue to drive on by.

The record labels fought the internet for a decade.

The book business refuses to acknowledge the internet exists. They got prices raised on e-books and sales dropped but piracy has now gone through the roof! They’re repeating the music business debacle twenty years later, they thought they were immune when the truth is they were just ignorant: scroll down to

“Book pirates are like termites: harmless as individuals, devastating in groups.”

The movie business killed its essence when money became more important than story, they hollowed out the essence to the point where most people no longer care.

Furthermore, these big swinging dicks, and most do have dicks, refuse to play in the real marketplace, streaming television, where you find out instantly whether people want to watch your product or not. Just like oldsters decry music streaming, where it’s not that you’re getting screwed on payments, but just that most people don’t want to listen to your music!

But the great thing about life is it keeps on rolling along, and the will of the people always wins, especially in an era where the tools of construction have been commoditized, where you can create and market on a shoestring. Sure, a lot of dreck has been produced, but not all of it is junk. When you try to narrow the pipe, the mole pops up elsewhere, in a world where there’s endless shelf space and instant access to everything.

Come on, if the movies were launched on streaming services day and date they once again would be topics of discussion by everybody. But who wants to pay to see “Parasite” today, when everybody who went previously will put you down.

And how can you trust an industry that lauds “The Irishman“? We were subjected to endless stories about its production, its story, its actors, and the final product smells like a turd, overlong with little arc, like a typical Scorsese pic. But no, Marty is a genius, he cannot be crapped on. The insiders and critics are just like those guys in skinny jeans who used to tell you your music was crap and you had to listen to theirs. Now the hoi polloi no longer care, and speaking of the general public, I can’t find a single person who thought “The Irishman” was great, and when ballots were secret, the truth came out, it won no awards.

Yup, impeachment came and went nearly instantly, but we had to hear about the turgid “Irishman” for years, intensely for the last half of 2019 until up to now. No wonder the mainstream media is losing credibility.

Now I used to wait for these flicks to hit the flat screen. But then I found out it was too late, there was other stuff to watch. More people have talked to me about “Chernobyl” and “Succession” than any flick in a theatre this year, and I haven’t even made it around to them, right now I’m into the second season of “Trapped” on Amazon, an Icelandic noir/mystery series that is too slow for the fast and furious movie theatre but plays just right on the flat screen.

I’m inundated with suggestions. And when something is good, I can dig my teeth in deep, sometimes seven or eight seasons! I truly get to know the characters. “Spiral” is better than any movie I’ve seen in years.

But in today’s America you can never go backward, you can never lose a thing you’ve got, which is why the left wing elites are agitating for Bloomberg, because he’s one of them. Bernie? He’ll blow it all up, they’ll pay more money, they’ll have to get in the pit with the rest of us, fighting it out.

But it won’t happen in a movie theatre and it won’t happen watching the Oscars, because they’re HISTORY!

This is what happens when CEOs have no investment in the company, never mind any firsthand knowledge or experience.

Dick Parsons blew out Warner Music for $2.6 billion, supposedly Jeff Bewkes was behind the divestment, and where is Bewkes now? OUT OF A JOB!

The music business gets no respect. If Bewkes knew his corporate history, he’d be aware that the Warner Music Group BUILT the Warner cable system. That’s how ginormous the profits were. That’s why Steve Ross compensated executives like Mo Ostin so handsomely, they were running cash cows!

And it only got better. The seventies rock boom was followed by the MTV era, wherein acts became worldwide superstars and then revenue was hoovered up with the sale of overpriced CDs.

But no, there’s no future in music!

So Napster comes along and those who run the major labels are not tech-savvy, and since the business is run by the equivalent of Mafia families they believe they can hold back the future, never mind keep royalties opaque. So what do they do? SUE! First Napster, then their customers themselves! If the product they were releasing was not so desirable they’d have gone out of business.

And then Warner itself refused to license Spotify in America, delaying the launch of the service, allowing for YouTube to become the de facto streaming service, something the industry has regretted ever since, even though it forgets this history and blames the problem entirely on the Google company.

But today, YouTube has been superseded by paid streaming services.

And who do we have to thank for this? DANIEL EK!

Oh, the guy you hate because he’s a billionaire today.

But he wasn’t always.

Ek put in the hard work, jawboning executives, sleeping in the back of planes while he flew all over the world to convince them that he had the solution to piracy. AND HE DID! With his free tier. Funny that the business didn’t immediately get this, because it’s the dope paradigm, give ’em a taste and get ’em hooked and then charge them, and the music industry, at least its artists, run on dope, even to this day, can you say JUICE WRLD?

But executives can’t control music. It’s not like movies and TV, where the execs believe they’re the big swinging dicks who have input, can change the art itself, if you want to call it “art.” No, music is best when it’s created hands-off. Which is how the majors lost control of new music production in the past decade. Creators posted their tunes on Soundcloud, majors just cherry-picked that with traction. Proving once again that the majors are inept. In a world where more people are making music and more genres are flourishing they only want to release Top Forty stuff, hip-hop and pop, ignoring the rest.

But they didn’t used to.

Which is why they have these huge catalogs that will generate revenue forever, or at least until their copyrights expire, which never seems to happen. Physical had inherent limitations, you had to manufacture, ship and stores had to stock, and there was no way a retailer could carry all titles, even if they were in print, they just did not have enough room.

So streaming comes along and you can listen to everything.

The marginal artists propped up by the old system, sucking at the tit of the label, back when the goal was to just get a record deal, don’t like this, because it turns out people just don’t want to listen to their music that much. But those with streams…they’re making bank, more than in the old days, and you can do it with one track! Yup, the album became superfluous, which is one of the reasons writers are crying, they used to get paid for all those filler tracks on a CD, but it turns out no one wants to listen to those online, so there’s no bucks.

And, of course, the writers/publishers should get a bigger share of the streaming pie, but the labels are not coughing up any points. As for the streaming services themselves, ignorant oldsters consider them the devil, not knowing the lion’s share of the revenue goes to rights holders. And streaming music does not scale, the more you take in, the more you have to pay out. So, if an artist is not getting paid, no one is listening to their tunes or they have a heinous deal with their label or both.

Meanwhile, streaming makes available all tunes everywhere. So, your career is not limited to where radio plays you. Word spreads online, where listeners can hear your tunes instantly.

But it gets even better. Once recorded music revenue went down, acts scrounged to get paid, and finally they raised the price of concert tickets to fair market value and got rich. Furthermore, there were more opportunities in branding, with sponsorship and privates and clothing and perfume lines.

And since the labels were greedy and the acts ignorant these companies took a share of said touring revenue and ancillaries, helping their bottom line.

So it’s no surprise that Warner Music is burgeoning. It could stop creating new music and still be worth many more billions than Time Warner sold it for.

Meanwhile, music is the hottest artistic medium extant. It speaks to people’s souls, they need to listen constantly, they can’t do without it. And while the film business struggles to get people to leave home and go to the theatre, with streaming and smartphones you can take your music EVERYWHERE!

Sure, the music itself is not in its best space. But it will only get better. As terrestrial radio, with its endless commercials and dated material, becomes ever less important and the media focuses on more than the streaming hits. Hell, look at concert grosses, people want to see much more than the Spotify Top 50, and in a world where everything’s digital, people are looking for real life experiences, which concerts and festivals deliver to a “t.”

What did that old song say, “the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades”?

This ain’t no dotcom company, this ain’t no VC-funded fluke, music is forever. I can’t tell you whether investing will be profitable because we don’t know what the stock will be priced at, but one thing is for sure, Warner Music will never go down to zero.

So, once again, the music survives. All the naysayers were wrong. They said if music was free no one would make it, but the problem today is too many people are making music, the scene is chaotic. They said no one would pay for music, but Spotify has over a hundred million paying subscribers alone.

But music still gets no respect.

But music, unlike so many art forms and enterprises, is forever.

You’ve just got to believe.

Founder and CEO of Primary Wave Music, Larry Mestel started out as a CPA and shortly thereafter was drafted by a client to Island Records, and after stints at Arista and Virgin he quit to start Primary Wave, a new wave publishing company with its own marketing department. Listen to hear how Larry and Primary Wave are breaking norms.

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You don’t analyze the past to see how the future will be disrupted.

The music business was the canary in the coal mine for digital disruption. First the industry didn’t believe it, then it said it didn’t make sense, then it tried to stop it and finally, after nearly a decade, it accepted it. And even though older customers have adopted the new technologies, many oldster artists have not, yearning for the days of yore, labeling streaming the devil, staying on the sidelines to their detriment.

This is what is happening in politics right now. So-called experts are looking at statistical models, they’re looking at history to predict the future, and they’re getting it wrong.

Disruption usually comes from the uninitiated, the ignorant, those who if they knew better wouldn’t even begin.

And the late Clayton Christensen said the new product is always cheap and shoddy at first, but over time it improves and takes over the old.

Can you say Bernie Sanders?

In 2016 they said it was impossible. No one wanted a Democratic Socialist. Then the DNC tried to stop him, to their detriment, it hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and turned off Sanders supporters. And now, four years later, these outsiders, the so-called “Bernie Bros,” are organized and triumphing and the usual suspects just cannot believe it, they want to stop it, they believe Bloomberg is their hope, not knowing it isn’t about Bernie himself, but his ideas.

Napster was sued out of business.

KaZaA burst on to the scene without a centralized database, which killed Napster legally.

After P2P sites we got digital lockers.

Sure, people wanted free music. But at least they wanted the music! Think about how many products you can’t even give away, because there’s no desire.

And this great desire for the music and easy and cheap distribution suddenly made acts famous, able to tour, where they could not before. Suddenly marketing was online instead of on radio and in print. An alternative system was being built that many in the industry still don’t understand and accept as radio and print mean ever less. Just because radio has the largest market share, the greatest number of ears, that does not mean it will dominate forever. Look at network television, with its declining ratings, based on an advertising model. It’s being creamed by pay cable and streaming. And Amazon has bundled streaming with shipping and new streaming companies are burgeoning, did you see the Disney+ numbers, and people are cutting the cord and…

As for Disney+’s numbers, the truth is people will pay if it’s a fair offering. Disney+ is $6.99 a month, streaming music services like Spotify are $9.99.

And streaming music sites are ahead of visual streaming sites. You get ALL the product for your $9.99. There are so many candidates today because you can get the word out online. Hell, the Democrats blame their loss in 2016 on what happened online. The internet fractures society, creates deep niches, few dominate, but when it impacts everybody, one person can rise above, that’s the essence of Trump.

And that’s what the Democrats want to avoid with Bernie. They want someone famous in the old world not the new. They want someone who is talked about on TV shows and in the newspaper as opposed to those talked about online. They want candidates who take money from the usual suspects, i.e. corporations and billionaires, as opposed to the general public. They want CONTROL!

But they don’t realize disruption comes with chaos. And you’re never going back, best to ride the wave and see where it takes you as you try to make sense of it all.

And now even the disrupted are being disrupted. That’s what’s happening with Facebook and Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg denied there was a problem with false advertising on his site. He thought if he ignored it it would go away. But the public was up in arms. He thinks his sites are too big, he refuses to take meaningful action. Meanwhile, Twitter is trying but it’s playing Whac-A-Mole. Is there a new site in the offing that eliminates this problem, these falsehoods?

The truth is we are no longer living in the pre-globalization era. Just like the public thought CDs were overpriced, with one good track amongst the dozen, people are pissed that the elites got rich while they did not. Kinda like the stock market…sure it’s good, but how many people actually own stock?

And we no longer live in the pre-internet era. Now word can spread everywhere, even though today it’s hard to gain eyeballs and information can be inaccurate.

And then there are bozos like the failing Shadow, which created the Iowa app.

Shadow was killed by market forces, it was resuscitated by an infusion by Acronym. And isn’t it funny that Shadow was started by a Hillary Clinton staffer? This is no different from all the non-techies who took VC money to create apps and products that were nonstarters, or failures like Pets.com. Johnny-come-latelies always fail. Because they don’t understand what disruption is about, they just want some of that money.

Kinda like Hollywood. Everybody with any cash is invested in tech products. Better to stay in your area of expertise, employ your own skills to triumph. Don’t create an incubator, double-down on your assets, do what you do best, create new products, like Baby Yoda with Disney+.

The news media was reasonably accurate when other industries were disrupted. But now that it itself is being disrupted it keeps complaining and getting it wrong.

Newspapers must survive, just like the album. All news online is fake. You need pros to tell you what to think.

And then stories ignored by the big boys were broken online and blogs push the needle and what do the newspapers and TV keep doing? Featuring and promoting the power players of yore while they denigrate those of today and tomorrow if they acknowledge them at all.

“The New York Times” is marginalizing itself every day. With its anti-Bernie screeds and drivel like today’s Thomas Edsall piece

If Bernie Wins, Where Will He Take the Democratic Party?

quoting all the old “experts” on what is happening, quoting old models that have nothing to do with today (kinda like the “Billboard” charts, trying to satiate the major labels it keeps adjusting its model into irrelevancy).

Bob Dylan had it right over fifty years ago. He said “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.”

But that was back when music drove the culture and it was all about being the other and pushing the envelope while you poked the establishment.

Then again, the sixties were the last time the youth revolted.

The little girls understood.

But their parents did not.

And today those kids are the parents and they too have no clue.