Well they tell me it’s only a dream in Rio
Nothing could be as sweet as it seems
On this very first day down

You land and you get inspired. Happened to James Taylor, it’s happening to me.

Back when car stereo was a thing, before automobiles had multiple speakers, never mind USB ports, you upgraded the system in your car. In 1985 I drove my new BMW directly to Auto Stereo Warehouse for installation of an Alpine head unit, ADS speakers in the doors and rear deck, and two giant ADS amplifiers in the trunk.

It sounded incredible. I guess you could get something better, but only if you were a competitor and dropped twenty grand, not that my system was cheap, it was the best a reasonable person could purchase. I’d hesitated, but then my shrink said that driving around in my car listening to music is what I liked to do most, for another person it was an extravagance, but for me it was a necessity!

And this was before CDs in cars, although a few years later I bought a changer for the trunk, at this point you made tapes, and my Nakamichis didn’t sound right so I went to Adray’s and bought an Aiwa and started duplicating from my vinyl. And one of the albums I copied was James Taylor’s “That’s Why I’m Here,” his last reasonable statement.

That’s right, artists burn out, I’ve got my theories. Mostly I think they believe their success will solve all their problems and when it doesn’t they can’t do it anymore. Furthermore, the more your world broadens the less your work means, it gets you out of your neighborhood and you get caught up in the trappings and it’s impossible to get back to the garden.

At the time I was out of work. I was playing golf and driving my new car. And I vividly remember driving on San Vicente, east, towards 26th, and hearing “Only A Dream In Rio.”

More than a distant land over a shining sea
More than the steaming green

These flights are not long enough. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I use their length to catch up on my reading and I got hooked on this book “The Immortalists.” If you start it don’t get turned off by the gay narrative…it expires. You see people put books down, when I buy them I finish them, I made that deal with my Kindle. And you can’t say anything without fear of backlash these days, and my point is there are still people squeamish about homosexuality and my point is don’t let it turn you off to this book.

And it’s funny how story triumphs. Too many highbrow books put plot in the rear seat. The intelligentsia pooh-pooh the fare the masses pore over, but sometimes the crowd is right.

And after typing in the lounge in Miami I walked to the plane.

And that’s when I was confronted with confusion, people disregarding the group numbers, boarding at will, bantering in Portuguese. I was just about to leave our shores.

And then the in-flight map told me I was over Key Largo and soon we were in uncharted territory. Americans go to Europe, maybe Mexico and the Caribbean, but South America is a no-no.

But the best place I’ve been in the past decade was Bogota, I felt so ALIVE!

And as the plane descended I was confronted with jungle and mountains, not what one expects when going to a city.

And the jaunt from the plane to customs was the equivalent of a 10k, but when I emerged into the sunshine it was warm and…

Different.

Tons of traffic.

And an ice cream vendor in the middle of the freeway.

And another person walking in the breakdown lane.

And rows and rows of concrete blocks that housed the poor.

And I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Actually, I’ve been to Kansas. Back when they still paid for schools.

And I’m stunned at the news on my phone. Between the teacher protests and the swooning stock market it appears we are headed for an Arab Spring of our own. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, supposedly everybody had a flat screen and was satiated, but that turned out to be untrue. First the poor and uneducated revolted and now those with more, who can see the landscape, students and teachers, are picking up the torch. Meanwhile, government and business are in free-fall, they’ve got no idea what’s going on, they thought they ruled and now they don’t.

But I’m in a foreign country where there are millions of people unconcerned with the goings-on in the United States.

And I’m always worried how I’ll be treated.

But they sent me a driver and gave me a suite. And now I’m looking out at the water, elated and confused. How can you still be so far away and be the same person?

But maybe not.

Travel changes you. In unexpected ways. You meet people, see how others live, and your world is enlarged. You thought you knew everything, now it’s apparent how little you do know. And the more you learn the more you realize you’ll never know.

But knowledge is power.

And experience leads to power.

And at the end of the day the trappings fall away and it’s just about what’s inside, who you are and where you’ve been, your ability to opine on this mystery called life.

“Only A Dream In Rio”

Spotify

YouTube

“Live Nation Rules Music Ticketing, Some Say With Threats”

A big nothingburger.

You might remember David Carr taking down Tribune management. A surgical strike revealing unknown information that could not be ignored.

This is not that.

The problem with today’s society is legs, as in longevity, as in staying power, as in staying top of mind. But in a world where movies play for weeks rather than months and this morning’s news is forgotten by tonight and Trump’s faux pas are in the rearview mirror shortly after they’re revealed if you want to make a big splash and last…

You’ve got to tell us something we don’t know.

And the NYT article failed to do this.

Furthermore, it failed to educate the public as to the realities of ticketing.

You can’t get a good ticket at face value. That’s the story in ticketing, that’s what people are concerned with. But truthfully, there have been plenty of stories about this and the public no longer cares, except for a sliver of fans who believe they should be able to buy front row tickets at face value the day before, everybody else knows it’s a game of pre-sales and connections and resales and if you don’t know this you probably only buy once a year, and should we have that much sympathy for you when we don’t protect you in other areas? Come on, if you want to buy a car and do no research into the game you’re gonna get ripped-off, same deal in tickets.

I’m not lauding this game, but this is what the business wants. Because oftentimes the only profit in the show IS the ticketing fees, promoters give the rest of the revenue to acts. The de-emphasized point in this article is Live Nation’s other revenue streams, most notably sponsorship. Live Nation rolled up a ton of festivals and sold opportunities to Madison Avenue, for this you’ve got to laud them, not excoriate them.

As for AEG… It let Live Nation buy FrontGate. Can you force a competitor to double-down? It appears not.

But the truth is concert promotion is a mature business. And the profits come from disruption, not fighting the last war.

The last disruption was festivals. It was a way for promoters to make much more money. The barrier to entry was low, but it turned out without deep pockets you oftentimes couldn’t make it, which is why LN and AEG dominate here now. If you want to solve today’s problems, innovate, don’t regulate.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster won the last war. What is the next war?

I’m not sure. Virtual reality? Private overpriced concerts? Come on, the arena experience, the default in this business, is absolutely terrible, you can see the act on the big screen but it sounds like crap. And the truth is people are willing to pay beaucoup bucks to be up close, why not let them?

Or maybe it all goes destination. Once upon a time Vegas was for oldsters. Then came Branson and now current acts play Sin City. Why not make the fans fly in as opposed to dragging the acts all over the globe, doing drugs to stay intact, to the degree they can.

And when it comes to ticketing…

Ticketmaster is notoriously built on spaghetti code. Creating the new on top of the old is not only difficult, but oftentimes impossible. Steve Jobs transitioned Apple from OS 9 to X, but that was a leap most punters are unaware of the difficulty of, it was herculean.

So…

We’re gonna see breakthroughs in ticketing. And whether Ticketmaster achieves those…

That’s a more important story than this NYT one. VCs laying down dollars to topple the edifice. Better wins, not always, but usually. Ticketmaster took down Ticketron by allowing you to pick your seat. AND paying the buildings. Could there be a new economic model? Believe me, a venue and or team will switch if they can make more money, they don’t care who appears in their building if their bottom line is better. And sure, you can fight the old war with old ways, bundling, threatening to withhold, but it’s hard to see a systematic effort by LN here, there’s no smoking gun, certainly not one that will energize the government, which is always two steps behind and a dollar short. The government always gets it wrong, with Microsoft…then again, the European Union is positively cutting edge with its privacy concerns . You think you live in the greatest country in the world, but that may be untrue.

The game changes.

Microsoft ruled with Windows and Explorer. Then Google made search that worked which generated an advertising juggernaut and then Facebook came in and stole its thunder, hell, does anybody go past the first search link anymore?

So when it comes to ticketing…

The issues are…

Facial recognition. Do you think that’s just to open your phone? If you’re buying an 8 instead of an X, you’re missing the point, and staying behind.

Security. The #1 issue in promotions today. Who cares what you book if no one comes.

Transferability.

There are a lot of issues, a lot of runway in ticketing.

But none were discussed in this article.

As for Jared Smith’s response… It was eloquent and delineates the issues better than the NYT, befitting someone who does this every day, but it got no traction:

“Ticketing, Vertical Integration and the NYT’s Recent Article”

But that doesn’t matter, because neither did the NYT article. Which didn’t tell the insiders anything they didn’t know and wasn’t sexy enough to grip the outsiders.

A failed opportunity, not even a bunt.

When you get people’s attention deliver.

Or don’t play.

Clear

Felice hates to wait.

It doesn’t bother me that much. I’m not saying I love the traffic, but I endure it, it’s payment for the privilege to live in SoCal. Then again, I tend not to drive during rush hour.

So we were at DIA last summer and Felice became intrigued by Clear. Funny how I’m not always an early-adopter. We now expect things to work right right out of the box, but I remember the old days, when you never bought a car in its first year and the products you got often didn’t function. And didn’t a company like this already go out of business?

Clear gets you into the airport faster. To be exact, you skip the I.D. check. Go straight to the conveyor belt/scan. It costs a buck seventy five a year. But we got free passes, for a while anyway, Felice saved hers, I threw mine out. I don’t sign up for anything I might cancel, a free trial, FORGET ABOUT IT! Then you’re dunned ad infinitum with e-mails forevermore. As for those people playing the credit card game, signing up and canceling for the miles… Life is too short to play the mileage game. I guess I’m my mother’s son, she’s never used a coupon in her life, saying it isn’t worth the nickel or dime, but I do remember forcing her to save Green Stamps way back when, to paste in the book, when I saw the paltry offerings, I never did this again.

You see you can concentrate on making money or grubbing at the bottom. If you’ve got a travel agent who can cash in your miles for a trip, fantastic, but otherwise it’s a full time job, I feel I’m better off working, trying to make real money.

So I didn’t sign up for Clear and Felice implored me to. Saying she wasn’t gonna wait for me in the airport.

But last summer Clear wasn’t yet in L.A., and usually we fly to EGE, only DIA when the direct flight to Vail ends. But she pushed me and pushed me, saying she had one month free, and I did it.

Actually, I had a problem with the website. Could have been user error. That’s the problem with modern life, you’re doing so much that if you try to do everything you screw up. It’s a full time job paying bills and keeping your enterprise running. In the old days, before everybody worked 24/7, mothers didn’t and they did this. And don’t go all #MeToo on me, I’m just reporting history, which cannot be changed, even though it can be analyzed.

So I e-mailed the customer service guy, the bigwig on the website, and he got back to me right away and helped me. And then I was in.

Until today, when I got to the airport.

They said you had to sign up, go through some mumbo-jumbo to complete the process.

Thank god there was a woman there to help me, although at first there wasn’t and I would have skipped the process accidentally but I asked a question… My father always told us to ask, sometimes it bugs people when I do, sometimes I feel self-conscious, but in this case the operator was away from her station and the clerk pointed her out and she helped me sign up.

Along with the woman next to me.

I need full attention. I get uptight when things get official.

And there were problems with the scans, they just couldn’t get my fingerprints right.

But worse was the iris. The operator told me to skip it, to do it next time, but I was having none of that. This was my one and only time, I didn’t want to wait again.

And then I thought I was done.

But there were questions…

The name and age of my mother. THEY HAD IT! I had to confirm it!

That’s weird.

But then they asked me where I’d gotten mail in the past couple of years other than Santa Monica and I realized they wanted Felice’s address.

HOW DID THEY KNOW ALL THIS?

As for my fingerprints, I’m not afraid of coughing them up, you have to do this to become an attorney.

But all this other info?

I get it, I get it, Cambridge Analytica used all that data to try and sway people’s opinions, and I’m unswayable, then again, I did believe that fake news during the election saying Trump thought Republicans were stupid, before I realized he was stupid, but the truth is…

The privacy ship has already sailed. We’re living in the future. And I’m still shocked.

Now I thought PreCheck was enough. But it’s not. That’s how life is, just when you climb the rung of one ladder, they put another one up on top. The PreCheck line is getting longer and longer. In this case, I bypassed the TSA agent corroborating identity and ticket and went straight to the conveyor belt and realized…I SAVED SOME TIME!

But at what cost?

Like I said, a buck seventy five. I realized that after the free trial was up I was gonna pay it. For all the b.s. about people not wanting to pay, they do so for convenience, which is why you can still steal music but it’s just easier to pay Spotify, because stealing is time-consuming and problem-ridden.

As for the airport lounge…

That’s now been broken down in two. If you get the black FIRST card, you get a free buffet and no screaming children, at least not today.

But it’s nothing like flying private.

And you wondered what they were gonna do with all that repatriated cash.

The truth is Tim Cook has been propping up the stock with buybacks for years, funnily enough borrowing the money to do so, knowing he had all that moolah overseas. But without any growth opportunities on the horizon, with no breakthrough hardware product imminent, he’s decided to break Apple’s mantra “not invented here” and purchase an outside product to leap ahead.

The truth is Steve Jobs was never against this. He stole the graphical user interface from Xerox, he bought SoundJam to make iTunes, and the self-satisfied inheritors of his legacy have yet to learn his lesson. Rumor has it Steve’s widow Laurene called Cook to complain, to inform him of the past to get on the right path, but I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere.

Now there’s precedent here. Google bought YouTube and Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram. And look at them now! You get to the point where you run out of ideas and you just purchase those of others.

And no one else can afford Netflix.

But Apple can. A hundred billion when they’ve got a multiple of that in the bank? NO PROBLEM!

So the entire landscape is rejiggered. Suddenly, Amazon has a deep-pocketed competitor in visual media. As for the TV networks, one knows they’re no match for a techie. Napster and Spotify, need I say more?

Apple tried to go it alone. But none of their shows has worked and the big investment in Witherspoon and Aniston… One show does not a network make. Your distribution pipeline needs product, which is why all the major labels make deals with the indies, they’ve got baked-in overhead. And without catalog, you’ve got a sea of red ink. You need past hits to keep you alive while you’re sorting out new.

Meanwhile, this keeps Apple from doubling-down on data, something Cook said last week the company would never do. Then again, Netflix decides what to make and promote based on what its users watch, so that’s kinda contradictory.

So where does this leave the landscape?

The studios are history. There’s nothing that says Netflix can’t make superhero flicks, and as a matter of fact they do! Can you say JESSICA JONES? The studios have backed themselves into a corner, a self-satisfied one, they thought they ruled the culture when the truth is tech does, and we’re all addicted to our mobile devices. If I hear one more director say their film was not made for viewing on an iPhone… The same damn people who shoot and edit digitally. It reminds me of the musicians bitching about streaming while they make their music on laptops and promote it for free online.

And the conglomerates??

Viacom… TOAST!

MGM? RIGHT BEHIND!

Disney? A day late and a dollar short. So busy focusing on theme parks and monopolies, they’re behind the eight ball. That’s right, Apple kills legacy ports. Gets rid of the old before their time. Whereas Disney milked ESPN to the very end, who’s gonna overpay to see these sports in the future? CERTAINLY NOT THE NEARLY NINETY MILLION PAYING CABLE SYSTEMS NOW! And Disney is based on LESS product, whereas Netflix is based on MORE! Disney is out of touch with the times, Iger should have gone years ago, this is the guy who couldn’t even pick a winning football franchise!

And then there’s HBO/Time Warner. Don’t expect the AT&T sale to go through. Furthermore, HBO’s got the wrong model too. A thin cross-section of product dribbled out. Netflix already has three times the subscribers of HBO, and it’s only going to get worse. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

So…

Amazon is gonna buy Time Warner. Yup, you heard it here first. Sure, Bezos usually doesn’t spend, but this Apple acquisition of Netflix illustrates there are only a few chairs left in this musical game, and Amazon doesn’t want to be left out.

And the new head of HBO? JIMMY IOVINE!

The truth is Iovine is being squeezed out of Apple. Hell, Cook doesn’t want to admit he made a mistake with the headphones and the needed to be rewritten software for the streaming service. Hell, you read last month’s story about Apple developing its own cans, right?

“Apple Turns Up Audio Ambition With High-End Headphones”

Beats are crap.

But “The Defiant Ones” was a huge success. And HBO needs a rainmaker. And Iovine doesn’t want to go back to a label. And everyone other than Bezos is faceless at Amazon. A perfect solution!

As for the other channels… TBS and TNT… Bezos doesn’t want them, they’re gonna be spun off, just like Parlophone in Universal’s purchase of EMI.

The good times will continue to reign for producers. With Apple and Amazon bidding up fees. But it won’t last forever, one outlet will win, and then fees will go down, just like in the movie business. But it’s an on demand all the time world we now live in and will be forevermore. Meanwhile, both Netflix and Amazon have made movies in the past, and Netflix goes day and date on its service, so expect all those movie theatres to…

Be in big trouble.

Reed Hastings will continue to run Netflix. But he’s angling for Cook’s job. Cook just might declare victory and move on, he hasn’t got a creative bone in his body. As for Jony Ive, he will only stay if he gets to redesign the Netflix logo, employing skeuomorphism, you see it really is a return to Jobstown!

As for Ted Sarandos…

He’s jumping to Spotify. That’s the secret sauce in the streaming company’s Wall Street listing. Sarandos is gonna convince the best bands to forgo the major labels and sign directly with Spotify, just as he did with visual talent at Netflix.

As for the other Silicon Valley titans…

Google is taking out more ads and billboards for YouTube Red, believing if the public just knew about the service, it would win. But there’s no truth you can only see the promotions with Google Glass.

Facebook is buying Snapchat. Snapchat is in a death spiral, shedding workers, and now Zuckerberg can get it for cheap, paying in stock, which has been devalued as a result of the Cambridge Analytica crisis. Of course, Instagram is a solid competitor to Evan Spiegel’s creation, but the ink is dry, no later than May 1st the combined entity will be known as INSTACHAT!

Microsoft? Steve Ballmer destroyed that company. Can you say NOKIA? Can you say SKYPE? Redmond is sitting on the sidelines, licking its wounds, just hoping to survive.

So it’s all about software and services, and the entity that controls them wins.

And the cable systems and channels never got the new model, believing that they’d just migrate the old one to the internet, that you’d pay for multiple services, how wrong they are. You’re gonna end up with two. Amazon, because it’s baked into Prime, and Netflix, because everybody else is there.

I know this is a lot to digest. Especially since the mainstream media was so busy producing fake news for ratings that they missed it completely. But not Trump, he’s ahead of the game, he’s signed for a news deal with Bezos, you see all that Amazon bashing was really just a negotiation, when Trump’s gone from office he’s just gonna stream his b.s. And Ivanka will be able to sell her tchotchkes on Amazon too. It’s a win-win.

Proving, once again, you’ve got to be deep inside to truly know the game.

No wonder so many Americans vote against their interests.

So all Apple television projects will now be under the banner of Netflix. Those Sony guys will be like a studio within, just like Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp:

“Report: Netflix is ‘in advanced talks’ to acquire Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp studio”

All this consolidation is good for Wall Street but bad for consumers. But what else is new.

The world is getting smaller and circling the drain at the same time.

If you’re depressed about it, pull up “13 Reasons Why.”

Or “Narcos.”

That’s right, Apple sells tools for fools.

And those fools are US!