{"id":1088,"date":"2008-01-29T08:21:33","date_gmt":"2008-01-29T16:21:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/01\/29\/the-grammy-waiver\/"},"modified":"2008-01-29T08:21:33","modified_gmt":"2008-01-29T16:21:33","slug":"the-grammy-waiver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/29\/the-grammy-waiver\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grammy Waiver"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Give Neil Portnow credit for convincing the WGA that big time movie and television producers are a similar enemy to thieving consumers.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right.\u00c2\u00a0 When I see kids on the street, stealing music, I get pissed that they&#8217;ve got money for Ferraris, vacations in Bali, but THEY WON&#8217;T PAY FOR MUSIC!<\/p>\n<p>Or do we give credit to Patrick Goldstein, who chided the WGA brass for killing the Grammys, the main fund-raising event for NARAS.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t understand those WGA guys.\u00c2\u00a0 Giving waivers here and there.\u00c2\u00a0 Who IS the enemy?\u00c2\u00a0 CBS is laughing all the way to the bank.\u00c2\u00a0 The WGA just delivered a Sunday night victory to the network!<\/p>\n<p>Really, Neil Portnow almost earned his exorbitant salary here.\u00c2\u00a0 Mike Greene couldn&#8217;t have pulled this off.\u00c2\u00a0 He was more about alienating the powers-that-be than making friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, Mr. Greene did his best to make the Grammys relevant, whereas Mr. Portnow is presiding over a sinking ship.<\/p>\n<p>Music&#8217;s greatest night?<\/p>\n<p>Then music must be in shit shape.\u00c2\u00a0 Because I want no part of this smorgasbord of vapidity.<\/p>\n<p>They say it&#8217;s about representing ALL KINDS of music, that it&#8217;s a big tent.\u00c2\u00a0 But then how come only the major label priorities seem to get screen time?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to put the blame on NARAS.\u00c2\u00a0 They&#8217;re a zit on the ass of an industry that&#8217;s an elephant run amok in Alaska, totally out of its environment.\u00c2\u00a0 When music is becoming decentralized, when everybody is making it, trading it online, we get Vivendi&#8217;s Levy telling us big label business is good and that the CD has nine lives left.<\/p>\n<p>Really, Mr. Levy goes on about MARGINS!\u00c2\u00a0 What about the ten percent drop?<\/p>\n<p>MIDEM has turned into a circle jerk.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody wanting to get paid, the only people left out are those who count, the people actually listening, the customers.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know that TV exposure delivers cred.\u00c2\u00a0 And credibility is key to longevity in the twenty first century.\u00c2\u00a0 If you&#8217;re a real musician, don&#8217;t throw on a tux or a fancy gown, go down to the juke joint and PLAY!\u00c2\u00a0 Get the booze flowing, improvise a bit, try to connect with the patrons.\u00c2\u00a0 Don&#8217;t worry so much about selling as DELIVERING!<\/p>\n<p>Who are those Grammy performers playing for?\u00c2\u00a0 Bud?\u00c2\u00a0 Or the fat cats in the audience?\u00c2\u00a0 I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;re playing for music fans.\u00c2\u00a0 Because real music fans just aren&#8217;t watching.\u00c2\u00a0 Only the casual buyers, who are so out of it that they go out the next week and purchase albums that have been out for eons, which somehow they&#8217;ve never heard of, or haven&#8217;t been motivated to buy.<\/p>\n<p>Neil Portnow deserves kudos here.\u00c2\u00a0 But he&#8217;s saved a television show, not the music industry.\u00c2\u00a0 The people who will save the music industry are not going to watch this show, they&#8217;ll be too busy breaking acts that are too outside or too far from double-platinum for the string-pullers looking for this television show to pull them out of their slump.<\/p>\n<p>As for the WGA&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 Writers deserve a piece of Internet revenues.\u00c2\u00a0 But the only way they&#8217;re going to get it is to make the movie studios and TV networks hurt.\u00c2\u00a0 By constantly granting waivers, they&#8217;re just weakening their position.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Give Neil Portnow credit for convincing the WGA that big time movie and television producers are a similar enemy to thieving consumers. That&#8217;s right.\u00c2\u00a0 When I see kids on the street, stealing music, I get pissed that they&#8217;ve got money for Ferraris, vacations in Bali, but THEY WON&#8217;T PAY FOR MUSIC! Or do we give [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-hy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}