Cyndi Lauper – Carey<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nendure Ashley Judd’s too long intro, and DEDICATE yourself to the performance, hang in there.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ll be positively BLOWN AWAY!\u00c2\u00a0 You’ll understand why Cyndi Lauper still has a career.\u00c2\u00a0 She turns the song into something completely different, this is live performance at its finest.\u00c2\u00a0 And isn’t it fucked up that you can SEE IT, albeit illegally, but can’t LISTEN TO IT?<\/p>\n
The excitement of YouTube, that endless surfing to see rarities, that’s the way it used to be in music, in the heyday of Napster.\u00c2\u00a0 This is what the major labels and the publishers, the rights holders, killed.\u00c2\u00a0 To the detriment of us all.<\/p>\n
The first thing I did when I got back to Santa Monica was to call Adelphia.\u00c2\u00a0 To order a cable modem.\u00c2\u00a0 And as soon as it was delivered, I downloaded the now available MACSTER, which allowed Apple people to play in the Napster world.\u00c2\u00a0 My first track?\u00c2\u00a0 Argent’s "Liar", which I always loved and couldn’t rationalize buying the whole album for.\u00c2\u00a0 And KISS’s "Lick It Up", one of the few tracks by the band I EVER liked.<\/p>\n
I’d spend whole DAYS downloading music, in print and out of print, commercially available and not.\u00c2\u00a0 After midnight, certain rarities would become available because Europeans had woken up and come online.\u00c2\u00a0 And I discovered the best time to download was on Saturday afternoon, because everybody was home doing the same thing I was.<\/p>\n
I’d go places, and that would be the discussion.\u00c2\u00a0 Did you get THIS from Napster?\u00c2\u00a0 How about THAT?<\/p>\n
I don’t have this kind of discussion anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 We talk about "American Idol", or food, but that zeal in people’s eyes when it comes to music?\u00c2\u00a0 That isn’t there.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what’s MISSING!<\/p>\n
But the problem’s been solved you say, with the iTunes Store.<\/p>\n
Well, as you can see from what I’ve written above, a great deal of the excitement never makes it to Apple’s retail environment.<\/p>\n
And Rhapsody and the newfangled Napster?\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve got a subscription, but…there’s just something different about owning things.\u00c2\u00a0 And, you’ve got the same availability problem you do with the other legal stores.<\/p>\n
Yup, we’ve turned music acquisition into a legally approved service, we’ve just killed all the excitement in the process.<\/p>\n
I’m not gonna download a hundred tracks on a Saturday afternoon from the iTunes Store.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re right, I don’t want to spend a hundred bucks.\u00c2\u00a0 To find out MOST of what I’ve downloaded I DON’T LIKE!\u00c2\u00a0 Napster changed the equation, from paying up front to paying after the fact.<\/p>\n
Wait a second, nobody paid for Napster.<\/p>\n
Bertelsmann wanted a legal service, but Warner, Universal and EMI sued them for copyright infringement.\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, the plaintiffs won (technically, settled).\u00c2\u00a0 And Capitol Records doesn’t even EXIST anymore!<\/p>\n
But what I miss most is that excitement.\u00c2\u00a0 Of going online to see what was on EVERYBODY’S HARD DRIVE!\u00c2\u00a0 You mean I wasn’t the only one who liked this?\u00c2\u00a0 Or THAT?<\/p>\n
You can’t understand if you didn’t play.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t understand if you still don’t play on the facsimile known as Limewire.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like talking about sex having never done it.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t really speak with authority until AFTER you’ve lost your virginity.<\/p>\n
The old wave players are fighting to keep an old business model.\u00c2\u00a0 Wherein you pay the equivalent of a buck a track, suddenly $1.29.\u00c2\u00a0 No more music is consumed, if they’re lucky, and so far they haven’t been, they’ll be able to replicate their CD business.\u00c2\u00a0 Growth?\u00c2\u00a0 Most people don’t even play.<\/p>\n
Yup, most people don’t buy music.\u00c2\u00a0 And many that do purchase very little.\u00c2\u00a0 But it was THESE people who were drawn in by Napster.\u00c2\u00a0 They wanted to know what was going on the same way you signed up for a MySpace account, and now FaceBook.\u00c2\u00a0 Napster was where it was happening.\u00c2\u00a0 A small fee to allow these non-players to suddenly play?\u00c2\u00a0 And get hooked?\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, music is like dope.\u00c2\u00a0 You taste a little, you want a lot.\u00c2\u00a0 You want not only the tracks, but to go to the show and buy the t-shirt.<\/p>\n
It’s like cell phones.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to lower the price and let EVERYBODY partake.<\/p>\n
But that’s not the game the rights holders are in.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re just trying to maintain what they once had.\u00c2\u00a0 Spreading the word that P2P is illegal, by suing people, they’re CONTRIBUTING to the death of the business.\u00c2\u00a0 The casual user doesn’t stop trading and start buying, he NEVER BOUGHT!\u00c2\u00a0 He just gives up, and surfs YouTube.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, it’s not worth the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
You’ve heard of winning the battle but losing the war?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what the music industry did.\u00c2\u00a0 So busy protecting its rights under an old model that the public abandoned it.\u00c2\u00a0 So, the concert business makes its nut by charging stratospheric prices for oldies acts.\u00c2\u00a0 What happens when those performers fade away forever?\u00c2\u00a0 Who’s going to sell out arenas then?\u00c2\u00a0 How much revenue are the labels going to book when the CD dies?\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no preparation for the future, no handing off to the new generation, no confrontation of reality, just smoke and mirrors telling everybody that you must respect the law, and keep things the way they used to be.<\/p>\n
Talk to an act.\u00c2\u00a0 There isn’t one alive that hasn’t gotten an e-mail from a fan telling them that their music kept them alive, kept them from committing suicide.\u00c2\u00a0 THAT’S the power of music.\u00c2\u00a0 Shouldn’t MORE people have it?\u00c2\u00a0 Shouldn’t MORE lives be saved?<\/p>\n
I was watching this TV show recounting the history of online music and I felt my adrenaline pump, I was reminded of the way things used to be.<\/p>\n
I want that excitement back.<\/p>\n
People should pay for music.\u00c2\u00a0 But should they pay the same amount for even less than the same thing?\u00c2\u00a0 Does the Net not give us any advantages?\u00c2\u00a0 With a store in EVERY house?\u00c2\u00a0 And distribution expenses SO LOW?<\/p>\n
Anything that restricts the free flow of tracks actually HURTS the business.\u00c2\u00a0 Because in an era where radio is an untrustworthy joke, it’s the PEOPLE who spread the word.\u00c2\u00a0 Monetize this behavior, don’t eviscerate it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is more music for more people. I’ve felt a strange ennui for the last couple of years.\u00c2\u00a0 The music sphere, it’s just not that exciting.\u00c2\u00a0 Could it be my age? Or the acts purveyed?\u00c2\u00a0 Possibly.\u00c2\u00a0 But I just don’t care as much as I used to.\u00c2\u00a0 The new releases come and go, nothing seems to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"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-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-d9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}