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AzOz Blog -- October 2006by George Ziemann Oct. 7, 2006 -- Almost exactly four years ago, I converted my personal website into a vehicle for the promotion of the band I was in at the time, Hayden's Wall. We had just completed a CD, the result of a year and a half of work. I soon discovered how tightly the market and radio airplay were/are controlled by the members of the RIAA. I watched as they were actively fighting every tool which allow a band to pursue music as an occupation without a major label (mp3 files, CD burners and the Internet). In a misguided quest to actually change things, I foolishly compromised all self-promotion for the band. First, there was eBay, where I tried to solve the problem, not my problem. One guy out there in cyberspace rakes me over the coals because he counted four times that eBay tried to appease me. It took a month to determine that the underlying issue was that I had mentioned more than one artist as an influence in the text of our advertising (Solution: Put that stuff in a graphic). You may notice that the Wired story linked above has no mention of the band's name. Neither does the mention at the IEEE website (Chicken Little and the Recorded Music Crisis, Sept. 2003), the article about file-sharing at Salon, the story about the RIAA's dwindling releases at BusinessWeek, Sound and Vision magazine, the BBC or 99% of any other sites that might have given me a mention. Needless to say, this didn't do the band much good. I convinced myself that I was working on something much more important than myself and somehow it would be worth it in the end. Spent too much time and effort on it with virtually no tangible results, by any measure. Previous Content While some of the previous content of this site may have been mildly entertaining to the readers, the information I have learned in the past four years has pretty much convinced me that the 30 years I spent pursuing music prior to 2002 had pretty much been a monumental waste of time because even if you win, you still lose. If you pay off the mortgage, they still keep the house. You can only say it so many times. Musicians either get it by now or they don't. As far as peer-to-peer (Kazaa, LimeWire, etc.) issues and the lawsuits, well, my stance is still the same. It has no effect on me whatsoever, either in finding or offering music. For those who do care about p2p, the solution to the RIAA problem is to simply erase the motherfuckers, just like radio did to ASCAP in 1940. But history says it's going to take another 5-10 years before people start figuring this out. Similarly, my lengthy, rambling discourse on the RIAA has been summarized into a single page. It's all you really need to know and more space than they deserve. The recording industry has very little to do with music, it's depressing and I'm real tired of talking about it. I'm tired of thinking about it. I was happier when I didn't even know what the RIAA was. If I throw in the fact that DRM is impossible without selling a complete new generation of playback devices that ignores the existing audio CD standard, that pretty much sums up the content of the 900 or so pages that used to comprise this site. Been saying the same things over and over. If you forget, just come back and read this again. Or try the WayBack Machine. Future Content The idea four years ago was to make AzOz (a name chosen by virtue of only having four letters when you could still get one like that) a music-related site. Why? Because I am a musician. So are all of my friends (and most of my enemies, come to think of it). Some of them made CDs, too. I intended to talk about things like sound reinforcement, live sound, engineering, musicians, digital recording, more independent acts you haven't heard, music history, music theory, my personal adventures in music, gear and gigs, clubs and concerts, photos and tunes. I should have done that. I think I'll try again. Oct. 10, 2006 -- Item One: The Roger Waters story (in Concert Scrapbook) does not exactly explain my extreme reaction afterward. This may not either, but I'll give it a shot without being excessively wordy. I would like to think that the people who would attend a Roger Waters/Pink Floyd show would be the kind of people I would want for an audience, either musically or through my writing. I walked away going, "This is the audience?" This site needed restructuring anyway. The old links would still have been broken. Item Two: There is one more primary section of the site that I'm going to initiate, some sort of history of music. This will bring back some of the previous information in a more organized, less redundant manner. Oct. 11, 2006 -- Article about Jack Nicholson says he had surgery last week to remove a stone in his saliva gland. I had one of those once. About the size of a TicTac. Makes the side of your face swell up and really, really hurts as the pressure builds up. After an hour in the emergency room, I heard my doctor on the phone saying, "I've talked to 40 people and no one has a clue what's wrong with this guy." Jack got surgery. I got stuck in a hospital room for several days to wait and see if it would come out on its own or my head would blow up. I'm betting he also did not have an obviously transsexual nurse named Roberta bring morphine in the middle of the night. But I could be wrong about that last part. Oct. 13, 2006 -- Reinstated Father Brennan's tunes in the Music section. Working on a page of copyright basics. Oct. 14 -- The IFPI (International Freakin' Pirates Inquisition) finally gets all their numbers totalled from June, revealing that the fewer records they sell, the longer it takes them to add it up. Sales are down, says the cartel, based on fictional retail prices that no one pays. And they haven't got those returns back from Tower Records yet. -- In August, a manufacturer's site called utube.com (for the Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp., of Toledo, Ohio) received 68 million "hits" on its website by dumbasses looking for YouTube.com. It got worse after that, culminating in the site's shutdown following YouTube's buyout by Google. By now, half the population of the United States has made this blunder, or a smaller proportion made the same mistake multiple times. I don't know which is worse. Either way, that's a lot of stupid. Oct. 17 -- Even if you describe yourself as a "laid-back country rock" act, if you're ever playing in Houston and a cop tells you "Stop" in the middle of a song, do not ask "Why?" because the answer is, "I'm going to tazer you and some of the audience." Oct. 21 -- Relevant information about payola is back, with the recent announcement that CBS Radio settled with Eliot Spitzer for $2 million. The FCC's formal investigation continues, maybe. More tunes -- Starting converting the Hayden's Wall tunes to 96k using the ProTools mp3 encoder. I just loaded the completed mixes as stereo pairs, then bounced them back out as mp3s. After only doing four so far, it seems like the 96k versions from ProTools sound better than a 128k version ripped with iTunes software, at least if you're patient enough to use the "best quality, slowest" setting. Eagles and WalMart -- Industry pundits Moses Avalon and Bob Lefsetz both dedicate their recent newsletter to the Eagles' upcoming new CD, which is to be on sale exclusively at WalMart for the first month or two. They would both like you to know that nobody cares about a new Eagles CD, especially them, and that's why they have to write about it at length. Lefsetz, who usually makes a lot of sense, is spinning hard on this one.
The thing is, the new Eagles album will be an independent release, their contract with Elektra (Warner) having expired. Our writer friends seem to really be more concerned that the Eagles (and Don Henley specifically) have committed some sort of moral sin by making a deal with WalMart for distribution, as opposed to another deal with Edgar Bronfman's cohorts at Warner Music or Elektra. WalMart wants to sell CDs for $9.97. In fact, I believe they're already doing it, even though the labels currently charge $12 wholesale. By taking the record label out of the equation, both the Eagles and WalMart will make more money and the consumer cost for a CD will be lower. Yeah, I know, WalMart doesn't pay people what they deserve. Neither does Warner Music. This way, at least one of them doesn't get paid and prices go down. Two out of three... Oct. 23 -- Indie Band to check out -- Michael Franti and Spearhead. Epitaph Records. Reggae rock and good enough to open for U2. Article from The Guardian about Franti.
I like Lewis Black's idea for a new, improved way to pick the president, which could be localized for things like governors and senators. Every four years, the winner of American Idol is blindfolded and throws a dart at a map of the United States. Wherever the dart hits, you fly over in an airplane and toss out a monkey with a parachute. After the monkey lands on the ground, the first person whose hand it touches is the president. If you think that's funny, maybe you missed that our president never said that we will "stay the course," even when that's exactly what he said. So if that's what you heard, it's not what he said. Or at least it's not what he meant when he didn't say it, even if he did. (Follow-up: Bush explained that "stay the course" really means "constantly adjusting the tactics," which is why he never said it.) The parachuting monkey idea needs some PR. Oct. 24 -- For those that care, you may have noticed that some of the old topics are now reappearing, even though the content of each topic is limited. Old content that is still relevant will be drawn back into the appropriate topic or a new one will appear. In November, I'll move the blog to the front page and use this page as an index for previous months. Oct. 25 -- Having raked the worst audience ever over the coals, it's only fair to acknowledge the best audience ever. Oct. 27 -- Okay, maybe I won't move the blog to the front page. Oct. 28 -- Yuki Noguchi (what a cool name!) at the Washington Post says that MySpace is so last year, which leads me to believe that the whole Web 2.0 social networking thing still has a few kinks to be worked out, not to mention mass murderers. Jehovah's Witness lady came to our door this morning and gave us a pamphlet titled, "The End of False Religion Is Near!" So I don't expect she'll be coming back. My 10-year-old daughter, Mac, went to a haunted house with other kids from the Boys and Girls Club. They went to the Festival of Fear and, even though she had already seen Killer Klowns from Outer Space, she went into the clown funhouse only to hurt herself (just a scratch) trying to get the hell out. Those clowns scared the crap out of her. We won't be going to the circus any time soon. Oct. 29 -- There's a story over at Slashdot today about the "evolution of html". Doing web pages is incredibly simple. Any musicians need help with their site? Free advice. Cheap hourly rate to do it for you. Oct. 31 -- From Fark: "MySpace, the site that couldn't figure out how to match up a list of known child predators using real names and locations to their database, to implement advanced audio fingerprinting technology to foil illegal music uploads". Think about that for 30 seconds or so. |
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Political
bullshit -- Yes, that
scary time of year is upon us, as we are deluged with the horror
and fright of political ads every two minutes, reminding me that
not one of the candidates in the Arizona races represents me.
The current system is so screwed up that the people on the ballot
always seem to be the last and next-to-last people you would
want doing the job. I'll be voting for Alice Cooper for U.S.
Senator. The Gin Blossoms will get my vote for US congressional
representative. The whole damn band.