At work - The Big Picture - Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/at_work.html

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

Travel / Adventure web pages

The music industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible.

"I’m simply explaining why I’m not embarrassed that I 'owe' Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn’t make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn’t lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase 'just don’t earn enough' for the word 'lose.'"

A great post from a musician's perspective on digital royalties for recording artists. Lots of insight here. The bottom line is that, moving forward, there has to be absolute and real-time transparency in royalties for artists and authors.

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47 What the fuck? I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

A rant on recouping an artist's repayment. Talks about revenue earned from digital sales.

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete

Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years.

Beautiful and eloquent letter from Michael Moore, on the day of GM's "hand over" to its new shareholders: the US government and its taxpayers.

"Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now."

Michael Moore's suggestions as to what to do with GM seem good to me.

Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame directed against record companies, artists, internet file sharing and any other theories for which a case could be made. We've read and heard about the "good old days" and how things used to be. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. After 35 years as an artist in the recording business, I feel somehow compelled, not inspired, to stand up for our fellow artists and tell that side of the story as I perceive it. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well.

Statement about the state of teh music industry

As Mellencamp states rock and roll used to spur "social movements" that were influential enough change the fabric of our society. Rock was born in cotton fields South morphed into blues became when white kids started play blues. Then came hippies then punks rap. In every case music a protest for those who felt oppressed some way. What sucks is this medium has been take over by very people it meant oppose: old rich guys. . .(who are probably fat too. .)."--via comment.

Read this later.

Mellencamp paints a hopeless picture. http://tinyurl.com/dctse6 I think he's never seen myspace. MB new release on vinyl? [from http://twitter.com/MilkBoyArdmore/statuses/1388145040]

On My Mind: The State of the Music Business - The Huffington Post

Reasons to bail out GM. Basically useful as a device to pull out whenever anyone claims that the problem is easy, and that we should "just liquidate the bastards."

by Jonathan Cohn. This is not your father's Oldsmobile we're rescuing.