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Death of the Recorded Music Industry (not a minute too soon)

The RIAA stopped suing people for sharing music, they announced last week. My own belief is that selling recorded music to profit some large corporation, because only they can get musicians heard has died the death of a thousand cuts. It’s the mimeograph trying to hold off the World Wide Web. Not going to happen.

The Grateful Dead have long had a great business mode; they encouraged fans to record show and share them. I remember hearing Jerry say, “We’re done with the music. You can have it.” Want to make a living at it? Tour. And sell online for those who appreciate liner notes, or as MP3s but for God’s sake, why make Sony or Columbia or the rest of the riaats, I mean rats, get all the cheese?

The history of the treatment of musicians by these people is legendary. Most musicians signing to a major label lost the rights to their own works, and often most of the profits. There is a plethora of songs and stories by artists complaining about their labels, most famously John Fogerty with Vanz Kant Danz (but he’ll steal your money, watch him or he’ll rob you blind). So what’s the new model? Here’s an idea.

My current favorite singer songwriter is Ingrid Michaelson, who embodies getting music heard and spread using new technologies and techniques like Barack Obama did. Maybe I’m out of touch, but it looks to me like an entirely new paradigm. She started out on MySpace and built a community of fans and ended up touring. I’m thinking about how a local talent with some music out there could use this to expand the base and get heard.

Ingrid’s latest effort, “Be OK” has an extremely spare orchestration, entirely acoustic and minimal. Her previous works had big scores and lots of instruments and were great fun, but this one is so much more intimate. And I suspect, less expensive to record and mix. With a little work, why couldn’t an artist record his or her own tunes and mix them with GarageBand or equivalent? Other than a decent mike (we’re talking performers here; you got the mike, okay?) it seems it couldn’t be that hard to actually home produce a dozen cuts for a CD.

Here’s the trick. When it becomes viable for an artist to record an album at home at very little expense (except time), does that mean we could have an entirely democratic world of music? Has it already happened, and I’m just clueless?

As both of my readers know, I’m very concerned with social justice, which will be even more important as we slide into the decade long Great Depression 2. Here’s a chance for artists to kill two birds and get stoned. Ingrid’s latest CD used a couple of engaging, cheap and effective methods available to anyone. First, the profits from the single, “Be OK”, are being donated to the fight against breast cancer. I think food banks would be a very appropriate recipient these days.

The beauty is that once you’re being charitable, much less chutzpah is required. For the very inexpensively created album, a singer who wants to reach a wider audience could put the songs on the net and either turn over all the profits to a charitable organization or from the one song. Radiohead released an album online last year where the customer got to choose the price. Especially when it’s for a good cause, I think people would pay a fair price.

The other nice thing about an album doing good is that you can tap into the national and international networks these outlets tend to belong to. As a longtime fundraiser and donor I call tell, these people are connected.

Being for a good cause also makes it easier to get local press, TV coverage or at least a spot on local NPR. Volunteering with the group couldn’t hurt. You’d know who does what for who, and how to get the national arm to highlight you. This just might be the new paradigm. Every third or fourth album for a good cause, and tour if you need to make money.

This might be a dumb idea, but usually when people say my idea is dumb, I’m about to make a lot of money.

Merry Christmas!

Gay Marriage and the Christians

I’m borrowing somewhat from a post on The Huffington Post, but the hypocrisy of cherry picking the Bible is a real pet peeve of mine and I never get a straight answer, in spite of asking friends, family and strangers who are Christians. The whole idea of defending marriage from gays and lesbians seems especially silly when the Bible more forcefully rejects divorced heterosexuals. Rush Limbaugh has been divorced three times from women. My friend David has been with Bill for 15 years and together they are raising two nice kids.

Which one is harming the family and marriage?

There are way too many divorced Christians for anyone of stature in the church to stand up and point this out. Because there are so many inconsistencies in the “pick and choose what’s a sin” meme, I’m going to stick to this one till I get an answer. Why don’t we execute heterosexual adulterers? The Bible demands it.

What am I missing?

1. Every word of the Bible is true (as Mike Huckabee stated).

2. We are ordered in the Bible by God to kill adulterers.

3. Anybody feel up to explaining to me why Christians don’t propose the death penalty for adultery?

And by the way, any answer involving “it’s a mystery” needs to turn on itself and ask whether marriage isn’t a mystery as well. Right out of the box, anytime a lot of things remain “mysteries”, you might want to think long and hard about attacking others. How about these apparent truths:

Judge not that you be not judged.
Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

That’s just off the top of my head, but doesn’t a theme seem be there?

Here’s the result of a search for “homosexuality” in the NIV Bible:

9Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Okay, that’s it. That verse is the only hit. Period. In the entire Bible. Same search on “poor” gets 178 hits. Divorce? 33. Unless we ban drunks, adulterers, greedheads, slanderers and swindlers from marrying, we are hypocrites. And Jesus didn’t even say it. It was Paul. Who curiously didn’t think much of any kind of marriage.

Whatever. I’d love to have a talk with an actual Christian who can explain who gets to decide what is real law and what is just some funny history. Otherwise, the entire religion remains an absurd joke.

Social interaction placebo

For the last twelve years, I’ve avoided punching a time clock, or actually any other form of organized employment other than the occasional board meeting. I’m a social animal, and really need interaction with other people. My wife is a fine and lovely companion, but we have little to argue about, and I already know most of her opinions. Social interaction is about the only thing I miss about work. During the whole Monica thing, I was dying for a water cooler to hang near and hear what people were saying, but it wasn’t happening.

Then there’s FaceBook. I’ve sort of casually drifted into it, but I realized it’s a replacement for the water cooler. Email is sort of direct and almost intrusive compared to just dropping a line on what’s up. So it’s like work, without the work, and only with people you like. Interesting.

Fifteen years ago, I was flying around the world, trying to convince people that this internet thing was worthwhile, and would change our live in huge ways; the democratization of the media, an end to TV induced “post literacy”, new social venues for oddballs and specialized interests and a whole world of advantages.

The irony is that all of it has come to be and yet I’m still just stumbling onto this stuff I was forecasting so long ago. My nephews and nieces get huge chuckles watching Uncle Jeff stumble through getting the iPhone or Mac to do what I want, never mind the Tivo or satellite, considering I was there at the birth of all this stuff.

Anyway, I’m not sure how it makes money, but FaceBook is yet another amazing example of how cool interconnectivity is. I wish I could get in touch with the thousands of dismissive skeptics who told me I was nuts and that this internet thing would never catch on. In 1993, I tried to help raise venture capital money for what is now the largest ISP in the world (currently part of Verizon) at a valuation of eight million dollars and got no takers. Eight million. Funny how thing turn out.

Manufacturing Meltdown

So Chrysler is shutting down all of its’ plants for a month. Toyota halted construction work on a plant in Mississippi that was to make Priuses. This stuff is all interconnected, and the bad times are here when debt levels, corporate, government and personal, are at all time highs. You can’t live off of negative savings. It just doesn’t work. Honestly. Do the math.

So now we’ve got a few hundred thousand more unemployed, at least for now, because Congressional Republicans and the White House had no problem with three quarters of a trillion dollars for banks, but balked at a fifteen billion dollar loan to save jobs. Um, I don’t get it. Two percent of what the banks got (with no obvious benefit I can see to anyone) to save, or at least extend millions of jobs is a problem.

Except for a very few cases, like the workers sitting in at the factory in Chicago, there doesn’t seem to be much organized action by normal citizens yet. Yet.

We leave for Florida next Saturday, and it’s always interesting to read the local press as we pass through small town America. The last two years, the big change we noticed was the unbelievable number of check cashing/payday loan outlets. In one small town in Virginia, Great Bridge, I counted 22 of them just on the main drag.

The real estate sections of small town newspapers are interesting insights into the realities of the local markets. Unfortunately, while the newspapers are dying a death of a thousand cuts, they do a less than stellar job covering their two biggest sources of revenue, the auto industry and real estate. Try googling “time to buy is now” and see how many sad messages like this are out there. It’s sad, but nobody gets paid to bear bad news.

Made Off

I was feeling all superior over the Bernie Madoff scandal, and would mention to any available ear what sheep people were to invest in something so obviously flawed. Today, I got an email from my money guys showing that I was out $42,000 to the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Doh! Perhaps a little modesty next time, you think?

Unsubscribe

I’ve had an AOL account for nearly 20 years, and over time I’ve ended up on a seemingly endless series of subscription and spam list. Back in my day, you never responded to these things, because it simply proved it was a valid account and the volume of spam increased. Recently I realized fully 90% of my inbox contained crap I didn’t want. I mentioned it to Liz, and she said she’d been unsubscribing, and it seemed to be working.

Lo and behold, there is an unsubscribe button on most of these mailings. The trick is finding it. The graphics show in real scale and color the headline, and the unsubscribe button. One is obviously the first thing you see and the other, the last.

Bonus round- when you unsubscribe, they send you a confirming email, sort of a last slap in the face. Who knew?

Of Barbers and Haircuts

In the year or two that prices for stocks and houses have been cratering, have you noticed they are always forecast to improve in a few months? It’s been years. Why do we keep listening to the experts when they keep being wrong? Ever notice the experts who offer these forecast for stock recovery work with what used to be investment banks? Notice that the folks saying the time to buy a “home” is now are generally builders and realtors? (Didn’t it used to take love, not just a realtor to make a house a home?) Remember all the credit card offers sent to you, your kids and the dog? The credit card companies are now shocked, shocked that people would be human and frail and foolish and misuse them.

Billions for advertising, but not one penny for education.

We the sheeple have been fleeced and are now were being asked to pay for the privilege. Next time the flacks tell you to buy a house soon, prices will never be lower, odds are he or she is with the National Association of Realtors. Check it out. Same with ones who say stocks are a bargain. Usually brokers. There’s a reason Warren Buffet is the richest man in the world; he once said, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” And he took his own advice.

Here are some more inconvenient and unconventional truths for you to ponder. This is in fact Great Depression 2. House prices won’t be back to 2006 levels yet by 2016. Real unemployment is already over 10% in reality. (The methods for reporting it are far different than they used to be.) The stock market won’t recover for a decade. Remember 2000 when the NASDAQ hit 5,048, versus today eight and a half years later it’s at 1,445. Buy and hold? Stocks are best in the long term? That’s down over 70 % over nearly a decade! How long did you plan to live? Does your broker still say to buy and hold?

Anyway, we should have seen this coming and a few did, like my friends at iTulip.com. But nobody makes commissions or gets elected by telling the bad news. You’ve been misinformed by highly paid shills who have profited from your misfortune and mistakes. They trashed the hotel room and we get the bill. It’s called a bailout.

The new reality

There’s no way in hell that the economy we enjoyed for the last 25 years is coming back. No amount of stimulus, tax cutting, free trading or anything else can bring it back. It was an unsustainable bubble created by a deregulated FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), denial of risk and an unprecedented use of credit and debt. It’s amusing to watch the pundits slowly catch on, but only ever so slowly.

The economy of the last 25 years is no more going to bounce back in a year or two than the NASDAQ. It was widely believed in 2000 that the index would be back to its’ peak in a matter of months. I was literally laughed at for saying it could take a decade. Looks like I might have been too optimistic, since at under 1600 it’s off its’ peak of over 5000 by what, about 70%? How’s that Enron stock holding up?

So in my view it’s a given that credit will be very, very much more rare in the future. I’m not sure the credit card companies will be able to survive it, but the rest of us will manage to muddle through. Once again, one will have to save up to buy a car. Doesn’t say much for demand for new cars does it? Sorry Detroit.

Same for flat screen TV’s, video games, computers, MP3 players, cell phones and all the other extras we’ve come to believe we not only need, but deserve. Sorry China. Sorry Best Buy.

I expect to see a lot more cohabiting, and hopefully more niceness. When everyone is skating on thin ice financially, wouldn’t it be nice to see acts of kindness as self-insurance in the case that your situation falls apart? It’s going to be easier to crash in someone’s spare room and help with the rent if you did the same for them before your situations reversed themselves.

Here’s another thought somebody clever will come up with- a value menu at local restaurants. You know, rice and beans for a buck. Maybe takeout only. Maybe with donated ingredients. Food will definitely be viewed and consumed differently. The fast food industry is going to either adapt and change or go the way of the dodo.

The other thing will be housing. There already exists a huge number of foreclosed and vacant houses in America. It’s in nobody’s best interest for them to remain vacant. They represent a nearly worthless asset to the banks that seized them. I believe there’s a great business opportunity for someone to manage renting out rooms in foreclosed houses and getting people housed, as well as getting the banks something for their investment.

Hello? Underemployed real estate workers this is your opportunity!

Trump to God, “You’re fired!”

On a side note, it seems that no less than Donald Trump has weighed in on the causes of the current financial meltdown. Could it be irresponsible borrowing and lending? Unregulated and exotic financial instruments? Pure and simple greed?

No! The Donald informs us that it is an act of God, which conveniently gets him out of some no longer profitable contract over loans with banks. Sweet! When I was a kid, Flip Wilson’s tag line was, “The Devil made me do it.” Apparently this time, it’s the Deity.

Hunger

I wonder how Americans will handle hunger. I don’t think most of us ever really had to deal with it. In the spring of 1983 (during the last nasty recession, but nothing like this one) I can remember lying in my bed in a cheap ass flop house hotel in Santa Barbara, California on a Wednesday trying to decide whether to spend my last seventy five cents till payday on Friday on a can of beans or bus fare. Eating the beans would mean a two hour walk to work, which was what I chose, but overall what I remember is the overwhelming helplessness of having a Bachelors degree from a great school and making three bucks an hour moving furniture and being so damn hungry.

Even better, I got fired from that job for having an attitude. As I recall, the supervisor had me stacking chairs in what I thought was a dumb place, and I suggested a different area. I was told to shut up and follow orders. Later, he realized he’d made a mistake, and asked me what the hell I’d been thinking. I told him at three bucks an hour, he couldn’t afford my brains, and that was it. I got canned.

In Santa Barbara, there were plenty of avocado and orange trees, so you could at least put some food in your mouth in the worst circumstances, but still it’s a really bad place to be when you don’t have enough to eat. I fear we’re entering an era where a lot of Americans are going to get their first taste (pardon the irony) of hunger. There’s really no reason to think it will be pretty.

Not sure what the way to deal with it should be. I suppose since most churches have kitchen facilities that they’ll be a likely candidate for feeding the community. They had soup kitchens in the 30’s in a lot of places, which makes sense since you can make soup out of anything and everything. Hell, I can cook. Maybe that will be my new profession: soup kitchen chef.

In a place like small town Maine it’s not hard to imagine how to put together a program like this. The Rotary, the churches, the town and the Chamber of Commerce could likely all be counted on to provide the basics to feed people a few times a day. The trick would be to stay humble and respectful of those down on their luck, and by God the people of Lincoln county Maine are certainly up to the task.

I wonder how the rest of the nation will fare?

First Snow

No rant just now. I drove to Damariscotta and back, and it all looks like a postcard. This is for our more southerly relatives and friends, which would be pretty near all of them.

Proportionality, part deux

Okay, so both my readers are familiar with two recurring pet peeves of mine, which would be proportionality and the global war on terror. I ran across a factoid that makes the two come together in an interesting way. The Bush Administration has come damn near a preemptive war with Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear arms. The morons in charge want us to believe it’s the absolute biggest threat in the world for a Muslim nation to have nukes, and Obama has even nodded to it. (Oh wait. Pakistan has them and they’re an ally. Ignore this, please.) While a nasty concept, there are worse things in the world than Iran with nukes. We faced thousands and thousands of nukes in the USSR for decades, including most of my life, and nothing bad happened. And they were VERY advanced and VERY well tested.

So here’s the factoid that makes the whole matter so ridiculous. The nuke that North Korea set off (and they are WAY ahead of Iran) was estimated at equivalent to 400 tons of TNT. Oooh. Sounds scary. But it turns out that a fully fueled 757 like the ones that hit the WTC each packed the equivalent of 900 tons of TNT. Large commercial aircraft are common as dandelions, and with the airlines in meltdown, they’re downright affordable.

Get my drift? The biggest freaking threat in the world is a loose (likely extremely unsophisticated) nucular (sic) weapon, worth another preemptive war, but anybody and his cousin can buy a used large airliner and fly it wherever they want. When we were in Tucson last year we saw the huge airplane mothball yard, and it goes on forever. Lots of planes out there if anyone needs one.

Once again, the desire to make us blindly fearful, and the lack of seeing things in proportion leads to ridiculous policies.

And another thing. Last week Peggy Noonan wrote an obnoxious column with the basic idea being that, “Say what you want about W, he kept us safe.” And all of the Democrats fear that two words will be added, “unlike Obama.”

These smug assholes love to use the line that since we haven’t been hit again yet, that W deserves credit. I can usually shut this one up by asking if the speaker will take an oath to switch parties in the event of an attack on American soil. No takers yet. And here’s the punch line- if George W. Bush kept us so fucking safe, what’s he got to say to the families of the nearly 3,000 dead in Manhattan, Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, not to mention over 4,200 dead Americans in Iraq? The attacks on the World Trade Center were on his watch after he ignored Clinton administration warnings. In their arrogance, any concern of the Clinton’s was deemed unimportant. Thanks, assholes.

He kept us safe? More like he tattooed targets on our foreheads.

Next Job

It has been stated that in the nearly 8 years since he left office, Bill Clinton has pulled down $110 million in speaking and consulting fees. This says a lot about how his judgment and policies are viewed, widely and globally.

How many people do you suppose will pay to hear W speak? There were times when I would have paid him to shut up, but I’m not exactly smack in the middle of his demographic. I just can’t imagine having to explain to shareholders why you spent perfectly good money for advice from the worst President in history. Poor sap. Some right wing think tank will probably give him a title, a stipend and a strong warning against opening his mouth in public or leaving the US.

That poor bastard Alberto Gonzalez couldn’t find work in the private sector for almost a year, and it’s a temporary gig.

Gee, maybe they were right about one thing. A free market tells you what people think you’re worth. And these buckos ain’t worth diddly.

Dumb and dumber

Okay, that last post got me thinking about racists and ignorance in general, so I thought I’d check out the mother lode: www.kkk.bz. Holy crap, they’re even dumber than I expected. On the home page, they refer to Omaha, NB, which I’m pretty sure, would be in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Nope, it’s our own Nebraska, NE for short. The banner headline reads, “THE KNIGHTS IS LEADING THE WAY”. Hopefully they is headed for an English lesson.

Here’s another gem, “DO NOT be fooled! The Knights Party is the ONLY legitimate Klan association in the United States. We are not some fringe fly by night group of disgruntled losers who decided to start a "Klan" group.“ That’s pretty funny coming from a fringe group of disgruntled losers.

Honestly, can you think of a group of losers more pathetic and ridiculous than the Klan?

Supremely Ridiculous

So here I am trying to figure out what the hell to write about. The Huffington Post had a link to a David Duke white supremacy site, and it occurred to me that the attendees at white supremacist meeting look to be some of the least supreme people I’ve ever seen. Definitely ignorant, unlikely to be educated, successful only in the sense of not having starved to death yet.

The focus currently of such groups is the problem with the guy about to enter the White House. How many of the posters on stormfront.org do you suppose went to Harvard Law School, or could have gotten in? I’m thinking damn few. Maybe instead of white supremacy they should call it personal insecurity and be done with it.

I’m so sick of these morons that I’m hoping we can just flush all the racists and be done with it. Go public, get bitch slapped, repeat.

Hell, I’m a 13th generation American, mostly English with some Dutch thrown in, and in traveling around the world I sure didn’t find that the white ones were better or smarter than the tan ones, the olive ones, the brown ones, the black ones or anyone else. If I had to admit to any racism it might be that Asians are smarter than the rest of it. But then again, I think it’s for cultural, rather than racial reasons. But honestly, if you look at the racial makeup of the University of California, you gotta think them Asians got something on whitey, but you don’t see them forming “Yellow Power” movements, even though they could probably statistically prove superiority. Sheesh.

Yikes! It's worse than I thought!

Okay, I knew there was going to be a really nasty, long and slow recovery for the financial system, and I’ve been accused of being Chicken Little more than once, but all I can say is Holy Fucking Shit. My bud, Eric Janszen (third smartest man in the world) posted a bit over on iTulip that explains why none of the injecting, pumping and flooding of cash into the financial system can do any good. The piece requires a rudimentary knowledge of economics as well as financial and monetary policy, but the guts of it are as follows.

I made much the same case a few days back but when Eric tells it it’s more compelling and scary. Basically, the major banks shared their risks by buying and selling each other credit default swaps (CDS) so if their bets went bad, somebody would bail them out. An excellent metaphor in a comment on Eric’s post states that it was like a bunch of swimmers tying themselves together far at sea for safety, and then immediately take on more weight than they can handle, thus all sinking together. Basically and collectively they owe more money than there is in the world, something like most of a quadrillion dollars. That’s $1,000,000,000,000,000.00.

Hence the “Holy Fucking Shit” comment above. That’s about $150,000 for every man, woman and child on earth, or about three million dollars for every American. That much money simply does not exist. The American, and therefore global financial system is dead. Kaput. Finished. And no bailout is going to help.

Man! This thing is unwinnable. If you have any dollars at all, and live in a first world country, this stuff is really important to learn and understand.

Figures lie and liars figure

There are any number of pundits out there in Punditistan who remind us why this isn’t the Great Depression 2. There are no bread lines, no hoboes, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, we are so near the beginning of a long, long process. There were no soup kitchens in 1929 and 1930 saw one of the greatest stock market rallies ever.

I read a great bit of wisdom from some old English dude, whose name escapes me, “We leap into debt, and crawl out of it.” I think the whole GDII thing is like that. When your neighbor loses her job, it’s a recession. When you lose yours, it’s a depression.

So anyway, one of the pearls of wisdom being cast before the swine (present company excepted) is that unemployment is “only” six and a half percent. Jeez, when I got out of college it was over ten percent. (Remind me to whine about how much that sucked.) Here’s a little inside baseball. There are many different unemployment numbers. Really.

The “official unemployment rate” is technically known as U3. Over time it has been twisted to make things seem better than they are. It does NOT include discouraged workers, part time employees who want fulltime work and marginally employed workers. These folks are however counted in U6, which is the number they never tell you about. They used to, but not anymore, so any historical reference (“It was much worse back then”) is either misleading or patently false. How’s that for a pisser? They think we’re stupid, and unfortunately, they’re usually right.

Here’s the deal. For October 2008, the “official” U3 unemployment rate was 6.5%, which is high, but not historically. The more accurate, and underreported U6 unemployment rate was 11.8%, and that my friends is a nasty number. No bread lines. Yet. No hoboes. Yet. No food riots. Yet.

Let’s take care of each other, remember the neediest and share what you have with those who need it. It’s a great time to short the market, but a lousy time to short karma.