A little background first…..

Kurt Hanson’s Radio Internet Newsletter has an analysis of the new royalty rates for Internet Radio announced by the US Copyright Office. The decision is likely to put most internet radio stations out of business by making the cost of broadcasting much higher than revenues.

Quote:

“The Copyright Royalty Board is rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the ‘per play’ rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange (a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA)…[The] math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers’ royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues.”
http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/030207/index.shtml

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A Forbes article discussing the dire news for fans of Internet radio. Yesterday afternoon saw online broadcasters, everyone from giants like Clear Channel and National Public Radio to small-fry internet concerns, arguing their case before the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB). The CRB’s March 2nd decision to increase the fees associated with online music broadcasting will have harsh repercussions for those who engage in the activity, the panel was told.

There was also a previous provision for smaller companies that allowed them to pay less, something the March 2 decision did away with; in the view of the royalty holders, advertising more than pays for these fees, and they’re ready for higher payments.

Quote:

“Under a previous arrangement, which expired at the end of 2005, broadcasters and online companies such as Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit could pay royalties based on estimates of how many songs were played over a given period of time, or a ‘tuning hour,’ as opposed to counting every single song … [They] also asked the judges to clarify a $500 annual fee per broadcasting channel, saying that with some online companies offering many thousands of listening options, counting each one as a separate channel could lead to huge fees for online broadcasters.”
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/03/19/ap3531170.html

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The Copyright Royalty Board formally rejects a request to reconsider its March decision to impose an onerous royalty schedule on Internet radio broadcasters.

Quote:

“None of the moving parties have [sic] made a sufficient showing of new evidence or clear error or manifest injustice that would warrant rehearing,” wrote the CRB in its decision.”

The recording industry (RIAA hordes) and its royalty collection organization SoundExchange are jubilant over the ruling, as you can imagine.

Quote:

“Our artists and labels look forward to working with the Internet radio industry, large and small, commercial and noncommercial, so that together we can ensure it succeeds as a place where great music is available to music lovers of all genres,” said SoundExchange head Simson in a statement.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070416-internet-radio-dealt-severe-blow-as-copyright-board-rejects-appeal.html

Noble words, but after today’s ruling, which will take effect on May 15 unless the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agrees to hear an appeal, there probably won’t be much of an Internet radio industry left for SoundExchange to work with.

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PLEASE HELP TO KEEP INTERNET RADIO ALIVE

This decision has the very real potential to force the closure of a wide realm of online webcasting sources that have significantly impacted the growth and development of independent roots music across all genres. To lose this avenue of promotion and support for roots based music could be potentially devastating with respect not only to its financial impact on the industry, but to its cultural survival.

http://www.musicdish.com/mag/?id=11693
http://www.petitiononline.com/SIR2007r/petition.html
http://www.saveourinternetradio.com/

Isn’t it past time that we burn the RIAA/MPAA houses down? ISN’T IT?!?!?

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However, I’m betting this is beginning to exclude the EDM genre, where waves of DJs (just from eye-witness accounts of the transition the past 4-5 yrs) are moving over to the more affordable formats of .wav and .mp3, purchased primarily on EDM download sites. It’s Economics 101. However the brief reference to DRM certainly applies. With the ability to directly record a vinyl record from a turntable now (ION USB Turntable & Stanton t90) into a computer, I definitely see the possibilities for a resurgence.

Besides, from a collector’s stand point, vinyl has never really faded from use or popularity.

With the advent of products like Scratch Live though, even an audiophile like myself, who has dedicated himself to vinyl, simply cannot resist the temptation.

The reason for this post is because NPR is running a story about the comeback of vinyl. It seems that sales of new vinyl records are up about 10%; sales will approach a million this year (as against half a billion for CDs). NPR mentioned the popularity of a turntable with a USB interface and speculated on other possible reasons for the resurgence. They mentioned sound quality and lack of DRM as possible causes. Sound quality can and will be debated, but DRM rates a resounding DUH!!!.

Vinyl is (or ‘used to be’ depending upon your point-of-view) the de-facto standard for DJ’s at parties and clubs, particularly in the EDM genre. The CD equivalent which allows you to mix and scratch used to be somewhat frowned upon in the artistic arena, but that mindset has quickly changed and while the EDM scene has lost much of it’s earlier millennium popularity, there are still quite a few electronic music fans who support it in any format. Vinyl will never overtake CDs or other digital formats in popularity, but we’d be silly not to acknowledge that the vinyl format is still thriving and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. Nonetheless, I do remember 5 or 6 years ago, when all of my DJ peeps would balk at any DJ who used anything other than tech 1200’s and purely vinyl. Clearly, the industry has come a long way since, and while digital formats are increasingly becoming more accepted, I doubt vinyl will ever disappear completely from the scene.

Today, artists like Richie Hawtin and Sasha are even using software like Ableton Live to produce a dynamic set that is almost impossible to trainspot. Wikipedia has a list of known Ableton users.

Others, like Mark Farina, use CDs.

Judging by what I witnessed at the Miami Winter Music Conference this year (and occasionally here in the Queen City), the standard set-up now is four decks – two CDJs and two turntables. And even though five+ years ago vinyl was the standard, as mentioned earlier, times are dramatically changing. Soon I’m expecting to see laptops standard at a club with either Serato Scratch, Final Scratch or Traktor Scratch installed and ready to use. (For limited use I’m sure.)

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As a former alumnus of Va. Tech and former resident of Roanoke, VA, I would like to thank the Va. Tech talking heads, other liberal colleges around the state, campus police, Larry Hincker and all the other anti-gun crowd pundits who had a hand in striking down (illegally IMO) sound legislation (House Bill 1572); legislation proposed by the honorable Del. Todd Gilbert that would have allowed students and teachers, who hold a state-issued concealed carry permit, to carry a concealed gun on campus(es).

By there very unconstitutional actions they were complicit and abeted Cho Seung-Hui in the killings of 33 students yesterday at Va. Tech. There is no guarantee, but if the students/teachers of Va. tech would have been allowed to lawfully carry a concealed weapon on campus (without the fear of ejection from the college) this tragedy may have been averted. My sympathies to the families who have been affected by this insane action by a seriously disturbed murderer.

HB 1572
http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?061+sum+HB1572

Virginia Tech’s ban on guns may draw legal fire
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/xp-21770

A bill being considered in the House of Delegates challenges the authority of public universities to restrict weapons on campus.
http://www.roanoke.com/politics/wb/49915

Gun bill gets shot down by panel
http://www.roanoke.com/politics/wb/50658

College spokesman celebrated 2006 defeat because it would help make campus safe
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55226

Va. Tech: Gunman Student From S. Korea
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/17/ap/national/main2693365.shtml

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A sensible and honest Op-Ed by Bradford B. Wiles, a graduate student at Virginia Tech.
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/80510

On Aug. 21 at about 9:20 a.m., my graduate-level class was evacuated from the Squires Student Center. We were interrupted in class and not informed of anything other than the following words: “You need to get out of the building.”

Upon exiting the classroom, we were met at the doors leading outside by two armor-clad policemen with fully automatic weapons, plus their side arms. Once outside, there were several more officers with either fully automatic rifles and pump shotguns, and policemen running down the street, pistols drawn.

It was at this time that I realized that I had no viable means of protecting myself.

Please realize that I am licensed to carry a concealed handgun in the commonwealth of Virginia, and do so on a regular basis. However, because I am a Virginia Tech student, I am prohibited from carrying at school because of Virginia Tech’s student policy, which makes possession of a handgun an expellable offense, but not a prosecutable crime.

I had entrusted my safety, and the safety of others to the police. In light of this, there are a few things I wish to point out.

First, I never want to have my safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police.

Second, I considered bringing my gun with me to campus, but did not due to the obvious risk of losing my graduate career, which is ridiculous because had I been shot and killed, there would have been no graduate career for me anyway.

Third, and most important, I am trained and able to carry a concealed handgun almost anywhere in Virginia and other states that have reciprocity with Virginia, but cannot carry where I spend more time than anywhere else because, somehow, I become a threat to others when I cross from the town of Blacksburg onto Virginia Tech’s campus.

Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.

That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.

I would also like to point out that when I mentioned to a professor that I would feel safer with my gun, this is what she said to me, “I would feel safer if you had your gun.”

The policy that forbids students who are legally licensed to carry in Virginia needs to be changed.

I am qualified and capable of carrying a concealed handgun and urge you to work with me to allow my most basic right of self-defense, and eliminate my entrusting my safety and the safety of my classmates to the government.

This incident makes it clear that it is time that Virginia Tech and the commonwealth of Virginia let me take responsibility for my safety.

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An Op-Ed by Larry Hincker, one of the main opponents of HB 1572
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/81277

Hincker is the associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech.

After the fear, and dare I say, panic from the events of Aug. 21, it is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles (”Unarmed and vulnerable,” Aug. 31).

I once worked for an out-of-touch manager who gave rather absurd directions. My colleagues and I would do as directed and dubbed it “malicious compliance,” knowing the task to be inane and the manager’s foibles would soon be apparent.

The editors of this page must have printed this commentary if for no other reason than malicious compliance. Surely, they scratched their heads saying, “I can’t believe he really wants to say that.”

Wiles tells us that he didn’t feel safe with the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting him. He even implies that he needed his sidearm to protect himself against the officers.

On that fateful Monday, campus was understandably on edge. Elvis-type sightings of the escaped prisoner around campus were rampant. People were legitimately concerned about where he might be. And although the police were relatively confident they had the suspect cornered (they were ultimately proved right), the anxiety level elsewhere on campus was very high.

Panic calls from within the Squires Student Center quickly morphed from facts into rumors, including a frantic call alleging a hostage situation. The police had no choice but to move a massive force from the manhunt site to that side of campus to deal with the hostage rumor.

The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again.

Who among us thinks the writer of the commentary would not have been directly in harm’s way if he showed himself to those tactical squads while displaying a deadly weapon? Would he even be here today to tell us the story? Contrary to his position, the writer’s commentary actually gives credence to the university policy preventing weapons in classrooms.

Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.

So were the students safer yesterday Mr. Hincker because they were not allowed to lawfully carry a concealed weapon on the Tech premises or could have lives been saved if students/teachers were allowed to do so? Do criminals go out of there way to obtain a concealed carry permit so that they can murder people or is it more sensible that they would carry a permit (and weapon) in an effort to primarily protect themselves and their friends from maniacs like Cho Seung-Hui?

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Record Store Owners Blame RIAA For Destroying Music Industry

DESPITE the major record labels’ best efforts to kill it, the single, according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.

You’ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart, CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you’ll have a tough time finding record stores. Today’s single is an individual track downloaded online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of songs — the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years — is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.

This is a far cry from the musical landscape that existed when we opened an independent CD shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1993. At the time, we figured that as far as business ventures went, ours was relatively safe. People would always go to stores to buy music. Right? Of course, back then there were also only two ringtones to choose from — “riiiiinnng” and “ring-ring.”

Our intention was to offer a haven for all kinds of music lovers and obsessives, a shop that catered not only to the casual record buyer (“Do you have the new Sarah McLachlan and … uh … is there a Beatles greatest hits CD?”) but to the fan and oft-maligned serious collector (“Can you get the Japanese pressing of ‘Kinda Kinks’? I believe they used the rare mono mixes”). Fourteen years later, it’s clear just how wrong our assumptions were. Our little shop closed its doors at the end of 2005.

The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

In the late ’90s, our business, and the music retail business in general, was booming. Enter Napster, the granddaddy of illegal download sites. How did the major record labels react? By continuing their campaign to eliminate the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears — whose strength was single songs, not albums. The result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the dearth of singles and the high prices.

The recording industry association saw the threat that illegal downloads would pose to CD sales. But rather than working with Napster, it tried to sue the company out of existence — which was like thinking you’ve killed all the roaches in your apartment because you squashed the one you saw in the kitchen. More illegal download sites cropped up faster than the association’s lawyers could say “cease and desist.”

By 2002, it was clear that downloading was affecting music retail stores like ours. Our regulars weren’t coming in as often, and when they did, they weren’t buying as much. Our impulse-buy weekend customers were staying away altogether. And it wasn’t just the independent stores; even big chains like Tower and Musicland were struggling.

Something had to be done to save the record store, a place where hard-core music fans worked, shopped and kibitzed — and, not incidentally, kept the music business’s engine chugging in good times and in lean. Who but these loyalists was going to buy the umpteenth Elton John hits compilation that the major labels were foisting upon them?

But instead, those labels delivered the death blow to the record store as we know it by getting in bed with soulless chain stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. These “big boxes” were given exclusive tracks to put on new CDs and, to add insult to injury, they could sell them for less than our wholesale cost. They didn’t care if they didn’t make any money on CD sales. Because, ideally, the person who came in to get the new Eagles release with exclusive bonus material would also decide to pick up a high-speed blender that frappéed.

The jig was up. It didn’t matter that even a store as small as ours carried hundreds of titles you’d never see at Best Buy and was staffed by people who actually knew who Van Morrison was, or that Tower Records had the entire history of recorded music under one roof while Costco didn’t carry much more than the current hits. A year after our shop closed, Tower went out of business — something that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The customers who had grudgingly come to trust our opinions made the move to online shopping or lost interest in buying music altogether. Some of the most loyal fans had been soured into denying themselves the music they loved.

Meanwhile, the recording industry association continues to give the impression that it’s doing something by occasionally threatening to sue college students who share their record collections online. But apart from scaring the dickens out of a few dozen kids, that’s just an amusing sideshow. They’re not fighting a war any more than the folks who put on Civil War regalia and re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg are.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it’s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.

At this point, it may be too late to win back disgruntled music lovers no matter what they do. As one music industry lawyer, Ken Hertz, said recently, “The consumer’s conscience, which is all we had left, that’s gone, too.”

It’s tempting for us to gloat. By worrying more about quarterly profits than the bigger picture, by protecting their short-term interests without thinking about how to survive and prosper in the long run, record-industry bigwigs have got what was coming to them. It’s a disaster they brought upon themselves.

We would be gloating, but for the fact that the occupation we planned on spending our working lives at is rapidly becoming obsolete. And that loss hits us hard — not just as music retailers, but as music fans.

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What the music industry should have done is realized that the individual “value” of their product was going down and reduced their prices accordingly to compete. That is what the rest of the competitive enterprising world does. They didnt, because they forgot that they were serving the customer music…….not the gatekeeper of music.. Those days are over…

The internet is not your competitor.

The market changed. There’s no guarantee that says people with middleman jobs (those persons that try to add value by standing between the producer of a good or service and the consumer of that good or service) will have a job forever, even if it seems likely to them. Markets change. People change. For many reasons, some of them you may be in sympathy with, some of them not.

Further, there’s no law chiseled in stone that proclaims a musician’s right to live off album sales. Musicians historically have lived by the largesse of wealthy patrons. Selling sheet music, performances, and recordings yield a certain level of income but for the average musician who is not a star, it needs to be supplemented by teaching, whoring (i.e., playing for weddings/birthdays/after-parties), building and repairing instruments, or a part or full-time job washing dishes, working at a music store, etc.

There’s also no law that says a CD which cost about $0.50 to stamp out has to sell for $15. Cut the prices back to $5 or $8 per disk and you’ll see sales shoot right up. Record albums used to sell for $4 or $5 back in the day, then tapes came along and bumped the price up to about $10 or $12, and then CDs went through the roof. OK already, if a CD *player* now costs around $20 why are disks still so damn expensive?

The amount of money musicians see from a CD sale is vanishing, especially when a middleman has done the production, mastering or promotion work. Do you honestly believe that out of that $15 (or $12 or $18 or….) the musician will be receiving more than $0.25 or $0.50 per copy? Typically not. If you self-produce, as less well-known musicians are forced to do, you’ll have to front about $20,000 in studio time, design, copying and printing expenses, and it takes a long time to make that kind of money back from sales, let alone start to turn a profit. Disks are really a calling card, a way of getting your name out there and popularizing your music rather than some kind of bread-and-butter solid income the RIAA (mafiaa) makes it out to be. Sure, a nationally known act with a dozen recordings out is going to be making some income from record sales but the lion’s share is still going to middlemen.

Because of this situation, I think it makes more sense to simply upload your music and get the public listening to it, then ask these same people to pay to hear you play live. People have long demonstrated that they will pay for great music either live or recorded. There were people making thousands of dollars a month on mp3.com, though most of the musicians there were amateurs. Yet, mp3.com had an interesting business model and I’m very sorry it got bought out.

The RIAA is living in a time warp. It’s no longer possible to monopolize sound waves. Even twenty-five years ago, we became used to constantly taping each other’s records, albums, tapes and even music on the radio. No one was rich enough or crazy enough to purchase every single must-have album out there, even though we all wanted to. So now that we have a much better music delivery system that very quickly distributes music out to millions of people all over the world–let’s take advantage of it and the money will follow. Apple, CDBaby, mp3.com–were thinking creatively and sooner or later a business model will emerge that leverages the current technology and gives musicians back some remuneration for their efforts.

Music isn’t dead, and it isn’t going to die. Let’s face it – as musicians, as listeners – the producers and consumers – we’re going to be fine. As musicians, maybe we’ll have to move to a different distribution model, and maybe it’ll be different as to how one moves to the top of the heap. It’ll still depend on your music to some degree (too bad it isn’t 100%), though…..maybe moreso. As consumers, maybe we’ll have to enhance our searching skills to find stuff we like. Surely the radio hasn’t been a good source for anything but the crassest pop and bottomfeeder “repeat it until it sucks” marketing mechanisms for years….so personally, I look forward to changes in the musical landscape. As for the middlemen, things change. Maybe you’ll have to close your music studio or record store. No sign of that yet for some, but OTOH, you can buy mixing and recording equipment for a fraction of what it used to cost, a rack-mount mastering unit that can really do a very good job……but all in all there are no guarantees for the middleman. Not in music, not in written material, and certainly not in video. If you find a niche and you can make it work, my hat is off to you. If it stops working though, it is you that needs to change – because sniveling about how you thought you’d be able to “spend your life” doing something ‘great’, is just a bit pathetic.

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Restored to its debut-season glory, the modified black 1982 Pontiac Trans Am is being offered at $US149,995 at a Dublin auto dealership.

Johnny “Vette” Verhoek of Kassabian Motors has had the car, officially called Knight Industries Two Thousand, on display for about a month.

It is one of four documented “camera cars” used for close-up shots and scenes where David Hasselhoff, who played Michael Knight in the series, was behind the wheel.

Although it cannot achieve the 300 mph speeds that KITT reached, soar 50 feet in the air or throw smoke bombs, key features of the star car are intact.

Perhaps most important, the red scanner light on the nose glows and makes a humming noise.

The car has two working video screens on the dashboard, and the cockpit features buttons that light up in green, yellow and red: ski mode, rocket boost, micro jam, silent mode, oil slick and eject.

Most of the buttons don’t do anything, Verhoek said. Nor can the car hold a conversation or drive itself.

KITT isn’t even street legal because of missing smog equipment and other modifications. Whoever buys the car will probably keep it in a private collection, or it may be purchased by a museum, Verhoek said.

The car belongs to Tim Russo of Livermore, a Kassabian customer who figured now was a good time to test the market, with the 25th anniversary of the show’s debut coming up.

Russo purchased the car 10 years ago at an auction in San Diego, and has spent the last decade finding parts to restore it.

So who’s up for going in with me?

Better yet…..getting this instead?

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