Tuesday, September 04, 2007
The Product
As so often happens, the best weather of the summer is the week after Labor Day.
If you're interested in the business of the recorded music business, The Music Man, Lynn Hirschberg's NY Times mag piece on Columbia co-head Rick Rubin is a must read. I'm a consumer. I'm rarely concerned with "product" because I have no problem finding it & almost no contact with popular "popular" music, the product big record companies sell. Product that sells is good product. Product that doesn't sell is product that sucks. The problem facing the music industry isn't one of quality, but that it's giving away the popular product through file sharing & 99 cent downloads of individual songs. I mostly buy classical music, which has never been more diverse, more interesting, or available at such bargain prices. You could easily build a first rate collection of classical music legally & not spend more than $10 on an album.
From Nat Hentoff, History Will Not Absolve Us:
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
If you're interested in the business of the recorded music business, The Music Man, Lynn Hirschberg's NY Times mag piece on Columbia co-head Rick Rubin is a must read. I'm a consumer. I'm rarely concerned with "product" because I have no problem finding it & almost no contact with popular "popular" music, the product big record companies sell. Product that sells is good product. Product that doesn't sell is product that sucks. The problem facing the music industry isn't one of quality, but that it's giving away the popular product through file sharing & 99 cent downloads of individual songs. I mostly buy classical music, which has never been more diverse, more interesting, or available at such bargain prices. You could easily build a first rate collection of classical music legally & not spend more than $10 on an album.
From Nat Hentoff, History Will Not Absolve Us:
If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations..Again & again, George W. Cheney has posed himself in front of American soldiers & reassured us that the plan-of-the-month is working, that Iraqis really do crave democracy & want to cooperate with Americans. The small problem is Iraqis won't prove it by not killing Americans or each other. "Securing" Anbar Province means it becomes Sunni territory, not part of a unified Iraq.
