Almost half the Australian public agree with Mark Latham that US President George Bush is "incompetent and dangerous", according to a poll.
It's taken far longer than I ever expected but Telstra has finally dropped it's cable prices to non-braindamaged levels. $70 for 10Gb limit with no charges for going over the limit (slowed to 65k), matching(?) Optus' cable deal. They're now cheaper than most 512k ADSL deals too. Except for the whole contract lock in can't-use-the-modem-elsewhere thang.
I wish every venue in Melbourne had parking for bands, or at the very least a loading bay. Nothing more annoying that trying to find a park near a gig.
At first, they kicked us out. But we kept going back again and again. The first record company to really understand this stuff was Warner. Next was Universal. Then we started making headway. And the reason we did, I think, is because we made predictions. And we were right. We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They're going to want to buy downloads.
No offense, but it's a lot easier to predict failure in any business... And I don't want to buy "downloads", I want to buy music.
And Apple is in a pretty interesting position. Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac.
True... The demos and artwork are done at home on Windows, but every studio we've ever been in has been Apple (ProTools) all the way. So far I've seen more Apple computers crash out this year while recording than Windows ones...
His comments of recording contracts are gold:
The winners pay. The winners pay for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success. And they get upset. So what's the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, "We'll give you twenty cents on every dollar we get, but we're not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We're gonna pay you not on profits -- we're gonna pay you off revenues. It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime. We'll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you're not successful, you'll make no money. If you are, you'll make a lot more money." That's the way out. That's the way the rest of the world works.
I like the way this assumes the only thing a record company is good for is marketing. I believe in this context the "advance" is a chunk of money direct into the artists pocket, outside of recording costs etc. No more free money.
It should be easy for a record company to get all the $ numbers together and mess with the contract calculations on gross / profit / artist revenue to see which method would have made the most money. It probably isn't. I doubt their accounting is that good. Or maybe they have done this and "keep doing as we're doing" won out?