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| Saturday, June 22, 2002 |
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Here's an idea. 
| | Let's keep our stations on the air, collect voluntary listener payments through Amazon, PayPal or whatever, and contribute a percentage of that revenue to a new distribution authority, created and administered by an honest and friendly organization that isn't the RIAA. Chances are that .org already exists. |
| | Betcha we could raise millions in no time, gather all kinds of money for a good source, inaugurate an honest new industry — and embarras the living shit out of the RIAA, the Copyright Office, the Library of Congress, and Congress itself for letting Disney & friends ram the DMCA through inthe first place. |
Power from the people
| | What more obvious monopolistic behavior can there be - then to conspire on pricing, continue to support (secretly) payola to radio stations and now - attempt to control not only the content, but the distribtion channels - via /so called / digital downloading. |
| | There's an Enron-like meltdown coming to a system that manages to be completely corrupt and legal only to the degree it remains protected by absurd laws and giant loopholes. (Thanks to the Head Lemur for that last link, along with lots of other good pointers.) |
| | It won't stand because we live in a democracy and the people won't stand for it. Simple as that. |
| | The Net draws its just powers from the consent of the connected. And this CARP crap is going to drive a shitload of consent, real smart fast. |
The machine in the ghost
| | On the phone yesterday, Howard Greenstein and I recalled a line from the old Joani Mitchell song, "Free Man in Paris": ...stoking the star-making machinery behind the popular songs. |
| | We realized that star-making machinery was what the DMCA was built to protect, and what the CARP/LOC processes have loyally served from the moment they began. |
| | That machinery (let's call it SMM) is not what Internet radio is about, and it is not what the Internet itself is about. But it is what both threathen, and that's why there are veins in the teeth of the RIAA. |
| | Today in the mail we got the latest Biography magazine. As usual I couldn't bear to to look at it; but for the first time I understood why: because it's so obviously part of the star-making machinery. It's less product than factory: one more way the machinery makes its sausage. Realizing it was part of the SMM made me feel like I'd just found a body-snatcher pod in my mailbox. |
| | My stars are in my referers logs. They're in my email, on my blogroll, and in everything I look up on Google. They have everything to do with intrinsic value, with authority, with the possibility I'll be enlarged by getting to know them better. |
| | They have nothing to do with celebrity. They are outside the SMM. And I'm not unique in that respect. The same is true of most of us here in the blogosphere. I suspect it's true to a huge and growing degree in the mass market as well. |
| | On the GeekCruise we took last month, we got to know the actor John DeLancie (at least as much as one can over a few meals and a few more hours of hang time). Before the cruise, we'd never heard of him — a fact that astonishes our friends who watch Star Trek or who have had other opportunities to sample John's work, which is surely is no less terrific than the delightful readings he treated us to on the cruise. But we didn't connect around any of that. We connected around personal shit — some of it funny, some of it painful, all of it deep. We came away liking the guy in ways that are not only outside the scope of celebrity, but excluded by its nature. |
| | Celebrity involves disconnected veneration, adoration and other forms of subordination to elevated status. We've made an industry of it, and that industry has caused massive economic distortions that cannot help but collapse — undermined by nothing more than what in Cluetrain we called "networked markets" that are "getting smarter faster than most companies." |
| | (Add to that most governments, schools and other institutions that thrive to any degree on our inability or unwillingness to inform ourselves.) |
| | Over the past couple years we've all bashed dot-coms for their insane excesses; but that's nothing like what we'll be doing once we get some historical distance on the very similar kind of insanties that have been pro forma in the entertainment industry for the better part of a century. |
| | The entertainment industry is fundamentally about making stars. In spite of its name, it is not about entertaining people, except as an effect of the star system, which is really about entertaining mass quantities of people. SMM manufactures, packages and delivers celebrity as a product. It works to cause appetites for it, and to deliver mass quantities of stuff made appealing by it, for as long as any variety of it might last. And since celebrity is perishable, the machinery keeps doing it over and over and over again. |
| | Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Just something wrong with nothing but that. |
| | That's why the CARP/LOC ruling is so awful and wrong. It's about maintaining the star-making machinery that starts with the recording industry and works its way through commercial broadcasting, mass market advertising, arena performance events, cross-promotion and all the rest of it. |
| | Music file sharing was the listeners' way of working around the failure of commercial radio to serve any form of passion or connoisseurship about music. When the RIAA killed Napster, it was understandable to the degree that Napster conceivably threatened the very revenues on which the industry depended. |
| | Internet radio is also a way listeners, as well as professional broadcasters, can perform that same work-around. But this time the RIAA's attacks are not in self-defense. Through CARP/LOC, the RIAA and its allies are viciously and murderously attacking something that not only fails to threaten them, but actually serves the very artists they pretend to care about. |
| | Internet radio is actually good for the record business. But that's not the issue here. Control is. Internet radio isn't an industry. Mostly it's personal. And it's completely out of anyone's control, like the rest of the Net. The entertainment industry can't tolerate that. |
| | So, through the DMCA and then the CARP/LOC process, the RIAA is commiting infanticide (thiink of it as a late-term abortion) on a business they imagine might some day pose some kind of threat to one piece of their star-making machinery. |
| | We need to keep exposing the true motives here. Howard Greenstein is right. CARP/LOC is not about extracting revenues from any kind of business. Rather it's about preventing that business from ever happening — and destroying what little there is of it so far. |
| | In the long run this will fail for the simple reason that networked markets will get too smart for it. |
| | Some day the SMM will be as anachronistic as old fortifications in cities that have since outgrown, ignored or embraced the outside threats of long ago. |
Speaking of which
My fear exactly
Losing one of our best
| | I'm still bummed about Scott Shuger, who died last week in a diving accident. He was 50 — almost 5 years younger than me, and far more fit, I'm sure. |
| | I didn't know Scott, but I read Today's Papers every day from the moment they first appeared in Slate (to which I actually subscribed, with real money, just like I did with Netscape's browser, the difference being that Slate didn't suck). TP was (and still is) an expression at the same time of what works best both in print and in pixels. Scott also wrote lots of other good stuff: a solid and skilled journalist to the last. |
More fun with math
| | Let's see... 3,560 reads yesterday, 6,504 on Thursday... Over the last 14 days the blog has averaged 2,635 reads per day; or 80,207 per month and 962,486 per year. Not up there at Glenn's or Andrew's levels, but still pretty fuggin unbelievable. |
| | Hmm... If links were songs, I figger I'd be owing the RIAA about a $500k a year. Not that any of the rest of you would ever see any of it, of course. It'd be just like Internet radio, only not doomed. |
| | By the way, over 1,200 recent visits have come from Andrew Orlowski at the Register (plus another 700+ from other departure points at the same pub). That's impressive. |
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