The FCC Strikes Again!

Posted on September 29, 2009

So,  I haven’t’ mentioned it here yet because i’ve been too busy to write much in the way of blog posts recently – get at me on twitter for regular updates if you’re interested in that – but I’ve been doing a weekly show on OzcatRadio.com every monday night.  The show is called ‘To the Roots’ and I play protest music from all genres and all over the world.  For now it’s pretty heavy on hip hop, folk, and celtic music just ‘cuz that’s the bulk of my personal music library but I want to flesh it out more and I especially want to play independent music from folks like me who put out our own stuff for the love of the music instead of just the love of money.

The problem i’m running into is they’re subject to FCC rules that prohibit profanity, which wipes out most of my hip hop collection.  after all it’s hard to say “fuck the police” if you can’t say “fuck.”

The upshot is that I need more music and especially more music without curse words.   So if you know someone i should be playing and where i can download radio-edited versions of their stuff please hit me up; and that goes double if you’re the artist.  I’ve spent enough years in this business to understand how much independent artists need radio play – that’s part of why i started doing the show in the first place – so hit me up with your mp3s and if i like it i’ll play it.

The end of Intellectual Property

Posted on May 22, 2009

This is great.

Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous – The End of Intellectual Property

by Adrian Bowyer

Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you the keys to their car, and you will receive an abrupt and unhelpful reply. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you their most interesting idea, and fifteen minutes later you will be glancing at your watch and inventing fictitious dentist’s appointments.

This prompts a profound biological question: if information is such valuable property, what is the Darwinian selective advantage in the ubiquitous impulse to give it away?

The answer was worked out a few years ago by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He realised that the human mind did not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection – like the peacock’s tail – to waste resources in a way that cannot be faked. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails, because those peacocks are strong enough to waste the resources needed to grow the tail and to drag it about. That peacock has good genes for strength, growth, and endurance, and so is worth mating with.

Parts of the human mind are for wasting glucose in a way that cannot be faked. Your brain dumps about 20% of your body’s energy budget out of your head every second of your life. You cannot pretend to paint a picture well, or pretend to write a quatrain of iambic pentameters well – you cannot pretend to be witty. You need to waste real glucose to do those things, all of which have no utilitarian value.

“But hang on,” you say. “If that were so, then you would expect only men to be talented, because sexual selection works through the power of female choice selecting the best males. But everyone except the most unreconstructed chauvinist can see that women are as clever as men.”

True, normally: it is the peacocks that have to drag around the tail and the stags that have to hold the antlers aloft. But, to choose between them, peahens and hinds just need good eyesight, whereas the only way for a woman to judge if a man is clever is for her to be equally clever herself – the transmitting device and the receiving device are the same: their minds. That is why the most important four letters in lonely-hearts columns are GSOH, why musicians, painters, authors, and actors (who all do nothing actually useful, and so who waste great mental energy) are so attractive to the opposite sex, why bank managers, engineers and computer programmers (who don’t waste their intellect, but use it for gainful things) are considered geeky and unattractive, and why we all want to tell people any inspired idea as soon as it comes into our head. Showing off cleverness by frittering it away is one of the main things our brains are for.

Read the full article at http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/EndOfIntellectualProperty?skin=print.pattern

Battle of the Bands

Posted on April 3, 2009

Now anyone who’s been in the music business (and I’m sorry to say it is a business) for any length of time knows that’s it’s full to overflowing with slimy unscrupulous parasites who make their money by inserting themselves between musicians and their fans in order to take a chunk of the money, but I think I may have just discovered a new low.  There’s a new company that’s been advertising on Craigslist in San Francisco for an upcoming “Battle of the Bands” and bragging that they’re setting them up all over the country.  The battles (or rather series of battles) are basically marathon shows.   Starting at 5:30 in the afternoon 9 bands get to play half an hour each and the band that gets the loudest applause advances to a second round; the winner of which gets $500, a gig all to themselves, and the possibility of getting some free studio time or even a tour to all the cities where they’re hosting battles.  Sounds kind of cool, huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  So I called them and asked what it would take for Beltaine’s Fire to get in.

And here’s the catch.

Each band gets 100 tickets for the events and is expected to sell as many as they can at $10 each, the more you sell the better your time slot in the battle.  And since the winner is determined by audience applause, the bands that sell the least will be playing to an empty house at 5:30 in the afternoon and lose.  That makes sense, they’ve got to fill the venue somehow after all.  Thing is, the promoters keep ALL the money.  The bands, who have to go out and convince their fans, friends, and family to collectively drop up to $1000 in tickets, get NOTHING.  Nada.  Not a thing.  So at the end of the night if half the tickets get sold the promoter walks away with $4,500 free and clear – and up to double that if the bands sell more tickets – and the “winning” band gets no cash, not even gas money, and their prize is the chance to do the same thing again for the elimination round, after which – if they win a second time – they get $500.

If the promoter runs four preliminary battles at $4,500-$9,000 each that’s $18,000-$36,000.  Add to that the final battle where only the best-selling bands will play (we’ll estimate maybe $6000-$9,000 for that since any bands that were unable to sell tickets have been eliminated) and the promoter walks away with $24,000-$45,000 in cash. From that they pay the best-selling winning band a measly $500 “prize” and the other 35 bands get nothing and are expected to be grateful for the “exposure.”

The worst part of all this is there are thousands of musicians out there who are desperate or naive enough to believe this is a good way to make a name for themselves and will sign up for this type of thing and make the promoter rich. (most of them won’t have read the fine print or figured out that they don’t get to keep any of the money until the night of, but that’s another story and an object lesson in and of itself).

And that type of shit, dear friends, is why the music industry is run by evil bastards.  Because too many musicians lack the common sense and self-reliance to work together to build a scene instead of relying on opportunistic creeps who are in it for the money.