political outrage

I know this is so like me. My response to anything political is to quote Sting: "De do do do. De da da da" and call it a day. Problem is my new outrage involves Sting. Well the music industry.

And it's the auto makers fault. "Oooh bail us out bail us out. We knew NAFTA would fuck us right along with our own short comings but we agreed with you so bail us out." And the govt did. And because the car companies got a deal, mortgage lenders get a deal and the rest of us get very expensive "free" health care if govt gets its way now the Big Wigs at the record labels who have been ripping artists off for years want a piece of the bail out help. But make now mistake, they aren't calling it a bail out. Apparently having learned from the payola scandal that a spade is a spade is a spade they have initiated a Performance tax bill.

This means that besides the licensing fee that radios stations pay to play music to us for free, they will now be required to pay a tax for the privilege of playing the schlock and drek the record companies are producing at alarming rates these days. you'll still get your standard favorites of the 60s, 70s and 80s (for now). The problem is that it is an unfair tax. They are looking to recover revenue from lost sales since the digital age which they helped launch took over their business. Last time I looked the price of a downloaded album was comparable to a CD but you don't get the cool cover or the lyric sheets. I paid 12.00 for Sting's new CD in a book bound format with great back story from Sting. CHEAP! But I didn't set the price for the collectible book. The company did. In that instance the record label was in no danger from the digi-boogeyman and in fact didn't charge what they could have. Drat!

The record labels are crying foul. But hello... the music industry (prepare to be blown away by an unsubstantiated fact) is one reason that technology has advanced so rapidly in the last 15 years. I didn't here them lament the death of the record store. I didn't see the price of a CD drop significantly after the new tech came out of its infancy. They've gouged their buyer, cheated their artists and grown increasingly greedy over the years. If the digital revolution is such a problem for them then they need to lay down and die and get out of the way or they need to go a little Sun Tzu and use the enemy's strength against it. They helped create this monster under the bed and expect us to go chasing it for them. Hello? Did they not read Frankenstein? Build a monster, treat it poorly and then the monster goes SMASH!

Really how laughable would it have been if Frankenstein had pleaded with the villagers to save him from his own creation? +100 on the Williams scale of funny. They would have done what the government needs to do to the record label. Shrug innocently but helplessly and turn their backs on the greedy, pompous execs. If they want to survive they need to quit stealing and make the new technology they were so gung ho about work FOR them instead of AGAINST. geez. It ain't rocket science. Hell it isn't even as complicated as 10,000 monkeys writing Shakespeare...

They can just back engineer something else the aliens left with us*. Grow up guys and solve your own problems.



*That is supposed to be funny. One dark government theory posits that the Compact Disc technology was reverse engineered from debris/evidence left after the saucer crashes across the globe in the 1940s. The government couldn't make a lot of headway in producing equipment to sufficiently utilize the information stored on similar discs found in Roswell and other locations so turned it over to private industrialists whose R&D departments worked to prove the NASA ads "Space. Here's what's in it for you."