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Quick Review: Fyre Fraud

The Hulu documentary is a hoot. It’s more about the lie, the huckstering, Billy McFarland as the Incompetent P.T. Barnum of the time. The Netflix doc was more about How Not to Put On A Music Festival. This is about how people got suckered into believing something that was not physically possible.

All from the power of our mobile devices to distort reality.

A lot of balderdash about Millennials, which misses the point. Bad music festivals have happened in the past. No one died at Fyre, but at least at Altamont The Rolling Stones actually showed up and played. This Festival existed only in the creators’ mind. It was fairy dust. The belief that Instagram could force reality to conform to it comes from the age we live in. Con artists are always with us, but the cons are flooding at our eyes, all day every day.

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Why Music Sounds Bad When You Get Older

Two reasons:

1. As you age, your critical faculties improve. When you first discover pop music, it’s like the rush of first love. You’re a blank slate and the music just writes itself into you. It becomes identity. And you immerse yourself into it. And after enough songs, you start getting readier and readier to dismiss things that don’t hit you like that first one. And since very few ever will, the general sense that “music sucks” gets stronger and stronger, until that becomes the default. Also, you’ll start seeing trends go and then come back around, and this will augment a healthy cynicism about the record industry, making falling in love with a song or an artist much harder.

2. You drop out and drop back into what’s current, largely unwilling. The common idea is that people stop paying attention to popular music sometime around age 30. Either the patterns of a grown-up lifestyle (kids, house, IRA) leave you with less and less time to devote to following the latest trends, or you get sick of the trends and the difficulty of finding something that pleases you, and you throw up your hands.

Now suppose some time goes by. Suppose some young people in your life expose you to the next Big Thing. And since your behind the curve on what’s been happening, it won’t sound like anything you’re familiar with. Or if it does, it will sound like an unoriginal or weak repetition of it. So of course the stuff the kids listen to is obnoxious. You’re not in a place to how it got there, and they’re not in a place to hear anything else.

youths

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Music Modernization Bill Sounds Good.

I am generally distrustful of bipartisan legislation, especially when the CEO of RIAA is this enthusiastic, but this doesn’t look too bad on its face:

A key provision of the bill is for Congress to establish the equivalent of a SoundExchange for songwriters to track credits and distribute royalties when digital services use their work. The switch to a market-based rate standard for artists and writers, closing the pre-1972 loophole that denied digital compensation to legacy artists and the addition of copyright royalties for producers and engineers are other changes widely hailed as improvements by a wide range of industry organizations, from the Recording Academy and the RIAA to ASCAP, BMI, the American Association of Independent Music and the American Federation of Musicians.

Sounds like a good compromise on the needs of artists and distributors. Establishing the means to accurately enforce contracts is what we have a govenrment for.

via Music Modernization Act Approved by House Judiciary Committee — Variety

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Theme-Hunting and Other Follies

I know I do this randomly and seemingly out of a sense of restlessness, but this time I think I may keep it a while. I’ve soured of the giant-header themes: no one needs to scroll through an image to get to the content. This one is clean, has the content front and center, and has a nice little Connector tab up top.

So you can hunt me down on Twitter, and Google+, and read my Tumblr, which is an ongoing project of going through my CD collection, and even look at my Youtube and Vimeo channels if such be your delight.

https://vimeo.com/39139236

Bonus Internet points for anyone who can name all my rogues gallery at the end of the song above.

That’s all. I’m keeping off the wider internet so as not to be spoiled before I see Force Awakens on Sunday. Enjoy your weekend.

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I Just Figured Out How To Tumblr. Possibly How to Blog.

So I mentioned that I was re-vamping my Tumblr from having a no real purpose to having a purpose. In the past 2 days I’ve gained nearly 500 followers.

Granted, it’s Tumblr, so following is easy and doesn’t necessarily lead to connection or interaction with contact. It’s like Twitter that way. Of all those followers, there are only a handful of likes, and I think one reblog. But I only have 654 Twitter followers, and I’ve been tweeting for years.

To what do I owe this success, such as it is? I think the following:

  1. People get what my Tumblr’s about, and are interested. People like talking about music, and my posts are short and to the point.
  2. Bro, Do You Even Tag? In doing music reviews, it always helps to tag the band name, the song name, the album name. Then people who check the tags see the content, and decide to follow if they like what they see.
  3. YouTube is the New MTV. After (which is to say, above) every review, I do a separate video post which has either a favored deep track or a live version or something else that I think noteworthy. YouTube is great at giving you options, and people like to hear music when they’re done reading about music.

So, Focus, Reach Out, and Consistent Content. Hopefully this continues.

Check out the noise at Every. Damn. CD.