2 Comments so far

1. Tsalagi Red March 20th, 2007 3:49 pm

   As a nonprofit which occasionally webcasts music, we only promote and play artists who license their works under creative commons, or some other type of web/pod-safe kind of arrangement. More and more serious artists are going this way

   I think it’s time to strengthen an alternative marketing system that will attract more good acts, and will bypass the big record labels. Let their dinosaur system die.

   As an amateur songwriter and musician myself, the internet has provided me with a means of actually showing off some of my work, in way that was impossible a few years ago. With the right kind of support to nurture the musical and artistiic expression bubbling up from below, we will no longer need RIAA and their affiliates.

2. T. Scheisskopf March 22nd, 2007 11:50 am

   Ok, Danny. I got me a little experience in the music biz. A mere 27 years worth. I agree with most of what you said, but one part of your article got on the fightin’ side of me:

   “And then came that army of promo men, roadies, and crews that brought us the sounds and built the stars”

   Roadies? Crews? Part of the problem, as you seem to infer? I think not.

   For 27 years I was a roadie. Now, if you had torn yourself away from the backstage hospitality room, stopped thinking up new and creative ways to give that night’s band’s performance a severe drubbing and had let your hands warm up from pearl diving in the free beer vat, you might have noticed something:

   We happened to be working our balls off. In a few cases, ovaries, too.

   The single most thankless job on the planet(Except if you work for Springsteen or Garth) is as a crew dog. The management abhors you. The record company pukes want to have you eradicated. The promoter considers you a necessary evil. The agency considers you somewhere between secondary and tertiary syphilitics. Apparently, we didn’t score much higher with the rock critics.

   The People Who Actually Work are not the problem. They will be forming up sides, for a pickup hockey game in hell, before a “pop star” sets up one bit of his or her own equipment. Are they gonna climb the wire ladder and focus their own lights? Are they gonna go up into the steel at the top of arenas and set the hanging points for their lights and PA? Sweet Bleedin’ Jesus on a Garage Creeper, many of them cannot tune their own instrument. Some can’t wipe their own asses. Literally. Exhibit A: Nico. Ask Giorgio about that one.

   I gave 27 long years of literal blood, literal sweat and literal tears to the music biz. Some gave more: their lives. Yes, some died on the job. None of us got rich. All so you would have fodder for your weekly prose, the agencies and management could take their points, the record company could stretch the envelope of creative accounting regarding the artist’s account. And all of you considered the crew dogs, at the best of times, strange and perhaps leprous.

   Now, a digression: After I left the music biz, I worked for a while as a Psychiatric Case Manager. I was pretty damn good at it too. I got great job reviews and a lot of praise for the improvements in the stability and situation of my client roster, which was every problem child they had. The people that none of the other case workers wanted, I got. One day, one of the other case workers asked me: “Why are you so good at this? I spent 4 years in college learning this and you are better than me!”

   My answer: “That’s because I worked my whole life in the music business. Being a roadie is just like the case manager gig, except the people you take care of and work for appreciate your efforts a lot more”.

   I might also add that in a lot of cases, the psychiatric consumers are a lot nicer people, too. And they generally make a lot more sense.

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