Note I realize the following essay is comparatively long- but I'm saying things once, in detail, so I don't to keep keep explaining things every time a situation crops up.
Plus, if you're not interested in this material you probably won't make the grade anyway as far as working with us and it's best we don't waste each others time.
In retrospect, after having finished the following I recall the complaints of CEO's about having to spend all their time putting out fires and thus never getting to do any real planning. I'm dubious about that but in any case it does seem that nowadays. unless you're on the lucky side of the fence I have to spend much more of my time in a defensive posture then I'd ever expected to.
I don't mind the game aspects of it, but the cost in terms of things that don't get done that could get done is massive.
I don't mind the game aspects of it, but the cost in terms of things that don't get done that could get done is massive.
But I digress....
WeB MEdia Business Environment
Oct 2011
Part One = the larger picture
"Just because you call a Fox a Hound
doesn't mean it's going to stop stealing chickens"
The following is an update on the options we have at present concerning the relative states of the big three in the marketplace - Apple Google, Amazon.
One of the hats I have to wear in order to survive in this very unfriendly business environment is of research analyst - it's not as much fun as chasing women - but at least I can trust the advice.
First off - a little chaos theory - One of the things chaos theory does well is explain population densities. In a nation there's the largest city, then three or four major cities, then many many intermediaries - this rule holds true regardless of the overall size of the nation. The same holds true in business where invariably after awhile you get a few leaders and a lot of suppliers and etc. It's a rule.
And I am not anti-business. I have a fairly clear understanding of what has happened and why - but this is not to say that the present system is not, if not broken, then at least malfunctioning. The checks and balances are not working, obviously and as to whether we call something criminal which is not covered by the law - this is not my concern.
I'll even agree with the conservatives that government doesn't always work they way it should, but when something is broken you don't just abandon it - you fix it. That is the bottom line.
Let's review a sad but all too typical case. It's the late nineties, optimism about the internet is beginning to wear thin. Tens of thousands of startups are in limbo. In media, which is what I know best, people were waiting to see if like newspapers and radio, local outlets would be able to serve the needs of the public. What everyone was waiting for was to see what the big companies were going to do.
What they did is they sat on their hands and did nothing. In media we were waiting to see what Time Warner was going to do. What happened is the president of T/W Gerald Levin and the president of AOL, Steve Case cooked up a back room deal where they agreed, in a few meetings over dinner, to sell TW to AOL using the inflated stock prices of AOL, which no one in the business thought could last. Those two walked out with a billion and half or so between them and the stock holders of TW, including Ted Turner, were creamed. A few months later the market crashed and hundreds of billions of equity were lost.
That was the end of the so called "new economy." People were upset but nothing was done - because when you give a few million dollars to a political candidate it's not called a bribe, which is what it is, but rather it's called a contribution.
The situation with the Occupy Wall Street movement is being handled expertly - because the winter is coming, soon, and when the snow falls the people camping out are going to go home. But is that a victory?
Turning now to the present situation with us, we were hosted first on Apple I-Disks, then mobile me for ten years, after the collapse of our local ISP. I inquired several times what they were going to go viz iCloud and finally this week we get the specifics and basically they are going out of the business of hosting web sites
To refer to another previous incident, again with the very nasty people at AOL - whenit started they depended a great deal on volunteers to handle the various chatrooms, with each dedicated to a certain topic. People put in months of effort, tens of thousands of hours and then discovered that, after having build communities of people who were knowledgeable, the chatroom were in effect sold to different companies to manage, and the information was utilized to make sales and the people who had managed the chatrooms were out of luck. In the world of crime it's called the bait and switch. You strongly imply, or even promise that certain conditions will apply and then when it suits your purposes, you change them.
I am often astound how when one establishes a long term relationship with another firm, that other firm rather then enhancing the relationship, abuses it. As it happened I got out of the Apple orbit two years ago when the crash came, and realistically Mobile me was not handled correctly because there was no input or special considerations from Apple.
Like with my landlord, I thought that if you paid your bills on time things would get better, instead they have evaporated. Personally one idea that I had that doesn't seem to have crossed anyones mind is a fellowship program where innovative web sites are hi-lighted and hosted free. What would it cost, peanuts, and it would expedite progress. But such is neither here nor there - in part because when you talk to the heavy geeks they don't trust Apple.
Apparently in their wishful thinking the people at google imagine that companies are going hold meetings on line and share things via co-operative computing. Problem number one is what happens when someone sues Google for the information on the hosted cloud site? This is not speculation. This has happened with the Chinese and let's get real, there's a lot of judges and a lot of jurisdictions in the land and to get one to subpoena information is not difficult.
Then there's the issues of security, eg hacking, which lets say you can reasonably control - of course, insiders know that the amount of corporate hacking is far greater then what is admitted to because admitting it kills the stock value.
Lawyers I've spoken with regard these two issues as deal breakers right off the bat.
Next, I feel like Warren Buffet here, but what exactly do you plan to make in these glorified chatrooms? Gee, with google sketch you have a virtual art class, how thrilling. In other words, as the expression goes they are "reaching" - they are looking for things that will make them look as if they have potential revenue sources but haven't we been through that routine enough times?
There's a central principle at work here which has an interesting political antecedent.We no longer seek colonies because rather then take over Tanzania, or India, or Chile which involves getting an army together and all the hard work of maintaining order and infrastructure, after the second world war, trade companies realized that that was too expensive and unnecessary. All that matters was that you controlled the economy and left the education, health and welfare to your puppet regimes. In other words rather then buy the serf, or web surfer, you simply control them.
So banks encourage direct payment systems because it locks the user into long term arrangements and thus they can monkey around with the payment systems with much more freedom.
Google and Apple say they want to build online communities and social environments - but they lie - what they really want to do is create media distribution hubs and get a piece of the action of all content that goes through them. That's where the battle is being fought. Amazon, in it's way is doing the same thing with it's Kindle book reader and the mainline publishing houses are freaking out.Their immediate reaction is to play hardball with any writers that sign deals with Amazon, but that's no long term solution. It may be they wind up being production houses, handling editing and preparations and leave distribution to Amazon. this will leave promotion in Amazons hands as well.
To give Apple a little slack on the I-disk debacle they probably discovered there was simply not enough content and interest in the I-disk/ Mobile me platform to make it worthwhile. People such as myself could argue that we were not given enough support from Apple but as well even had they supported us it still may not have been enough to overcome the lack of capitol that faces most start ups. There were a lot of software writers that had I-disks and then moved to independent hosting, for instance but such businesses face two problems, which boil down to one.
The beast from Redmond (Microsoft) got it's name because of the many small software companies it crushed or bought out. I for one am not a Gates hater. He pays well and is knows his field, which can't be said about everyone running a information age business, but it's in the nature of the beast to appropriate anything of value it sees. These companies can be seen as updated versions of medieval armies that slash and burn and loot everything that stands in their way. To coin a phrase they are mediaevil armies.
It's like the joke they tell in America about free speech. You can say what you want as long as no one hears it, but if you have something that potentially has an audience the hammer comes down in the form of censorship and refusal of large media to publish you. So if you have a limited use free ware app you are allowed to proceed but if it goes beyond a critical level you're either bought out or the large firm will duplicate the app and undercut you in price until you are broke.
As an aside, I have a little cultural baggage that affects my decision making. Germany resisted unification for a long time because there were so many independent principalities, and my Great Grandfather owned, in the US several firms, one of which, a food processing company, he had a chance to sell to A&P foods, but the sticking point was not money or who manufactured the product - it was that A&P ( A supermarket chain) wanted to put the products out on their Ann Page Label, where as my Great Grandfather wanted to retain the family name. so he couldn't sell but fifty years later the firm was sold for far less, for basically the recipies and now exists on the Victoria label.
Let's be honest, since the takeover in 1980 the pop music business ain't what it was. It is censored, it is trivial, and worst of all the cash cow is looking a little thin. So I have to ask if it's worth even associating with these clowns. In Vaudeville for instance there were battles between artists and the theatre chains that went on for decades and eventually the artists won, because films came in and the artist is the constant here - lets not forget that.
A little story for your edification. In 1910 a group of male Vaudeville actors, including Fred Stone (Who you never heard of) formed a a group of about ten and they agreed that if someone screwed them the others would retaliate. The were called "The White Rats" - note that the word Rats when reversed spelled "Stars". Fifty years later when Humphrey Bogart and his pals were hanging out in Hollywood they revived the White Rats mostly to drink, but also because there were some mean bastards around at the time (Red Scare). And those rats became the Rat Pack when Sinatra took it over.
The point I wish to make is that friendship is a good thing.
One might add that in the early fifties Sinatra went through a rough period emotionally and it didn't help that he and the head of his label, Mitch Miller, loathed each other, but Sinatra knew what he was doing, he wanted to work with the best and the result was Capitol records, and his recordings there remain the gold standard for that particular genre.
And in the Google/Apple contest the advantage has to be given to Apple because of all the hardware that's out there. The classic law of the information age is you give the customer the car and then sell the gasoline and replacement parts and mandatory upgrades. The goal of these companies then is to create media distribution hubs.
It is analogous to NBC for instance, getting out of the business of creating programming and relying on independent firms to do that. Along with that, everyone tries to appropriate as much content as possible, Hence Google and Amazon seek to put thousands of "out of copyright" books on line. I don't really have an opinion on said moves or the motives behind them, other then to make the self evident statement that motive is nearly impossible to determine in most cases.
There's a story I've told many times about Tom Edison, who claimed he invented motion pictures - and he did - in the US - but the French claim their guy did it. It's the same with most major scientific breakthroughs that each nation claimes they did it first. But with Edison since he claimed to have invented the motion picture he wanted exclusive control over all motion pictures made in the US for the duration of his patents and presumably those patents could be enhanced and in effect he wanted perpetual control over ever film made.
Since he was Tom Edison he had no problem getting the eastern courts to agree and that became one of the reasons for the movement of the industry to California where the courts were far friendlier to local film makers -who incidentally paid taxes.
I dare say most of us consider this to have been a good thing. This story though hilights two aspects of technological progress that we need to be aware of.
The first is almost psychological. Call it the "crack in the egg" theory. I refer to myself as being in the wasteland for the past thirty years because people not only did not flourish but we didn't even survive in a small way. There's the "Winner take All" which has a specific application involving the fact that when all potential products are always available the best will have a disproportionate segment of the market. To that we can add the "All or Nothing" syndrome. You don't start up a small television station in a major market place. The cost of entry is too high.
The psychological aspect I refer to is that when all the bad things were happening since 1980 the cover story, so to speak, was that it was a done deal - that there was no significant opposition - that everyone was in agreement - which was nonsense of course, but serviceable nonsense because the opposing voices had been systematically eradicated. The few opposed who got through were labeled crazy.
This was why although many people felt unease about for instance the reality of trickle down economics, they kept quiet because they did not want to be considered crazy. As I say it's a psychological effect - the madness of crowds, as they say.
However as soon as the consensus or unanimity of belief is challenged and not refuted all of a sudden it becomes feasible to express doubts and reality, in the form of an economic depression tends to challenge the myth that everything is fine. It was said the Nixon, once thought a conservative, would be by Tea Party standards an ultra liberal. Myself I've gone from the terminally disenchanted fanatic in the wasteland to today when I am practically middle of the road in some quarters.
The technological aspect of this, as I've written about extensively is that, at least in it's inception, technology seems like magic and we tend to disregard the sometimes selfish motives of those who utilize it. In biblical terms, we worship false gods.
The second point concerns perpetuity. Which is to say bad things eventually get taken care, but sometimes eventually is a long time. Most of my adult life here in the northeast has been lived in the shadow of a steadily decreasing standard of living and that is not going to be rectified. To add to Lincoln's saying you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool them for quite a while. The unspoken element of all this is that the effort of corporations, via knowledge and the law, is to tie people into long term relationships as much as posible. If they had their way they'd have us in their debt for perpetuity - much like banks which seek customers that are going to be in debt for as long as possible.
So the battle goes on for information and control. The Tamlinmediaco has survived because we got real small. I hope we haven't been crushed too much. I have, in the past, tried to explain the utter lack of morality of the virtual being, the corporate entity. It won't get better on it own, in fact it will get worse, as it require more extreme measures to maintain control of it's domain.
And ultimately it comes to who's domain we're talking about. They want to own your ass, as the expression goes. I have no doubt in time things will reverse, but we must ask at what cost? At it's most extreme, it the past at least, the cost has been in lives and bloodshed and people ought to consider that when they propose to saddle us with a win win proposition.
But I am a pacifist. What will be lost if we relinquish control of our lives and freedom to our betters? It is a question I prefer not to ask.
"I call's 'em as I sees 'em"
Baseball umpires saying
part two = the local distribution (Primarily of the ALFTUNES, plus a few other things)
I've thought about it, (actually for years) and have come up with the conclusion that we're going to distribute things on the honor system. When I get around to it I'll et up a pay pal account, or some such thing and they who want to and who can afford it can contribute.
I think a dollar for a two sided release is suggestable. For a long time I thought about micropayments as a fair way of people only paying for what they want- but it's just that who knows what they want? Plus there's two philosophical questions; aspects of which other then the honor system I can't resolve.
They are 1) What is this stuff worth? What is the price of a work or art, or likewise what is the price of truth? What is the value of getting into someone else's head and seeing how they think? Furthermore I don't want to be put in the position of having to generate what the Brits call "good value"
We're different from most people in the music business in that we've always taken it for granted as a sort of normal thing to do. It is not in other words divinely inspired art. I think of Mozart who many think was an inate genius and , you know, gifted by the gods, and he himself tried to make people understand that while he had some "receptivity to the musical environment" it was also work. Bach as well insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that anyone could do what he did if they had put in the practice.
Bach was an orphan though and he had a lot of spare time and his family were all musicians - things that helped him on his way.
In any case since my youth I've always thought of songwriting as a craft and not an art, because, honestly I was afraid that should I regard it as a art then whatever inspired it could go away and leave me broke! Only in recent years have I found an added advantage to this way of thinking. I never sought to achieve any magnum opus that would liberate my mind from shackles of illusion. I just do my job day to day and thusfar at least have not found the cause to stop.
To repeat, it's not like I expect anything to change should I create that er, "masterpiece." As Dylan would say, "Everythings gonna be different , when I paint my masterpiece." And if I don't get around to that I hope you love me anyway. And if you don't love me I hope you at least leave me alone.
Obviously there are other factors as well to the question. If production costs increase, eg I start selling DVD's, or putting together live shows - I'm certainly not going to lose money on the deal. Like Wagner before me, incidentally I have ideas about how live presentations should be done.
Anyway, there's a self regulating aspect to this idea. The more bread people give me the more pastries I can make. If people think the stuff is worthless, fine, then I'll just do it on a small level. Would I work for a big company? At the risk of being semantic, no, but I would work with a big company; as long as they are decent? Yes. That said, knowing me, I value having a lot of control over what happens. For instance if, as too often happens, a company says, "You can only put out one major product a year, so as to maximize our return on investment," that's not going to happen.
To some degree it's a case where logical, normal business procedures are stupid and not only that but counterproductive. Just look at Apple for instance. Sculley comes in, does all the normal marketing crap, and the company tanks. Jobs comes in and makes a better product and things get much better.
Remember Tom Peters? His mantra was excellence and every clown on the block repeated it, but they didn't do it, instead relying on little tricks to jimmy the stock prices. Homey don't play that.
The second thing that decided me on going the donation way was that I don't want to be in a position where someone can't hear the songs because they have no money. First off, that's not even possible, because in case you haven't noticed it - intellectual property has taken some valuation hits via the internet. So I'm not being purely altruistic - I'm just not bothering to do what probably wouldn't work anyway. Plus, I can't be bothered. Above all I strive to have the time and space to do what I want. Again you know, what is anything worth? If I were to gig for a large audience I suppose you could say I was worth a twenty grand an hour, like a rock star.
Then as well the old paradigms are about used up. Personally I don't care for arena rock. It's costly to put on. the sound stinks and half the audience only sees you via the screens anyway, The kicker? Why play for an audience of a hundred thousand when online you can play for millions?
Plus there's more. In the college town where I'm living there's a computer collective called Slash/Root and they do a lot of things on a pay what you want basis. Obviously you have to be careful. You can't keep hitting people up for money for one thing. Plus you have to limit the cases where you request funding and have some alternate source of revenue (in this case - computer repairs)
As I indicated when you get right down to it music has it's moments but like any job it requires doing a lot of repetitive tasks. Also it's impossible to tell in the beginning who is going to stay with it and keep learning. When I started out there were many people better at playing and singing then I, but most of them went into other careers. What I had was a huge repertoire of tunes I couldn't perform very well and I knew it was what was for me. I've always loved the pop song. It's a window into other people's world and it makes me feel a little less lonely.
A classic technique, especially in the net, is to make a lot of promises and then work the youngsters for sixty hours a week and then dump them or sell the company - but that won't work for us because we have to be world class.
What is world class? Well, Pat Metheny is world class and Kenny G is not. The best judge of any profession is the peer review and that can be tricky too because you have to have peers on the right level making the call. World class means you advance the art form in some way, not that you just sell a lot of market units. Hopefully you'll do both. Another thing is the better you are the fewer there are who can really judge your abilities.
So it's a good idea to give as many people a chance as possible because it's so hard to tell who's got the real mana. That said you can't expect people to dedicate their lives to your success, especially because the more talented a person is the less Bullshit they will put up with. Then again, experience with rock bands showed me that everyone thinks they are talented and if they can't shut up and do the job you may as well let them go, because they are not suddenly going to understand stuff that's way over their heads.
Again there's the Wagner scenario part two - meaning not only multisensoral projections, but enhanced performance spaces as well. Suffice to say, if you know what I am referring to, we won't provide the incense and other accoutrements though.
I realize that more then fifty percent of what I want to do is directly contrary to what is understood to be successful practices, but what can anyone do to me, fire me?
Next is the matter of what and how much to say. Obviously, since 1980 and MTV there's been a Clampdown on free speech in music and in all forms of media.
I for one, have made a hobby out of complaining about said occurrences. There are two ironies,
One is by obeying their corporate masters the music companies have slit their own throats. People have never listened to songwriters who kiss the ass of the king. It's just not good show Biz. But this is self evident and the fact that I've been virtually blacklisted doesn't really bother me. They don't want to be associated with me and the joke is I don't want to be associated with them. so we agree to dissagree. Maybe they can pay off the congress but they can't bribe the public.
The other irony is that as we know recent times have seen a global movement that has essentially concurred with my complaints of the past thirty years and yet, I don't want to get out in front of this and I'll tell you why.
I know what music can do. I've played enough gigs and seen enough audience reactions to know that it can get people excited. the thing is I'm only human and I make mistakes. I am very cautious about the possibility of sending anybody over a cliff. I mean making a suggestion that people follow that I regretted later.
You have to be a little professional about it. If you're a surgeon, some people are not going to pull through . To some extent you can't control things. A Helter Skelter in England is a playground structure. In the US it means only pandemonium. It's as if the more people listen to what you have to say, the less you have to say.
The lack of specificity on the part of the part of the occupy wall streeters ought be seen in the light of the total lack of transparency on the part of the governments. There was no Snidely Whiplash handing out bills to congress people, it was all done in the shadows so as to assure no one was held cuplable - and if things are to improve then it's going to take some mental readjustment on the part of policy makers.
Nothing is new incidentally. Bert Russels Grandfather was PM of UK in 1848 when minor revolutions swept all europe - the industrial revolution had made the same class distinctions the information revolution has brought. And Bert stated one time that it was well understood that the one thing that made the forces of reaction stand up and take notice was violence in the streets and they hence are quite aware of it, which is one reason why they struggle so hard to prevent even the hint of it appearing.
One could suggest the masses are like Dorothy in the wizard of Oz, not realizing that all they have to do is click their heels and say "There's no place like home."
And finally sometimes one can do well by doing good. I wrote a tech/buisness website for years in the nineties and I saw the same process repeat itself over and over again. The accountants in measuring the value of a company believe that by doing certain things they can make far more money and so the company gets bought institutes a new get tough policy and goes down the toilet.
It happened to Cubase. When Charlie Steinburg, the founder ran it they were at the forefront of innovation, had much of the market and were well situated to keep going for years. They got bought and tightened up the distribution at the same time stopping innovating and now Halion the flagship sampler is almost out of the picture.
Contrast that with Native instruments Kontakt. When they started they looked like amateurs. The GUI on the first sequencer looked like something out of a fifties sci fi movie. Now they own the market because the name of the game in this era is not immediate ROI- it is market share. That's why banks want you to do direct deposit - because it ties you to them and makes it difficult for you to change vendors.
Simply put it takes years to really learn complex applications and if you get attached to one, like I am to Digital Performer, eventually you're going to give them your money.
A I say there are many examples, and conversely there's the CEO who fires thousands, divests branches and looks good to the market. Eg JAck Welch - but the problem is General Electric stopping being an appliance company and became a finance company and when they went bust someone else was left holding the bag.
There are so many examples of this screwed up short term mentality one doesn't know where to start. The music industry found they could make a fortune by convincing people to buy CD's of products already recorded and took a gun to the head of the younger market - the result is well known. They haven't got a clue, even now , after years of failure. And I have no sympathy for them
I banged my head against the wall for years and now my attitude is not to try to educate, or make bad firms change, but to replace them. The arrogance and contempt for the customer evidenced by banks is another case where they perhaps reasonably considered themselves beyond reach. They thought that since they controlled the legislative system they could do what they want- not realizing the power of hatred. At this stage of the story, if push comes to shove the legislators will sell out their erstwhile buddies in the equity markets to save their own skins.
This is not noble, or moral or even inevitable, but it is possible. So let's all try to be friends, shall we?
TAMLIN
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