I've finally achieved consistency in my life. Any person of average or above intelligence can predict what I will say next with unerring accuracy. And what I say will always be wrong.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Ambassador Locke Picks Up His Own Coffee, still a jerk.

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/08/17/139720794/ambassador-locke-picks-up-his-own-coffee-gains-hero-status-among-chinese

dammit, I dropped the ball, now the comment section is closed. I had planned to say something like this:  "When I was a Washington State employee and Locke was the governor of Washington, I saw him shopping at Safeway on more than one occasion. I wanted to go up to him and offer my opinions of the corruption and nepotism in his administration, and it's inept and reactionary nature.

I never did, but I saw others approach himk in a freindly way, and he shunned them, the way his current boss shuns the ordinary people:  http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/26/the-real-obama/"

I've missed that chance.

__._,_.___
Recent Activity:
MARKETPLACE
A bad score is 598. A bad idea is not checking yours, at freecreditscore.com.
.

__,_._,___

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Innocents pleading guilty

 

Sometimes your show is interesting, but I don't like listening to it because I know that at least once a show you are going to say something absolutely bone-headed, and you don't have an option for people to correct you with a posting on your webpage.

Increasingly, I avoid shows like that - a webpage (particularly for a radio or tv enterprise) that doesn't allow reader comments is like a book without an index or bibliography - if it isn't fiction, it might as well be.

The bone-headed thing you said this time was your astonishment to learn that one person in the US had plead guilty to a crime he didn't do.  There are a tremendous number of people in prison in the US that plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit. People plead guilty to things they didn't do for all kinds of psychological and sociological reasons. There was nothing unusual or unsurprising about anything your guest had to say about what was done to him, his internal processes, etc.

To act as if it only happens in the Soviet Union, or one person in the US is contemptible. By acting like you are so shocked by this one case, you make it appear that the system works in all other cases, which is far from true.  If you wanted to learn something about the subject (rather than just serving the cause of state propaganda), a good place to start might be "The psychology of interrogations and confessions: a handbook" By Gisli H. Gudjonsson

But you don't have to pursue the exotic notion of picking up a book, just use the google. A combination of words like "false, confession, wrongful, conviction" will lead you to a huge amount of resources. I don't think you even tried, which suggests to me that your interest is in serving the cause of state propaganda, so I don't believe I'll be listening to your show any more.


__._,_.___
Recent Activity:
MARKETPLACE
A bad score is 598. A bad idea is not checking yours, at freecreditscore.com.
.

__,_._,___

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Re: Change

 

Hey Bob

My wife and I went to a wedding in Chicago. Due to our frantically busy lifestyle, I had my suit, but no shoes or tie.

Sunday, the day of the wedding, we started hiking around. We went to Nordstroms, seemed like a familar safe haven from my Seattle days.

Shoes:  $195.00
Ties: $197.00

As my friend, the great songwriter Rod Downburst Johnson (I figured you wouldn't mind me dropping the name of a famous person I know, you do it all the time) said, "how is that even possible?"

My wife said we should just take a mortgage out on the house and bite the bullet. I said "No, dammit, I am not going to do it. I have to stand for something, and this is something I won't stand for."

I got a tie from The Gap, they were nice people, they treated me very well, now I'm on their mailing list. I got some perfectly reasonable shoes at a discount place.  I save about $360.

Now what were you saying about how smart Nordstroms is?

And the help behind the desk at Apple's "Genius" Bar are still sub-Howdy Doody.

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 7:41 PM, Bob Lefsetz <bob@lefsetz.com> wrote:

1

I read a "BusinessWeek" article about selling shoes at Nordstrom. Used to be if they didn't have your size, the salesman would get on the phone and call other stores. How eighties you say! And that's what Nordstrom realized, they were losing sales. So they put the chain's entire inventory at the salesmen's fingertips. And on the very first day the system was implemented, the register receipt in one store was 21 feet long, sales had surged. But in order to make this happen, power had to be removed from the merchandisers, who ran their divisions like fiefdoms, who held on to power and information with an iron fist.

Macy's and Saks are still light years behind on this inventory system, but our next story is HP. Carly Fiorina believed success was linked to size. In order to triumph in the marketplace, HP purchased Compaq and soon had the number one market share in personal computers. The only problem was that margins were thin, and there were huge inventory problems and now the new CEO wants to spin off that enterprise. Ms. Fiorina was looking at today, not tomorrow. And she believed scale is the only thing that counts. Scale is important, dominance is not.

Which brings us to the iPhone. Trumped in market share by Android handsets, Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Because the iPhone is uber-profitable, much more profitable than Android, and it's part of an ecosystem, including iTunes and the iPad. Buy one and you buy the other, people are infected by greatness.

And then there's Hyundai. A laughingstock twenty years ago and a dominant player today. They slowly got better and word of mouth turned it around, sold their cars.

And all of the foregoing is an illustration of the sea change in the music business. If you're looking at today, you definitely won't see tomorrow. And tomorrow will be vastly different from what has come before.

The major labels were beholden to the retailers, the merchandisers in the Nordstrom story. As long as they were tied to the past, they couldn't enter the future.

And like HP, record companies believed market share was king, irrelevant of the cost of achieving that scale. They had a pipeline they wanted to fill. Now Jeff Price at Tunecore can do this for bupkes, their advantage has been lost.

Apple knows it's about profit. About creating something so insanely great that people bond to it and keep giving you money. The music business is all short term thinking, like HP.

And Hyundai knows that great products are not developed overnight. It can take decades to achieve success. And great products sell themselves.


2

The sea change the major labels missed out on is the power of the artist. The artist is the epicenter today, just ask a concert promoter, who gives performers the lion's share of the gate receipts, if not all of them. To try and maintain a paradigm wherein you profit while the artist starves is to be locked into a past that no longer exists. We live in an era of transparency, your mobile handset will tell you how many minutes you've used but you can't get an accurate royalty statement, never mind one that's up to date.

And old school artists believe it's all about finding a tit to suck on, someone to pay the bills and play daddy, someone to tell you what to do and give you an allowance. They don't want to be free, they just want to be paid, badly. Whereas new school artists know you must do it for yourself. Scrape up the money to buy a Pro Tools rig, distribute via Tunecore or CD Baby. And sell yourself.

The majors' distribution monopoly has been shot to hell, it's gone.

Their stranglehold on radio and television still exists. But those media mean less than ever before. They're only good for selling the most mainstream, bland stuff, which has the shelf life of a burrito, at best. This market-driven product is expensive to sell and is diminishing in returns. Leaving the landscape open to new entrepreneurs.


3

Acts need development and marketing. That's it. Focus on providing those two.

There will be musical experts who can inspire acts and help them grow, producers, even songwriters who will light the path.

As for marketing, it'll be about giving the public the tools, empowering fans to spread the word. It took a decade to demolish the old CD model, to make streaming de rigueur. It might take as long for radio and TV to become completely marginalized. But they're going, don't let anybody tell you otherwise. As exposers of music they're incredibly inefficient. Why wait all day for the video on the TV or the song on the radio when you can pull it up instantly online?

But the question remains, what to listen to?


4

The money is in telling people what to listen to, being a filter, a trusted authority. It's the MTV of tomorrow.

And it's much more complicated than a Spotify playlist. There's trust involved. And monetization. You're creating an ecosystem as sticky as Facebook. So far, this doesn't exist. Companies don't realize that people don't want everything, just the right thing. That music is human and recommendations must be so. And we're all time-challenged, we're immune to crap and hype.

Which brings us full circle. Those losing power today still believe that crap and hype can triumph.

Those who will win tomorrow know this is not so.

Grandpa is running Sony Music. Major labels want no young 'uns involved. They just want to keep driving until their license is pulled.

If you're starting out today, align yourself with talent. Make yourself invaluable. Be in it for the long haul. And know one success leads to many more, people are looking for great acts and acts are looking for great managers.

But there are few great acts to go around. Sniffing them out will be key. Signing and keeping them will be the next step. And the relationship will be about trust more than contracts.


5

All of the foregoing is going to happen no matter what. Focus on the public, not the industry. The public is leading. The public stole on Napster, embraced MP3s sans copy protection years before the industry acknowledged their dominance. The public finds acts and builds them, not string-pullers. Apple would mean nothing if the products weren't great and no matter how much advertising you do, no one wants a TouchPad or a Zune. Underlying quality is key.

But that's the only thing that won't change.

Quality will become even more important. Along with honesty and trust. The businessman will report to the artist, not vice versa. And the whole system will be reliant on long term bonds with the audience. Even the wii is fading. Fads have a shorter run than ever and it's best to leave some money on the table, to invest in tomorrow. A fan who gets a good seat at a fair price is much more likely to spread the word than one who had to buy from a scalper or had to sit in the back.

Fairness rules in the new world. How come the music business doesn't understand that?

Embrace fairness and you're on your way to success.


--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters,  http://lefsetz.com/lists?p=unsubscribe&uid=88b8678a3d7c42bcbd2e501dabb13042

To change your email address http://lefsetz.com/lists?p=preferences&uid=88b8678a3d7c42bcbd2e501dabb13042




--
Powered by PHPlist, www.phplist.com --







--
I want to play in your town for you and 2 of your friends. 
http://eventful.com/performers/matt-love-/P0-001-000156481-4/demands

__._,_.___
Recent Activity:
.

__,_._,___

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Re: A Band Apart continues with free music for you

 

copied from the Stoli Vodka facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Stoli?sk=wall).  Stoli is behind all this. Now I have no idea what Vodka has to do with Rock and Roll, but anyway, please show your support for Egrigious Artists by clicking "like" my comment, it will increase the odds that this serious problem is fixed.

There's something wrong here. I tried to vote for The Icehole Sailors from Ypsilanti, but they didn't appear on the page. Can you fix this?
a few seconds ago · ·
On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Flavorpill <no-reply@flavorpill.com> wrote:
Vote now to claim your exclusive mixtapes
A Band Apart continues into Round Two with free music for you
Main image Advertisement

Exclusive offer:

Download free mixtapes featuring top contenders

Flavorpill and FanBridge's A Band Apart competition is tearing into Round Two, and that means it's time to claim your free mixtapes featuring the top contenders.

In the first round, you voted on the artists you wanted to see reach millions of new fans and perform at an exclusive blowout Flavorpill event in New York. Now, we've narrowed it down to the top ten in each region, and created a series of one-of-a-kind mixtapes spotlighting their music.

Head over to Stoli's Facebook page to vote in the second round and the free compilations are all yours. After this, only ten bands will remain — and only one will win.

More from Flavorpill this week:

The 30 Harshest Musician-on-Musician Insults in History

NYC Goes From Day to Night in One Frame

TV Characters Who Were Cut from Their Show Too Soon

About this email: We're proud to present this competition with Stoli. Flavorpill Presents is an occasional dedicated email of offers and promotions — perks, contests, and giveaways — with love from our sponsors. Pictured: The Spanish Channel

© 2011 Flavorpill. All rights reserved.
mattlove1@earthlink.net is subscribed to Flavorpill Presesnts. Automatically UNSUBSCRIBE this address. For more information, please read our ANTI-SPAM/Privacy Policy, or contact us at subscriptions@flavorpill.com (HQ: 594 Broadway, Ste 1212, NY, NY 10012).




--
I want to play in your town for you and 2 of your friends. 
http://eventful.com/performers/matt-love-/P0-001-000156481-4/demands

__._,_.___
Recent Activity:
.

__,_._,___

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Re: Amateur Camera News: The Hottest Models, Clearer Than Ever! [4723235]

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.