amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
You've been doing your research, haven't you? Seeing that you've already suggested having graduated with a degree in computer something, you sure know a whole lot about the record biz LOL it's all interesting, nonetheless.
I went to school for a short bit for comp sci. At the ripe age of 26 dealing with kids just getting out of high school... That didn't last long. Nor did being relegated to asking for permission to take a piss. I had just been out of school for a bit longer than I think should have.
When it comes to business there are a variety of things that all businesses have in common. I can look at the industry at a complete distance, and go "ok here's some monday morning quarterbacking, but I think it fits."
The one fundamental thing keeps coming back, is if the software industry ran their businesses like the record industry runs theirs. They would have folded and gone to shit a long time ago. I'm talking about the majors here.
Their entire existence rides on a bit of monopoly in contacts and resources, and how they wield them. That and they sue the fuck out of whoever they want to. They don't make money off of the litigation. It does allow them to wield prior litigation like a big fucking axe.
You want out of your contract, and we don't? Fuck you, you either do what we say, or we sue you out of fucking existence.
You want out of your contract and we don't? Yup you can go, but you can't record shit under the band name you signed with us on. You delivered three albums, you owe us six.
Or they just pay you shit. I think I read somewhere that TLC was literally fucking broke, after having massive success on an album due to the way the label structured their deal. They were going on a world tour, but couldn't afford to get groceries.
In some respects, with the US Supreme Court has liberalized how RICO charges are able to be brought I think you could safely bring at least a few record label execs up on criminal charges.
Another reason when I read about Malm, the little fucker deserved to be punted out the window. There are hundreds if not thousands just like him.
I think the best education you can ever get in business is figuring out how Enron's balance sheets worked. They would take a sale that would pay out over time, perform "mark to market accounting that would take that sale's projected revenue over time and put it down upfront in a single quarterly result. It drives your stock sky high because it looks like you've made an amazing haul for the quarter. The problem becomes to continue that stock growth you have to do the same shit repeatedly.
Mark to market still happens, every day. You can usually see it in companies filings just by looking at historical numbers of the company itself and across industry competitors.
After that Enron decided to create tons of shell corporations. The part where they were so fucking arrogant was when they named them "Death Star" and so on. You then take the debt that's on your books, and dump it onto the shell corp and wow your balance sheet looks fucking clean as a whistle. The only problem there is that debt is a ticking fucking timebomb and the only way to hide accumulated debt in that manner is to keep doing it repeatedly, in ever increasing numbers. Enron had regulators, fuck even W while he was still governor in their pockets. Their breached their fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and boy did it fuck *everyone* when the house of cards came tumbling down.
So in that sense all the numbers that bore the fuck out of other people, are insanely interesting to me. Am I some kind of like uber investor, record industry insider, or business guru? Nope. You just look for the cracks and problems, and you find them pretty quickly when you know where to look.
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
Confession: I looked up the bands you mentioned. I will respecfully say I despise that kind of music, my heart's in trip-hop/electronica/New Wave, which brings me to HTDA...
Long ago I gave up trying to convince people the merits of metal. You either hate it and think it's pure shit. Or you love it. There is just no middle ground there. It's also a ridiculously conservative genre. Try finding an album that doesn't use copious amounts of double bass... good luck
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
You've been doing your research, haven't you? Seeing that you've already suggested having graduated with a degree in computer something, you sure know a whole lot about the record biz LOL it's all interesting, nonetheless.
I went to school for a short bit for comp sci. At the ripe age of 26 dealing with kids just getting out of high school... That didn't last long. Nor did being relegated to asking for permission to take a piss. I had just been out of school for a bit longer than I think should have.
When it comes to business there are a variety of things that all businesses have in common. I can look at the industry at a complete distance, and go "ok here's some monday morning quarterbacking, but I think it fits."
The one fundamental thing keeps coming back, is if the software industry ran their businesses like the record industry runs theirs. They would have folded and gone to shit a long time ago. I'm talking about the majors here.
Their entire existence rides on a bit of monopoly in contacts and resources, and how they wield them. That and they sue the fuck out of whoever they want to. They don't make money off of the litigation. It does allow them to wield prior litigation like a big fucking axe.
You want out of your contract, and we don't? Fuck you, you either do what we say, or we sue you out of fucking existence.
You want out of your contract and we don't? Yup you can go, but you can't record shit under the band name you signed with us on. You delivered three albums, you owe us six.
Or they just pay you shit. I think I read somewhere that TLC was literally fucking broke, after having massive success on an album due to the way the label structured their deal. They were going on a world tour, but couldn't afford to get groceries.
In some respects, with the US Supreme Court has liberalized how RICO charges are able to be brought I think you could safely bring at least a few record label execs up on criminal charges.
Another reason when I read about Malm, the little fucker deserved to be punted out the window. There are hundreds if not thousands just like him.
I think the best education you can ever get in business is figuring out how Enron's balance sheets worked. They would take a sale that would pay out over time, perform "mark to market accounting that would take that sale's projected revenue over time and put it down upfront in a single quarterly result. It drives your stock sky high because it looks like you've made an amazing haul for the quarter. The problem becomes to continue that stock growth you have to do the same shit repeatedly.
Mark to market still happens, every day. You can usually see it in companies filings just by looking at historical numbers of the company itself and across industry competitors.
After that Enron decided to create tons of shell corporations. The part where they were so fucking arrogant was when they named them "Death Star" and so on. You then take the debt that's on your books, and dump it onto the shell corp and wow your balance sheet looks fucking clean as a whistle. The only problem there is that debt is a ticking fucking timebomb and the only way to hide accumulated debt in that manner is to keep doing it repeatedly, in ever increasing numbers. Enron had regulators, fuck even W while he was still governor in their pockets. Their breached their fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and boy did it fuck *everyone* when the house of cards came tumbling down.
So in that sense all the numbers that bore the fuck out of other people, are insanely interesting to me. Am I some kind of like uber investor, record industry insider, or business guru? Nope. You just look for the cracks and problems, and you find them pretty quickly when you know where to look.
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
Kudos to Trent & Co. for branching out and experimenting, but I simply don't like it thus far - and I definitely wouldn't be so shallow as to attribute my initial reaction to the music to the fact that the Q is part of the project, or that it was too NINish, or not NIN enough
That earns you a couple of points
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
The wonderful thing about the type of music they've chosen to experiment with is that vocalists don't have to be super skilled to succeed just as long as they have a style all their own.There are simply too many versatile and talented female musicians who are more than just dabbling to "become famous", and can't/will not rely on nepotism, and are actually willing to work to get their sound out there.
And.... there go all the points. Judging from interviews, Trent being what appears to be a perfectionist. I'm positive this had nothing to do with nepotism. I'm certain there was a lot of conversation over it, and some of that conversation was this album. They dug it, it felt right to them, so they let the world in on it.
A tangential example here, I don't make music, I don't think I could find a way to do it if I had someone screaming "PUT THAT CHORD RIGHT THERE". When it comes to development, a couple of my friends are damned good developers. We worked together on a project or two, but all of us being assholes in our own ways, agreed that it didn't work right. However, that was our decision and it was based on our view of the quality of our output. It's a very easy thing to take a high gloss view of an app and go "wow that's shitty it doesn't have feature 'x'" And that's fine, but if we're on oh I don't know on a beta rev, I could give a fuck if feature x is implemented. I want to make sure features that are there already feel good, are solid before I go off the deep end and go for adding random 'x' features.
That's a horribly imperfect analogy, but it's the closest I can get. It just feels like the same kind of bit. "OK let's together and see what happens". That was the expectation they set for themselves. They delivered on it. Explained what the expectation was, and detailed that they were working on a full length album for early(?) 2011.
Also, as far as I can tell every single person in California who is in a music scene tend to feel like this:
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
"There are simply too many versatile and talented female musicians who are more than just dabbling to "become famous"
The one thing that I've noticed about the west coast music scene is that because you marry x, or quit band y to go do band z. Somehow you're a: "sellout", "a piece of shit", "not in it for the music" and so on. If you want to see the people that actually fit in that category, turn on American Idol. Bullshit streamed live to your TV courtesy of guess who? Big ass labels, and big ass TV networks that LOVE ad revenue.
This is where I like the death/metal/thrash community. Band members swap between bands like fucking hot potatoes. It's rare to see an interview with some metal band that has lost members attributable to anything more than "meh, we didn't like 'em in the band", or "he wanted to go do some solo stuff", or "we're changing the direction of the music and he didn't like it". And that's what fans attribute it to as well, largely.
Attribute it to the metal ethos or whatever it is, but still. When I go to like a, oh I don't know, Shadows Fall show... I can randomly walk up to a group of people standing inside or outside the venue. Fire off a couple pleasantries and immediately start having, usually, a pretty kick ass chat just about anything. Usually it starts out with the rattling off of bands, trading bands you should check out and after that much fucking laughing about whatever. The only fucking dicks are the idiots who got fucking shitfaced, and come to the show with a hard on to fuck with people. Those people typically get chucked early.
You throw in some popularity and shit seems to change in the perception of what you do from there on out. Simple explanations suddenly seem completely fucking sinister.
MQ:"to be honest, being a professional singer was never a dream of mine, wait, that’s a lie, in the 8th grade i wanted to do broadway but in high school i realized i didn’t enjoy musical theatre that much. professionally, i wanted to be a buyer/stylist/personal shopper but after a couple of years at a fashion institute, i became very uninspired & lost. i stumbled into singing a year later & used the opportunity to overcome my severe stage fright. ta-da."
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. In 8th grade I wanted to be, a pilot. By the end of my freshmen year in high school I wanted to be a lawyer. In my sophomore year, after a teacher told me "you are never going to make money on the internet", well shit I wanted to become a programmer. That last bit stuck. So I got there a bit earlier than someone else. But, at the very least I can understand it.
I spent a lot of time high school, doing just about every geek type of speaking that you could think of. Four years of it actually, and then a year of coaching it after I graduated. I was very much "well just go up there and talk". People would lock up and drop out of the program. It sucked, they were smart people did amazing with just me or a couple other people in the room. Throw in 30 listeners, other speakers and an opponent, bam, they were done. So I've seen the pain in the ass part if you don't come to public speaking/performing easily. I also have no strategies or tips to get over it. So I'm worthless in the advice department there.
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
Seven, it just seems like she doesn't care about the craft - you know, the music - it's just a means to an end to her, and artistically speaking, it's quite upsetting. More importantly, that's why some people have gone on to question Trent's motivation, and whether he was ever in it for the tunes, or whether it was always just "a means to an end" for him as well - copy random beats and doctor them enough to make them his own and moan and scream over them to pay the bills.
The problem I think with the reasoning there is you're ignoring the pasts. Trent worked as a fucking janitor in a recording studio. If anything the jobs he did work were the means to the end of making music. So he went in DIY, at night, after he got off work and put in time on demos. Apparently, whoever ran the studio was cool by that. Something, I highly doubt, would fly now. Hence my obsession with the musicians co-op thing. Continuing on, so he went out did shows busted his ass doing the stuff he wanted to do. If he was in it for the money, he wouldn't have been putting out PHM. At that point, on Billboard in 1989 your big hits were:
02 Chicago - Look Away
03 Bobby Brown - My Prerogative
04 Poision - Every Rose Has Its Thorn
05 Paula Abdul - Straight Up
06 Janet Jackson - Miss You Much
07 Paula Abdul - Cold Hearted
08 Bette Midler - Wind Beneath My Wings
09 Milli Vanilli - Girl You Know It's True
I do not see anything there that PHM could even slot into. If he was out there to just make money he would not have recorded PHM.
Apparently to sing now, bands accept fucking resumes and applications. Which in some respects has to be more of a bitch than starting out when Trent did. If Mariqueen wanted cash and money she wouldn't have found and gone in with an indie band off of Astralwerks and done the club circuit. She wanted to make music. And since she had the nefarious impetuousness to meet a guy and fall in love with the dude. Man everything she did before that is leading up to her ascendancy to blah blah. I mean I can't even write it. It sounds that retarded to me.
Every musician that I've met has started out busting their asses, doing thankless gigs that pay shit and have been in it for the music. Then again you're not going to see me at a meet and greet hanging out at a Backstreet Boys show.
And the wild thing is, apparently getting out making music and performing was more important than dealing with shitty gigs, gear and cruising around in a van. I classify those kinds of gigs as that, because I've been to gigs where there's like 10 people there and you feel for the band.
Musicians I think sit and go "holy shit there was this horrible gig...". But, largely a gig is a gig starting out. Later on if you get some degree of success, you get to say "OK, playing 45 minutes without soundcheck sucks for us and for anyone who would show up, so let's try to do as few of those as possible"
I mean you want to talk to me about Mariah Carey marrying Tommy Mottola go for it. But this? pfft.
As far as caring for the craft. I'm deadly honest here, I have no idea what that means. It sounds a wee bit ambiguous and highly subjective. Then again, caring about the craft of programming is just writing solid code.
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
I've tried to explain my opinion as explicitly as you've explained yours, so you see I'm not just a blindly envious naysayer like I've come to see you're not just a shameless asskisser.
Yup, and a decent chunk of it comes across as you being an asshole. But, from the reverse perpsective I'm sure a good chunk of mine comes across as being a self-indulgent arrogant asshole. So I think in a certain sense, while it doesn't excuse either of us being assholes, it certainly balances it for people from either side. Or hopefully it does.
amouthfulofsin220 wrote:
Very true, but maybe Trent & Co. might find her to be a blessing in disguise, since she might shame this "epic" thread and the Twitter trolls into extinction.
The one thing about doing stuff, making waves is that there will always but that fuckwad that goes out of their way to try and make your life as annoying as fucking possible.
The scary thing is, sludger isn't the worst. There are far, far worse. But, still sludger is literally the worst fucking prick I've seen on here and if she's chilling with whoever is on the twitter troll accounts then they're fucking pricks too.
People can say whatever they want to. But some of this shit, "miscarriages" wtf are you kidding me? If someone walked up to me and said that shit to me in person it would piss me off no matter who it was. About 8 years ago a friend and I had a party one night. One of the dudes girlfriend's had a miscarriage and he was busted up bad about it. We barely knew him, recognized the name. But, still it was intense and we were at least trying to calm down about it.
Then some fucker comes in and starts cracking retarded fucking jokes about abortions and shit. Honest to god there have only been a few times in my life when I've been that fucking angry. He got cocky, we threw him down a stairwell and called the cops to come pick him up and take his ass to the hospital.
I have since mellowed out significantly. But, fuck some of this shit in here is just so beyond the pale, you just wonder what human being goes "blah blah blah miscarriage". Apparently someone who has never had kids, never been pregnant, never been married and probably hasn't been laid in a loooonnnngggggg fucking time. I sure as shit don't believe in God, but if there was ever a point where I could go "you know God, throw this motherfucker a curve ball" this would be one of them.
