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The Long Tail is Dead
I don’t mean to pick on Chris Anderson again, but he’s such an obvious cipher for the “Information wants to be free” brigade. Now it turns out that his original “grand theory of everything” called “The...
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2009 Music Hits-WTF?
To give you an idea of what a musical Interregnum we’re in, look at the top selling artists of the year (including Digital sales): Michael Jackson Taylor Swift The Beatles Susan Boyle Lady Gaga Andrea...
View ArticleCopyleft Bullshit
At USC we have students turn their papers in electronically to a system called Turnitin,com. It automatically checks for plagiarism. So what are we to think about the group of German critics about to...
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Censorship Con
A profound reversal in attitudes has taken place in the last twenty years. While in the 1960’s the cries of “freedom” and “liberty” came from Progressives, today it is the right that sees liberty...
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Forty-three years ago I worked for Levon Helm. I was the tour manager for The Band and in my book, Outlaw Blues, I recounted how Levon changed my whole notion of the “cracker”, a name he proudly...
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Rhythms of Life
When I was 20 years old in January of 1969 and a senior at Princeton, I went to work for The Band as their first tour manager. At the time most of the American music that was being played on the FM...
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Guy Time Running Out
Ben Ratliff’s rumination on the Coachella Music Festival raises an important cultural issue and then just drops it. Ratliff wonders if the audience has become more important than the performers–and...
View ArticleA True Artist
We lost Jesse Winchester last week. I’m sad because he was the real deal and not enough people knew that. Robbie Robertson “discovered” Jesse in 1969 when I was working as The Band’s tour manager and...
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EDM Tribes
Last September The New Yorker ran a long piece on the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene in Las Vegas and noted that the top DJ’s were earning $300,000 a night at the biggest nightclub at The Encore...
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Is the Music TV Show Dead?
Fox began airing American Idol in June of 2002 and for eight straight years it was the number one rated TV show in America. It so outdrew the competition that the other networks pretty much gave up...
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