MCChris

Budda? That was, what, 50 amps ago, Jaye?

You should custom order a Standard with those pickups. I'm thinking spruce top.

Seth Justman, J. Geils Band

Totally agree. With Hanson and a series of younger drummers in tow they are better than ever IMO.

IMO it's a combo of Lambert coming up on American Idol and him filling a role once occupied by perhaps the greatest entertainer in the history of rock. Both offend the snobbish sensibilities of music aficionados. Speaking of American Idol, would anyone outside of the industry be using the term "pitchy" if not for that show?

In other words, he was flaming. "Flaming," of course, being derived from the word "flamboyant." Arnel Pineda is no Steve Perry, either. He's better rehearsed because he'd been performing the material in a tribute band for quite a while. And of course Freddie owned the songs. He WROTE the damn songs! The bottom line is that Brian May and Roger Taylor are sharing the stage with Lambert. If he's good enough for them, he's got something going on.

Preach it, brother:

Certainly makes more sense than the pairing with Paul Rodgers IMO.

Nothing tests my faith in mankind more than when lousy things happen to good people. Texted you about the wah. Might be interested in having BBC back also.

Maybe when the ticket prices started eclipsing opera ticket prices? Good point. I'm too broke and too uncouth to be allowed at public events anymore.

Since when did metal concerts and sporting events become akin to attending the opera?

Clearly ELO didn't get the memo when they released "Out of the Blue," a double album of pure crap.

We have that in the states. BMI/ASCAP are the enforcers. The venue should be on the hook for that. Costs should be factored into the rental fee. Same way bar bands don't pay music licensing fees. The bars do.

Yeah, but a lot of musicians made a lot of money and lived quite well without flushing all of it down the toilet. Jim Peterik is a great example. The guy lives LARGE in the Chicago 'burbs off "Vehicle" and "Eye of the Tiger." Few of any people on this forum (or anywhere else for that matter) make more money than their employers. They'd probably be surprised at how small of a percentage they earn compared to their employers. Why should the music industry be any different?

What in blue blazes are you talking about? So all the limos, private jets and Neverland Ranches were just a mirage?

That's always been the case. Now the artists get nothing.

^^^ Very well stated. I've fully embraced digital downloads versus physical copies. I don't need the clutter and my ears are too shot to be super particular about sound quality. With a good pair of headphones, my iPod and iTunes on my PC sound fine to me. Same goes for a good car system. Do I really care about lossless formats with all that ambient noise going on? No. But I'm old school in the respect that if I like a song, I'll buy the entire album. I can count on one hand the times I've been burned by doing so and there was nothing else of value on the release. That's an argument I don't get. Yes, the CD era all but eliminated singles as a viable purchase, but none of the people complaining about albums not having enough good material to justify a full-price purchase strike me as the type who were stocking up on Bobby Sherman 45s. When Zep or Bad Company came out with an album, you bought the whole thing. Even younger listeners who dug Black Flag and the Melvins bought entire albums, because those bands weren't even releasing singles.

Perhaps my tone would have been more respectful if your first reply to my post hadn't been "fuck you." LOL!!!

Similar. Takes a lot more effort to make a cassette copy or burn a CD than to simply click on a link to download a file. File sharing also is much more viral. You can't make hundreds or thousands of cassette copies in a matter of seconds.

So artists should quit feeling entitled to compensation for their creativity, but broke folks should continue to feel entitled to expensive devices, internet connections and data plans that they probably can't afford? Same way an employee is hurt when his boss claims to be penniless that week and informs said employee he won't be paying him.

Again, no one's talking about lavish incomes here. Teachers salaries aren't even being earned by most musicians.

If true, that undermines your argument. If good artists putting out pro-quality stuff is still fairly rare, then it should be easy to separate from the pack and still make money. Not really. How much shit are you willing to wade through in order to get to the beach before you give up and pull yourself up out of the shit? And again, how do musicians make money when consumers aren't willing to pay for music?

No, but it's a lot easier to fly the flag of your business model when it's just a side hobby. Imagine if your main thing was being a plumber, and you truly had a passion for it. But you had to maintain a restaurant gig to pay your bills, because plumbing just wasn't paying enough, and amateurs and freeloaders were undercutting your earning potential. Eventually the job that pays the bills will siphon time and energy away from what you truly love and are good at. Wouldn't it be better if you didn't have those distractions?

Are you a full-time novelist? Exactly.