perfidy

Four years after being kicked to the curb by the label he founded-- Arista Records, superstud Clive Davis finds himself back in the saddle as head of the North American music operation of BMG, owner of Arista. His erstwhile successor, L.A. Reid, has been ousted by the accountants due to an inability to make money off multiplatinum acts such as Pink.

(How do you not make money off of Pink's second album? That shit was everywhere, and I guarantee you her contract is not that favorable to her own interests. L.A. screwed up bad.)

Look at my last post about Tower Records, then read the story about Davis and see if you can spot the trouble. Back? Ok.

What seems like good news for Clive now could turn out to be not so good for anyone else. The major labels are in the same trouble the major retailers are, which is why BMG and Sony are in talks to merge their music operations. Obviously Davis has been brought on board to guide the music unit through the merger, and about the time the whole thing comes crashing down he'll semi-retire with millions of dollars and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

"What", you say? I say this: Sony and BMG are merging their music wings out of desperation because recorded music has ended its fifty-year run of profitability. Sooner or later there will be one or two major labels releasing 90% of the high-charting albums in the US and all the interesting stuff will happen around the giants' feet. The majors will still put out Britney and No Doubt and P.Diddy, but the interesting stuff, the good music for music's sake will happen even more exclusively in basements and garages, shabby offices, and out of the trunks of cars. Music will become local, and scenes will communicate via the inter-web. The transition will be ugly: radio will suck worse, the RIAA will kick like a mule with the DT's, mainstream distribution channels will become closed to smaller-name labels and bands, and great artists will be dropped like a sack of hammers. But the outcome will be great: awesome music, there for the taking for cheap or free, if only you know where to find it.

GeekLethal has tipped me off that Tower Records will finally seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, having run out of time, credit, and willing buyers.

Tower is the victim of several forces: the overall decline in recorded-music sales over the past five years; an ill-timed expansion just as sales peaked; rumors of poor financial management; and an inability of management to respond to the changing marketplace. The sow is smaller, and Tower is now sucking hind teat. So to speak.

Some of you may remember that Tower faced bankruptcy a couple years ago and had to close a few of its trademark superstores. By selling off their Japanese division and closing some US branches, they managed to stay alive, but at a cost. I personally felt the loss acutely, because the Tower Records on the corner of Newbury and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston was my dealer of choice of deep-catalog jazz and world music.

And that's the crying shame. Alone among the big stores, Tower was dedicated to carrying extensive back catalogs and relatively obscure artists along with the Top-40 glitz. They always had a wide selection of Jimmy Smith recordings produced by Rudy van Gelder, for example, and usually had a number of Sun Ra's less orthodox offerings as well. Unglamorous music, but wonderful stuff I was happy to buy. Unfortunately for Tower, these days such diversity on the retail side simply means tying up more capital in slowly-moving stock and eventually it killed them. Nowadays it just doesn't pay to carry the weird stuff.

Paradoxically, the opposite may hold for record labels. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolutions points to the bloodbath currently happening in the classical-recording world. All the big labels are shuttering their classical units because the cost of producing yet another recording of Mahler only to sell four thousand copies has now become outrageous. And yet the small labels offering weird music (Boulez, Xenakis, Scriabin) thrive.

What does this all mean? As Cowen says, "Let's not confuse 'good for the suits' with 'good for the consumer.' Big chains like Tower may go the way of the dodo, but that just means the model is dying, not the business underneath.

Six day old blog Siberian Light lets us know what those wacky Japanese are up to. Apparently, turning entire Chinese luxury hotels into giant orgies is not enough. The kinky Japs have taken this show on the road. (The soundtrack for the video would have to be Soul Coughing's Bus to Beelzebub.)

One would think that the police crackdown would have forced other orgy organizers in the metropolitan area to go underground, but that's apparently not the case. ...one organizer decided to go public, so to speak, by offering a completely new thrill: He chartered a bus, staffed it with hookers from the pink trade, solicited male participants, and then proceeded to run two-hour circuits of the city's while the male and female passengers emulated the same rush-hour crush they undergo on the morning commuter trains --- while completely naked and horizontal.

For his 30,000 yen [ $284.38 ] tour fee, the reporter claims he exhausted his supply of condoms, having made it with four different females during the two-hour tour. "A bargain," he remarks with a grin.

Indeed.

Abdul Khan, who just the other day confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, has been pardoned by President Musharraf. (hat tip: National Security Blog.)

Needless to say, many people will be a little miffed that Khan is getting off so lightly. Khan is a national hero, the father of the Islamic bomb. Musharraf was likely in a tight spot with this one, but I can only hope we get some useful intelligence out of this.

Over here, you can get your very own Hoser ID Card. Just like mine: 

Be afraid, be very afraid:

Li'l G n'R

I could list out the specific policy tests I'm referencing and not go down the "incompetent" route. I guess I should do that; it's only fair that I do that. Conclusions need to be held.

But:

1. You are giving the politicians credit for winning a war. The military did that; the politicians don't do anything more than point the direction. This is a wash. We don't judge on the success of the war. We judge on the underlying reasoning.

2. You characterize the economy as "improving". Well, for who?

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots

Apparently not for anybody who isn't a major-league investor. The scariest thing about the chart is that is does NOT reflect the jobs that were lost DURING the recession...so we are way behind where we were.

Why is this recession not generating any jobs or increases in wages for average americans? That is the big question.

The GOP answer is: Just wait -- you'll see. It'll work.

I think we just handed a huge chunk of social security money to the investment class in this country so we could create jobs for regular people. They took the money, and there's nothing to show for it. What is the time frame on tax stimulus, anyway? We certainly can't go by the estimates given by the GOP on when we'd see jobs created. _Every_ one of those estimates has turned out to be pie in the sky. Every Bush budget, for that matter, has been pie in the sky.

Given the failure (or at a minimum, dramatic underperformance) of the supply-side tax approach, what is an appropriate response?

I read somewhere today that the very richest amongst us have more or less convinced themselves that tax cuts for the wealthy really are the best way to gernerate growth.

How should we test whether or not this is true?

I'll write a little more in the next day or two, describing specific points of evaluation. I find this process interesting; I wrote a while back on the "Concerned Citizens Primer". It's time for Buckethead to make his case, and me to make mine.

I must confess that I don't like 9/11 being used as a catch-all excuse for every mis-step.

Ross and others might be interested in this.

James at Outside the Beltway has a comprehensive roundup of commentary about yesterday's primaries and caucuses. Lots of good "what does it all mean" to chew on.

The same two Cubans who tried to reach America with a floating Chevy flatbed truck are trying again with a 1959 Buick.

Marciel Basanta Lopez and Luis Gras Rodriguez, who were sent back to Cuba in July after they failed to reach Florida in a converted 1951 Chevy pickup, were allegedly at the helm of the newest vehicle-boat conversion... Relatives in Cuba told Basanta's cousin, Kiriat Lopez, who lives in Lake Worth, that they knew the men were planning a second escape attempt. "My cousin isn't crazy. He wants to be free," Lopez told the newspaper. "That's how crazy he is."