Beck and James Lidell are skipping the District. Not that I mind too much, given that Lidell is not so great and tickets are sure to be hefty. Oh, plus I would have to deal with the city’s surplus of young professionals. To swipe from the ever observant Soviets, our corporate and federal comrades have exceeded their young professional quotas around here.
Also missing out on the stand-and-talk crowds of DC is Radiohead.
Okay, so we do not know when a tipping point will happen until after the fact, but I have seen a couple of stories recently of bands uniting to counter the RIAA’s handling of downloadable music.
A more informative post about the packaging costs lawsuit can be found in a subsequent post on the same site (Digital Music News). Here are the main issues, as copied and pasted from part of the post:
1) Sony pays royalties on only 85% of total sales of “phonorecords”. The 15% fee is for “breakage”. I.e. Sony and the artist have agreed to assume that 15% of the produced product will be unsaleable for damage during shipping, packing, and display. There is no shipping, packing or display in the conventional sense for digital downloads.
2) Sony deducts a 20% fee for “container/packaging charges”. Container and packaging charges aren’t associated with digital downloads.
3) [ Sony reduces ] “its payments by a further 50% “audiofile” deduction”. I’ve not been able to find any explanation of what this “audiofile” charge is.
I have a couple of RIAA posts in the hopper (as the bl-ids say).
NPR’s music site always amuses me. They just posted an audio review to Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale. I can imagine the older listeners being confused and annoyed, the old listeners trying to intellectualize Ghost, and the young listeners thinking they are cool because they can now talk about the album when their not (indie) label droppin’.
In any event, the review is not worth listening to (and the album is not all that great, especially compared to Supreme Clientele and Pretty Toney Album; although, the interview with Rza by Terry Gross that is linked to on the site is worth listening to, just to hear Gross beg to be cool). However, the site is still worth keeping tabs on, assuming you can handle the indie-biasness and forced hipness of the whole thing. Some of the people NPR have working on the site are people/heads NPR brought in because of their knowledge and quality.