Monday, July 08, 2002

The Internet Debacle: An Alternate View Janis Ian writes: I stated that I planned to adopt the viewpoint of devil's advocate: free Internet downloads are good for the music industry and its artists. ... Let's take it from my personal experience. My site (www.janisian.com ) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded Society's Child or At Seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But… that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn't include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows. ... in the hysteria of the moment, everyone is forgetting the main way an artist becomes successful - exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, no one buys CDs, no one enables you to earn a living doing what you love. Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money. So I make the bulk of my living from live touring, playing for 80-1500 people a night, doing my own show. I spend hours each week doing press, writing articles, making sure my website tour information is up to date. Why? Because all of that gives me exposure to an audience that might not come otherwise. So when someone writes and tells me they came to my show because they'd downloaded a song and gotten curious, I am thrilled!  (07/08/02)  Has There Ever Been a Paradigm Shift? Arthur Young wrote: Suppose I were to present a plate of food to a child to eat, and the child were to turn the plate upside down, spilling the contents about, and proceed to separate it into different ingredients -- to count the peas, etc. We have been given this marvelous world to experience, but science prefers to analyze it -- a worthy undertaking, but it becomes absurd if the food is not eaten. Analysis may be food for science, but this doesn't mean that the eating of the food should not be included in the theory. So this is my main thesis. Science describes and analyzes the world, finds out the laws of its behavior, but it never occurs to theoretical science that the law of cause and effect can be applied and used for our own benefit -- communication, transportation, all machines -- using the laws of nature to increase our freedom. This cannot be dismissed as mere application and anthropomorphic, because all life does the same. Plants control their metabolism to achieve growth and reproduction; animals learn mobility and are able to achieve short-term goals (including some long-term goals such as migration). This is not just technology; it is the basis of life. (07/08/02) Stop! I want to get off. Guardian Unlimited -- Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week. A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. ... Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. ... The WWF report shames the US for placing the greatest pressure on the environment. It found the average US resident consumes almost double the resources as that of a UK citizen and more than 24 times that of some Africans.  (07/08/02) Too Much Water -- Texas Style Washington Post -- Hundreds of people fled west Texas towns Saturday as a storm dumped more than a foot of rain on an area that rarely sees more than 2 feet a year, while rainfall tapered off in flood-weary central Texas. With thunderstorms and locally heavy rain forecast through the middle of this week, it was unclear when thousands of evacuees would be allowed to return home. One evacuee, Erik Lyon, had moved to New Braunfels since the town's 1998 flood and didn't expect that to happen again, but on Saturday he sat on a cot at a Red Cross shelter in the central Texas city checking ads for homes on higher ground. ... New evacuation warnings were made Saturday for residents in three small towns and part of Abilene, where Big Elm Creek had swelled to 23 feet above flood stage. "We're really not sure how bad it's going to be, but the worst is yet to come," said Abilene police Sgt. Kim Vickers. The town has about 116,000 residents. (07/08/02) Back To The Future CNN MONEY -- If we set the controls of the Way Back Machine (come along, Sherman) to the last time the S&P 500 closed so low, we come out at Jan. 13, 1998. The first two weeks of the year have been rocky and investors are still fretting about the Asian financial crisis that began in the fall of 1997. Worries that overseas turmoil will infect our economy, ending the long expansion, are running high. But for all the jitters back then, a cursory glance suggests that investors were willing to pay more for stocks back then than they are now. The S&P was trading at 18.8 times what analysts thought its component companies would earn over the next year. Now the P/E is 17.6.  ... The upshot is that if you liked the market then, you should love it now. But investors have been getting out of stocks faster than Martha Stewart can run from a TV camera crew.  (07/08/02) 6:15:33 AM

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