Wednesday, May 19, 2004

VJCental.com Community Site for VJs by VJs - VJCentral.com. "Welcome to VJCentral.com, a community site for VJs by VJs intended for newbies who want to learn how to create live visuals as well as for experienced VJs looking for inspiration, advanced tips and or other fellow VJs." [unmediated] 6:43:48 AM

Ottmar's Comment A CD is a CD is a CD?. You can buy a table at Target for a hundred bucks and you can buy a well-made designer table for 20 or 30 times more money. There are a lot of pretty obvious reasons why the Target table is cheaper. Quality of design, quality of material, quality of labor, volume built. Now let's look at music and the CD: just because a CD is a CD is a CD and all of them cost roughly the same amount to make, does not mean that it's value or price should be the same, and yet we have certain pricing expectations. With music there are simply less objective elements available...quality of design or composition, quality of material or recording quality, quality of labor or performance, volume built...most of them are not as obvious as comparing a WalMart table to a Le Corbusier table. Some people come up with funny ideas. Last week I read about a Harvard professor who suggested taxing all music players (CD players, mp3 players, blank CDs etc.) and dividing that money between all artists, depending on their popularity. Presumably music itself would be free and available, and the musicians would get paid from the tax levied on players...How would an artist's popularity be measured? Amount of downloads? A combined value of paying audience members over a year and downloads? Radio play? TV appearances? A combination of all of the above? The fact is that we are all looking for a new relationship with music and the business of music and nobody has found the holy grail or even come close - yet. I think a decade will pass before a real workable solution is found. [Ottmar Liebert] 6:40:37 AM