Tuesday, 18 May 2004

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. 12:08:33 PM  Permanent Link 2 this Entry   It's the Guitar's Fault Along about the third set Tommy Crook came in to see how I was doing, then sat in with his own band on my guitar. It was as if Godzilla had wandered through the club swishing his tail. I realized for the first time that it had nothing at all to do with the guitar. It had everything to do with the guy playing the guitar. He sounded just as overwhelming as when he played his own vintage Gibson archtop. Yet his hands looked just like mine. Lesson #1. Beautiful recollection of the guitar's lessons by Tuck Andress. 10:56:50 AM  Permanent Link 2 this Entry   Lucy I was in New York this week-end to play guitar during the presentation of Richard Holbrook's Lucy at the ICFF. Take a look at Lucy, because she is the future. Inspired by guitar construction, Lucy is much lighter than, and as sturdy as, old-fashioned desks. Best of all, she uses a lot less material... Went to Tao on Sunday evening. I had a reservation for 8:30 and was looking forward to the experience, after friends had spoken highly of Tao's pan-asian food. But I didn't like the vibe, didn't like the music and when we still didn't have a table at 9:10, we bailed and ate at the Lever House instead. The food there was excellent. 10:56:33 AM  Permanent Link 2 this Entry

© Copyright 2004 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 01.06.04; 10:27:30.