May 1st, 2008 @ 6:50PM
Well, here is my latest journal. I have written only a half dozen or so "articles" or blogs or journals on line since I got my first website 12 years ago, or since I got "on-line in 1985 with BBS's or 1988 with AOL or prodigy boards, or the "pho" listserv of music industry digerati. I decided to stop after Michael Robertson got read back all his on line pho postings at his deposition in UMG vs. Mp3.com. I sat next to Robertson in court and he was shaking like a leaf. That was before he sold the company to UMG for 375 million. A company that never made any money. UMG screwed it up and sold it for 5 or 8 million or something.
I think that writing lots of personal stuff on the internet is stupid. I see people writing about their jobs, their marriages, their business plans, their politics, for all the world to see, like it was a letter home from camp. A text searchable digital letter home from camp, publicized to the world. I don't get it. I know that the Paris Hilton generation has gotten into internet coitus cell phone movies as a method of meeting people, but I think I value my privacy. And my privates.
BLOGS. WIKI's. WIDGETS. These are moronic marketing words. They piss me off. I was an English major. And a philosophy minor. I can think straight in English. I don't no marketing wizards.
Did you know that Dmusic was the first music social network? I kicked out all the fans. I'd rather be mp3.com improved for collaboration than Myspace. Still do. Oh well. I am not one to chase crowds. I actually got into the internet music thing when Robertson sold Mp3.com. I saw an independent music industry emerge and thought it should be encouraged and preserved, rather than sold to music industry cretins who would kill it. I am not motivated by money, although I have an expensive lifestyle in some respects. Old cars and guitars, mostly. I don't take vacations or go out at night. I am an alpha male on beta blockers, and I own three or four changes of clothes. That doesn't count the college clothes that I still think I should fit into.
I admire Michael Robertson. He admittedly knew nothing about music. He just saw people searching for MP3's. So he bought mp3.com from Marvin Pollock III for $1,000, put up some news and away he went. We was a computer guy. I think he grew up in a trailer park. My father was a doctor. I am a musician and a lawyer (or vice versa, depending on the year). Its interesting to me that mp3tunes, Robertson's latest venture, hasn't much more traffic than Dmusic. See what money does to you?
Robertson is a great on-line writer. He makes me sound like e.e. cummings. I am trying to imagine a context in which this post would be read back at me in a lawsuit. "Mr Feldman, tell us about these old cars and guitars". BTW, If you want to see me play a guitar, search "1964 SG" on youtube. Buh Bye!
ps: Admit it. Isn't it nice to read things where the writer uses PARAGRAPHS! Where the hell is the spell checker? Where's my emoticon?
February 3rd, 2008 @ 10:11PM
August 9th, 2007 @ 12:45PM
August 17 & 18,
2007
The Regency Center
San Francisco
Lawrence E. Feldman, Leflaw.com/Dmusic.com/boycott-riaa.com
Panel: Sue Me, Sue You, Sue Everybody!
Saturday, August 18, 2:10 pm - Lodge Room
Lawrence E. Feldman (Leflaw.com, Dmusic.com, boycott-riaa.com) is an
attorney and musician from Philadelphia with a diverse background in
class actions, the internet, music and intellectual property.
He has been involved in class actions in the music industry such as the
AFTRA pension case, (2001) Sony BMG root kit class action (2006) Mp3.com
litigation(2000), Minimum Advertised Price (map) price fixing litigation,(2002)
and others. He has also represented several persons sued by the RIAA
for downloading.
Mr. Feldman has lectured on entertainment, copyright and trademark
litigation at Temple University. He has also represented well-known
entertainers and companies in the music industry. His law firm,
Lawrence E. Feldman & Associates, is a general civil practice
emphasizing complex commercial and tort litigation, including class
action litigation, consumer rights, computer law, internet law,
medical malpractice, copyright and trademark law, and entertainment
law. Feldman has also represented artists and entertainers in digital
music matters. Feldman has represented artists and entertainers as
diverse as Carl Gardner of the Coasters, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kendricks,
Ruffin & Edwards of the Temptations, Dave Peverette (Foghat), Bill
Keith, Bill Pinkney of the Original Drifters, Clement Dodd (Studio
One), members of Survivor, Toto, the Byrds, and others.
Feldman also is a principle in Dmusic.com and Boycott-riaa.com, two
long standing websites that have served the independent and non-DRM
music movements since 2001.
Mr. Feldman has been involved in several seminal class actions,
including In Re First Pennsylvania Securities Litigation, No. 80-1643
(E.D. Pa.); Bergman v. Sanders, No. 79-3662 (E.D.Pa.); In re Eastern
Sugar Antitrust Litigation, 697 F.2d 524 (E.D.Pa. 1983)); Eisenberg v.
Gagnon, (first racketeering case applied to limited partnerships)
(E.D.Pa.1985 ): In re VMS Funds Securities Litigation ($100 million
settlement 1990); Gateway 2000 Pentium warranty settlement (1996)
Iomega Zip drive settlement (1999). Mr. Feldman was also the chief
negotiator in Curley v. Cumberland Farms (1992), a RICO settlement which
resulted in a $10 million settlement for overly aggressive loss
prevention and collection activity.
Feldman is a guitarist and violinist who has played or recorded with
David Bromberg, Jim Rooney, John Lincoln Wright, Jim and Jesse, Lester
Chambers and others, and has produced several jazz albums for Rounder
Records. An example of his playing can be found at
here
or
here.
-
Main Page
-
Schedule/Speakers
-
Registration
-
Location/Hotels
-
Sponsorship Opportunities
-
Contact
November 4th, 2006 @ 9:26AM
Tutan heads
are better than one
Shoutout to ShadowMom - Miss You!!! Big Much!!!
October 15th, 2006 @ 1:03PM
Here is part of a digital music business plan that someone put together in 2004. What do you all think? Should we finish it? Is it still valid?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
How to Take Over a $40 Billion Industry
...Without Even Trying
In the 1920’s, the recording industry tried to stop radio. Congress
and the Supreme Court were called in to decide the fate of the
pirates that were giving their music away.
Radio won.
In the 1940s, ASCAP tried to escalate radio royalties. Radio
formed BMI and embraced the growing number of independent
labels. World War II, a shortage of vinyl and a musicians strike
against the industry short-circuited the industry in the same decade.
In the 1950s, the independents gave birth to rock and roll.
Radio won.
In 1960, convinced that the only reason radio stations were playing
rock and roll was because the disc jockeys were being paid off, the
established industry asked for payola hearings. But rock and roll
survived, along with jazz, rhythm and blues and country-western
— all products of the growth spurt provided to the independents.
And all were initially rejected by the majors as illegitimate product
not fit for the marketplace.
During the past four decades, the major labels have shifted,
combined and consumed the competition, with five labels now
controlling between 84% and 90% of the U.S. market for recorded
music.
Since 1999, the recording industry has actively tried to limit ther
use of the Internet for the exchange of music files. They again
called on Congress and the courts to decide the fate of the pirates.
Generous estimates of the number of artists/acts that our
government is being asked to “protect” (those which the major
labels represent) number less than 10,000.
At the time of its demise in 2003, mp3.com held more than a
million songs (some reports say 1.5 million) from more than
250,000 acts.
Industry executives referred to it as the “Toxic Music Dump.” Yet,
more than a few acts were plucked from mp3.com, so it couldn’t
have been entirely toxic. Even if you make the unreasonable
assumtion that 90 percent of the indie music is not marketable,
there are still more than 2.5 times the total current talent pool of
the major labels.
How many times have you heard this phrase? “...when someone
creates a hit purely from the Internet, then I’ll believe it.”
The Grey Album was it.
So what is everyone still waiting for?
The Great Void
The current debate over file sharing has developed a severe chasm
in which many independents find themselves trapped. Regardless
of talent or commercial viability, their avenues for promotion are
cast with aspersion by claims that downloading is theft and the
implication that the only “legitimate” sources for digital music are
the pay-per-download services that carry primarily (if not entirely)
major label music.
The largest catalog of available music at this time is Apple, with
500,000 songs licensed for its use. This is a third of what the
independents have offered to the public for free via web pages and/
or file sharing networks such as Kazaa.
Most of them would be thrilled to get a quarter per download (25
cents per download more than they’re currently getting), if
someone would merely collect it for them. Maybe even less.
Ironically, they’d be better off than the major artists are under the
current system. Most of the independents have no record labels in
the middle to inflate the price.
On the Internet, independent artists are not bound by the same
webcasting royalty rate established by the RIAA and the Library of
Congress.
So what is everyone still waiting for?
Today’s technology has put tools into the hands of musicians that
very recently required an expensive recording studio, or at least an
expensive recording session. Little more than a decade ago, the
ability to self-produce a high-quality recording was almost
inaccessible to the average musician. Now, digital recording tools
fully capable of better than CD quality are common and widely
owned.
While the recording industry has been busy alienating its core
market demographic, the independent artists have been expanding
their fan base, encouraging the free exchange of their material via
several Internet outlets, DMusic being one of them.
The independents which have created a product on their own in
many cases have succeeded in bypassing one of the three key
reasons artists seek a recording contract —to actually create a
completed, marketable product. They’ve also bypassed losing the
rights to their own music.
As we know, digital distribution is so easy that it’s impossible to
stop — drop a digital file on the Internet and it can circle the globe
almost instantly. This leaves the independent artist of the 21st
century in need of only one service the record labels used to
provide — promotion.
October 12th, 2006 @ 12:34PM
I may be getting into fights, but I dig this new deesign. Its more organized and intuitive. We are debugging it for a few weeks before we start advertising for new listeners and artists. I guess its time for video, too.
December 18th, 2005 @ 12:29PM
May 18th, 2005 @ 4:11AM
I think the following article ought to be read by everyone. Twice. The nature of genius is very metaphysical and inscrutable. This article illustrates the genius in all of us. All of us are in the right place at the right time. Its all relative.
______________________________________________________________________
Musings show Einstein's genius at work
By Gary Stix
Gary Stix
is an editor at Scientific American
A century ago almost to the day, a 26-year-old Swiss government functionary wrote to tell a friend about some "inconsequential babble," a series of science papers he had just finished writing. The patent clerk, a German Jewish expatriate who worked on physics problems in his spare time and at the office while others weren't looking, had accomplished little more in his aspiring physics career than having a doctoral thesis turned down.
The papers Albert Einstein cranked out during the course of 1905 would show a proof that atoms really exist; that light is both particle and wave; that time and space are not absolutes and that mass and energy are equivalent. (Remember the most famous equation of all time: E = mc2?) Einstein's musings would provoke the most radical upheaval in physics since Isaac Newton's annus mirabilis in the mid-1600s, which laid the groundwork for the law of gravitation, the calculus and the theory of colors.
The secrets of Einstein's gifts consisted of a near-religious zeal to uncover immutable laws of nature; an incurable rebellious streak; an education steeped in the works of 19th-century philosophers; perhaps a few funny anomalies in brain structure; and, not least, historical circumstance - in other words, pure luck.
The United Nations has declared 2005 the International Year of Physics, serving also as a commemoration of Einstein's miraculous year. The centennial is more than just a toast to the man with bad hair. It serves also as an occasion to contemplate the very nature of genius.
Today, any physicist is but a click removed from more data than an Einstein could have ever imagined, or desired. ("Where is the knowledge we have lost in information," T.S. Eliot once lamented.) In the ensuing century, no achievement in the physical sciences can compare to what Einstein produced either in 1905 or during the following decade or so of his life.
How could one individual achieve such seemingly superhuman feats? As one NASA scientist put it: "Was Einstein a space alien?" The question of whether Einstein was a mutant of sorts has fascinated neuroscientists for decades. The Princeton professor donated his brain to science (even posthumously). One area of the organ involved with visual and spatial cognition and mathematical reasoning was wider than normal - another had more densely packed brain cells. Perhaps this accounted for Einstein's vivid imaginings, running along beside a light beam, and other thought experiments that helped him formulate his theories.
With those inferior parietal lobes and that Sylvian fissure, why didn't Einstein end up as a pre-Bauhaus modernist architect rather than the person who radically changed our view of the physical world, besting Roosevelt, Gandhi and Hitler to become Man of the Century in the estimation of Time magazine?
Historians and psychologists have devoted reams to answering the question of what endowed Einstein with his particular gift. Recent additions to the paper mountain of Einstein scholarship have even turned up a few new ideas. One relatively recent work suggests that the Technical Expert, Third Class, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, was literally in the right time and space - that is, at his desk at the patent office, the top desk drawer of which Einstein called his department of theoretical physics.
Harvard science historian and MacArthur fellow Peter Galison suggested in his 2003 book Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps that Einstein never fit the depiction of the detached philosopher-scientist lost in theoretical ruminations. Rather, he had an intimate acquaintance with the practical problems of the world he inhabited. Patent applications that involved clocks and methods of sending electrical signals to synchronize clocks - an obsession for both railroads and the military at the fin de siècle - were likely, not only to have crossed Einstein's desk, but to have influenced the way he thought about physics.
In 1880, the clock tower in Geneva had three faces, one for middle Geneva time (say, 10:13) another for Paris time (9:5
and another for Bern time (10:1
.
Countless ideas circulated for clock synchronization schemes. While milling through patent applications, it was Einstein's realization - a key tenet of the special theory of relativity - that time was not regulated by some über-clock that prevails anywhere from Allentown to Alpha Centauri. Neither time nor space are absolute. Clocks on a speeding train beat infinitesimally more slowly than clocks at the station.
Einstein was not the only one thinking along these lines. The great French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré delivered a lecture in 1904 in which he even used the word relativity, a year before Einstein, while discussing how time depends on the frame of reference of the observer. But Poincaré, a member of the scientific elite, refused to go all the way. Making trains run in a common time frame required coordination of two clocks by sending a signal between them and correcting for the time of travel. "Clocks synchronized in that manner do not therefore show the true time, but what one might call 'local time,' so that one of them is slow with regard to another," Poincaré said. To Einstein, the consummate outsider, discarding the master clock that keeps true time was the logical next step.
Even if Einstein were not on the scene, relativity was in the air, and it would have only been a few years before one of his physicist contemporaries would have derived a full exposition of the theory. Special relativity brought together time and space, energy and mass, the electric and magnetic forces. But Einstein wasn't finished - his compulsion toward unification, a trait common to all genius, continued to surge ahead. ("I am driven by my need to generalize," he wrote in a 1916 letter to a fellow physicist.)
His 1905 theory applies only to bodies in uniform motion traveling in straight lines. The general theory of relativity, published in 1916, took into account that moving things change speed and direction - in other words, it encompassed the effects of acceleration, and that most universal of accelerations called gravity. Einstein created a geometrical description of gravity that depicted massive bodies such as stars curving space and time around them. Unlike his special theory, general relativity arrived unannounced from the deepest reaches of the master's mind, a work of unadulterated genius whose insights might not have been achieved for decades without Einstein's presence.
As always, Einstein was best at reducing things to their essentials: "I have no special talents; I am only passionately curious." If he suddenly came back, courtesy of a nearby time warp, he would be taken aback by the commodification of his name and image and the burgeoning make-your-kid-an-Einstein industry. Amazon.com sells the Baby Einstein Caterpillar Discover & Play Activity Center for $79.99. Super Saver Shipping is not available for this item.
Gary Stix (gstix@sciam.com) is an editor at Scientific American.
More sources:
A summary of Einstein's papers is available at the American Institute of Physics Web site. www.aip.org/history/einstein
Albert Einstein: Image and Impact.
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/
Galison, Peter. Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps. W.W. Norton & Company, 2003
Think Like Einstein.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/think.html
Next genius:
Alexander Hamilton.
May 11th, 2005 @ 6:55PM
May 10th, 2005 @ 11:26PM
I just realized something. These journals are Blogs! We had blogs all these years and I didn't even realize it! Now, what do I do? Should we have patented this? Look at the lost revenue! We had blogs first. Oh the power of marketing.
evansorchid:
ViciousKitty:
BOWILLIE:
ShadowMom:
Mojosnake:
aflunky:
leedsquietman:
IkeBetina: