Too Few With Too Much in the Land Where Money Is King

I bounce between tabs these days. Tabs for freight lanes and board listings for shipments needing trucks and trailers, tabs for business correspondence, tabs for news and social networking sites.  I run through them all in the course of a day. Freight slows a bit this time of year. The pumpkin hauls were pretty light in October and early November. The Christmas tree hauls seem even lighter. I did move a bunch of hay throughout the Midwest into Texas, but always with some hassle involved. Highways in Nebraska, South Dakota, Oklahoma and into northern Texas during hay season lift the wide load (freight width > than 8') rules and just allow trucks to hang wide load signs for other vehicles on the road to look out for. Works in places where people have not populated the surroundings much. Don't see that practice on the Interstate 5s in California for sure, or on the 95 up and down the East Coast.

Right now, freight bookings have slowed to a crawl. I guess retailers have all their stuff now, and pray they sell most of it. In one of my past lives, these days were all about checking on the hits and advertised goodies.  What percentage got sold each day? What were you looking at for stock returns in January? Would you meet projections? Were any of those great cookies left from that awesome vendor who sent the huge gift basket to our department? Did all the Holiday greeting cards and gifts get done and mailed? Those were the burning issues.

Time spent thinking about politics? Not so much.

Why didn't I spend much time thinking about politics just a little more than a decade ago? Well, first I was busier, just like most of the people I know today, and second, but most importantly, political shit got done to facilitate commerce. You may not have fully agreed with what got done (NAFTA, Digital Copyright Act, Gulf War, etc.) but shit got done, most people were busy making their way and I didn't need to think about politics every fucking day of the year.

Today, nothing gets done to help most people make their way. The only legislative things getting done are those things that keep a lid on the fixed economic system we live under. Even when legislation passes like the Affordable Health Care Act, or the Financial Reform Act, the bills get tied up in litigation and stalling maneuvers that suck the life out every promised fix to the broken system the bill tried to remedy. Any American not earning in the top one percent of the population is still at huge financial risk if they have a severe accident, or get really sick whether they have insurance or not. No other country's government shits on its citizens with such perverse delight as does the American government, and health care offers the very best view of that perversity.

But health care and financial reform are only two of the issues in a country where nearly every thing has broken down. There are issues on food safety, on genetically modified foods, on bee colony disorder/collapse, on infrastructure maintenance and repair, public transportation, public education, higher education, on unemployment, underemployment, poverty, literacy, immigration, military actions, trade agreements, minority rights, worker rights, drilling rights, pollution standards, and I haven't even talked about clean water, frakking, the oceans, mining practices or any of things you toss and turn about every night like religion, STDs, crime and terrorism.

But all of these issues boil down to one crux issue: money. And the real issue about money today, just like it was in all those bloody centuries past, is that too few have ended up with too much.

I probably would never have ramped up on this topic if I hadn't seen some stupid press release from the RIAA on its lobbying efforts to Congress to stem intellectual property piracy. You know what kills piracy every time? Having the legitimate goods to sell at affordable prices the public will pay, and maybe having these legitimate goods at more than a handful of huge retailers in either the brick & mortar world or on-line.

But that is not the American way today, and particularly in the music biz.

Here is a very profound sentence from the RIAA release: “We’re especially grateful for the focus on the plight of musicians as they struggle to be paid for their work." This is particularly ironic when you consider the first paragraph of the RIAA mission statement:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies. Its members are the music labels that comprise the most vibrant record industry in the world. RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate recorded music produced and sold in the United States.

Do you find the words recording artist or musicians following the words "supports and promotes" in the first sentence of this mission statement? The focus on the plight of the artist in the press release is just cover for blatant bullying and censorship tactics this organization has pursued successfully for nearly two decades now, and has resulted in the recorded music industry shrinking by more than 50% in ten years time. Most recording artists I have listened to, or read their biz stories, got chump change, or less, in royalties after all other line items from the onerous contract language got applied.

This is the trade group that sued a dead grandmother over supposed copyright infringement a few years back. It also the very same organization that inserted the "four little words" -works made for hire- into a giant spending bill that passed through Congress and was signed into law in 1999. The words meant that musician recording artists would never own their own copyrighted works. They would be solely owned into perpetuity by the suits at the largest media and publishing companies. The language was removed after an eight month siege by major recording stars and high profile attorneys. The language which caused the grief was inserted into the bill by Mitch Glazier, then a Congressional staff attorney, and who now is the executive vice- president for RIAA having worked for the organization since 2000. The repeal of works made for hire does not officially take effect until 2013.

You have to wonder what contracts wannabee pop stars sign to get any type of label deal nowadays. Only the very few have made any money on their recordings, and all those other acts and all that catalog that made the music biz a $14.9 billion industry in 1999, now just makes money for the big four- EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner- at $6.8 billion total for 2010. There really is no competition in the music market place today all the acts now are commodities in a digital age where serfs up sums up where most musical acts stand, and technology companies like Apple and Amazon work with the big four to keep the money in very few hands, and away from those who do/did all the real work.



 


Thanks for popping by. Until the next time.