Dear Netizens,
Wow. Lots of passionate feedback to my Napster rant - mostly pro, some con. Many people asked permission to reproduce it to send to friends and post on other sites. By all means, go right ahead - one important note before reproducing it: please send me a fee of $1.25 to cover the cost of... HA HA, just kidding!!! It's FREE! Imagine that. (although, eventually you will be seduced, via subliminal messages, into purchasing Deano's Dishwashing and Denture Cleaning Powder to make your dishes 'and' your teeth shiny and bright. This digital content is tricky stuff, huh?!)
However, I did make one serious omission in the text which I'd like to correct: when referring to the tape/machine royalty paid by manufacturers to the record industry I inadvertently omitted the word 'digital' tape. and 'digital' cassette machines. [see corrected paragraph at the end of this email. Or, for a complete copy of the corrected version of Dean's Napster Rant go to the Newsletter section of the website http://deanfriedman.com and click on Newsletter Volume 4, Issue 7, August 13, 2000]
The mistake was regrettable, but the main points remain the same: 1. tape and tape machines - digital or otherwise - had absolutely NO measurable negative impact on music sales and 2. the huge bounty received by the Record Industry is still not shared with the artists that create the music in the first place.
I was a little self conscious haranguing you with my admittedly disgruntled
anti-record company artist point of view, but you were all very tolerant.
So, with that in mind, next month's topic will be "Is there an ongoing
conspiracy being conducted jointly by the United State's and Britain's
military-industrial complex to undermine the international sale and proliferation
of Boobles, Honkblatt's and Boing-D-Boings?" News at 11:00.
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O.K. here's a fun tidbit - ready!
Get ready to set your VCR's for Saturday evening, September 16th at 20:55 o'clock. I've just been interviewed by the BBC to appear in a segment of a ten part series airing now on BBC-2 TV entitled 'I Love The '70's'. My brief segment will appear in 1978, the year Lucky Stars and Lydia hit the charts. There was a fly buzzing around the studio all during the interview, that no one could catch, so if I seem a little distracted it's because he kept landing on my nose and I was trying to grab the li'l fella.
Gee wiz, all this TV exposure, you'd think I'm some kind of music icon from the '70's or something. So, when do I get to do a softdrink commercial?
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Oh, by the way... Amazingly, there are still tickets available to the
upcoming Dean gigs in London and Cambridge, so, if you've got no plans...
Dean Gigs:
Saturday, Sept. 9th [9pm] - Cambridge - The Boat Race
- 01223-508533 £10 ORDER
TICKETS
Sunday, Sept. 17th [8pm] - London - The Spitz, Spitalfield
Market - £15 (info line c/o
Stuart Lyon) 0207-351-2938 ORDER
TICKETS
[ Credit Card orders by phone for Spitz/London gig now available on
Ticketweb 020 7771
2000 ]
Click here to ORDER TICKETS. (See GIG section for more info on the Spitz venue)
To order via regular (snail) mail, send a cheque or m.o. payable to
'Dean Friedman'
along with SASE and daytime phone # to:
Dean Friedman Tickets c/o
Stuart Lyon
498a Kings Rd
London SW10 OLE
Mail Orders received 10 days before the concert date will receive Tickets
by return
mail. Late Mail Order Tickets will be held at the venue box office
for pickup 1 hour
before gig.
These are the only scheduled UK gigs this year.
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Anyway, that's all for now. See you at the gigs.
Be well,
Dean
dean@deanfriedman.com
http://deanfriedman.com
The following is the corrected version of the two paragraphs in my newsletter referring to the 'digital' tape royalty:
"The labels made a similar argument when digital audio
tape was first
introduced. 'Heavens', they insisted,
'everyone will illegally tape recordings and the
record industry will die. We must
stop this dangerous new technology!'. The TV and Film
industry had the same hysterics earlier
over videotape. What actually happened? All
three industries simply got larger
- exponentially, evolving into multi-billion, multi-national
conglomerates. What copying does occur,
it turns out, simply serves to perpetuate
interest in the content itself, which
eventually leads to consumer purchasing.
Here's the funny thing about the 'illegal
tape' scare. When digital cassette tape was first
introduced, the record labels actually
got the US Congress to force digital tape and
cassette machine manufacturers to
pay record companies a royalty on tape and tape
deck sales to compensate the labels
for loss of revenue due to bootlegging. This
amounts to millions of dollars every
year paid by the consumer to digital tape and
cassette machine manufacturers who
pay royalties to the major labels who then pay a
fair portion of those royalties to
the hardworking recording artists who are responsible
for the music content in the first
place. Oops, I was just kidding about the last part;
actually, the record labels keep their
'tape' windfall and don't give a penny of it to the
recording artists who's precious rights
they were supposedly defending. I'm not familiar
with the European situation but this
continues to this day in the US and I've never heard a
major or minor recording artist make
a peep about it. Most of them aren't even aware
that it has been going on for years."
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