There were several reasons why I stopped posting here last summer. One was simply a matter of time management. Writing the sort of articles I that I was putting up is time consuming - and between a full time job, the time I already spend digitalizing recordings and keeping the radio station running plus the ordinary chores and tasks that everyone has to deal with, I was already pretty stretched thin to begin with. Yes, one can fight city hall. The problem is doing so requires time.
The sort of postings that I plan to put up here in the future will usually not be as time consuming to write.
Another reason I stopped posting is there has been precious little news to report regarding the Internet radio royalty situation since my last posting. The negotiations that were mentioned in that posting are supposedly still in progress. But since they are held behind closed doors and I am way too small a player to be in on them, I and many other webcasters have been pretty much in the dark about what is going on. This, of course, makes it very difficult for the operator of any Internet radio station to plan for the future or, in the case of stations that are significantly larger than mine, to attract investors. Undoubtedly this is one of the motives the RIAA has for dragging this on for so long.
This posting from the founder of SomaFM is the closest thing I have found to a recent update on the royalty situation. Keep in mind that the negotiations with the RIAA's SoundExchange are not a single set of negotiations with all webcasters but rather a series of separate negotiations with "small" webcasters, "large" webcasters, "non-commercial" webcasters, etc. One of the networks Radio Dismuke is carried on, Live 365, is considered a "large" webcaster based on its revenues despite the fact that it is home to some of the smallest Internet radio stations. The other network my station is carried on is LoudCity which is considered a "small" webcaster. So any "deal" that might come along for one may not be valid for the other.
Finally, a major reason why I stopped posting is simply because I can only focus on evil and irrational people so long before it really starts to get to me. What the Luddites at the RIAA have been trying to do in order to kill off Internet radio and replace it with an online carbon copy of AM/FM radio type programing as part of their desperate attempt to protect their antiquated and obsolete business model from emerging competition makes my blood boil. That, along with the possibility that the Internet radio station I had put so much effort and devotion into building and which has brought new visibility to a mostly forgotten genre of music that I passionately love was going to be forced to shut down, brought things to the point where my frustration over the situation and my hatred towards the RIAA Luddites was starting to dominate my life and my thinking. For the sake of my overall outlook on life and my happiness, it become very important for me to instead focus my thoughts and energies on the thing that I value and the things which are within my ability to change for the better rather than on desperate and scared Luddites whom I despise, have zero influence over and who would be impervious to any argument that I might make no matter how logical, valid and eloquently stated. Let's just say I needed to take a vacation away from the subject for a while. The lack of any significant news or progress about the royalty situation resulted in that vacation being much longer than I anticipated.
The good news is that, during the time since my last posting, I have had the pleasure of watching the RIAA's world continue to crash down around them and at a rate much faster than I had anticipated. Even the heads of some of the RIAA labels and a former RIAA executive have pretty much openly admitted that they realize their old game will soon be up and that their shortsightedness and their fear and hostility towards new technologies is largely to blame. Happily, I think that such realizations on their part are too little too late to save them. The labels are still talking about how they are seeking new business models. That is something they should have done ten years ago. If they haven't figured it out now - well, they are in deep doo doo. Indeed, there is talk that the RIAA itself may not exist for very much longer.
A number of things I predicted in my earlier postings with regard to the eventual downfall of the recording industry have actually started to happen - and I will most likely, at some point, put up a few "I told you so" type postings which will provide the details.
This Blog And The Future
I will continue, of course, to post updates about the Internet radio royalty situation as such information becomes available. I will also have commentary about the demise of the old RIAA dominated recording industry and all of the wonderful new technologies and new media venues which are replacing it and providing us with a new world of musical choice and diversity which would have been unimaginable a decade or so ago. I will also provide news about Radio Dismuke in terms of upcoming programing and its progress in exposing the popular music of the 1920s and 1930s to new audiences.
But beyond that, I will post about a wide variety of subjects that interest me and would likely be of interest to many in the Radio Dismuke audience. I will comment about vintage music, vintage films and other aspects of the popular culture of the early 1900s decades. I will provide information and recommendations about new CD reissues and contemporary bands which perform vintage music.
I live in the modern world - what other option do I have? There are some aspects of the modern world - mostly as a result of technological and scientific advances - that I appreciate and value a great deal. But I intensely dislike much of today's popular culture and aesthetics - and to the degree it is possible for me to do so, I simply choose not to participate. Ever since I discovered it as a child, I have been fascinated by the popular culture of the early decades of the 20th century. That is the world that has always inspired me and which I seek to incorporate into my daily life. Thanks to the ability of today's technology to serve niche tastes and to bring together communities of people with highly specialized shared interests, it is increasingly possible to do just that.
Thanks to technology, we have more opportunities than ever of being able to pick and choose between the best that today has to offer and the best that previous decades had to offer. Sure, all of us are impacted by and have little escape from modern trends in areas such as politics and the overall economy. But we certainly no longer live in a world where our entertainment options are largely limited by whatever the elite gatekeepers at the Big Three television networks, the Hollywood movie studios, the RIAA labels and major market FM radio program directors think will appeal to the largest and lowest common denominator. Our access to information about subjects that we are interested in is no longer limited to whatever our local libraries and book stores choose to stock and by the very high cost of publishing and distributing such information in paper formats.
We live in a world where none other than the mighty NBC television network is scratching its head trying to figure out how to stop the loss of its audience not to other networks or cable but to YouTube clips posted by tens of thousands of unknown nobodies. Some of those clips that are draining away NBC's audiences include musical excerpts from previously forgotten films of the 1920s and 1930s. Who would ever have thought that 1920s and 1930s film clips could compete with and jeopardize the audience for prime time network television? On their own they don't - the audience for such film clips is minuscule compared with that of even a single small town NBC affiliate. But when one combines that niche along with all other countless niches that YouTube is able to appeal to - well, NBC along with the rest of the mass media finds itself bleeding to death as a result of thousands of tiny pin pricks.
The mass media culture we grew up with is rapidly dying and will be replaced by a vast mosaic of countless niche subcultures that each of us will get to pick and choose from in terms of the art, music and ideas we choose to partake in and in terms of the people we choose to associate with. Niches, of course, have always existed. But in a mass media dominated culture the number and viability of such niches is severely limited because of the difficulty and expense involved in making people aware that they even exist. In a mass media dominated culture, everything tends to get pushed towards the widest - which frequently means the lowest - common denominator.
In the niche dominated world of the future, I strongly believe things will tend to get pushed in the opposite direction. High quality content that was previously not available because its appeal was too narrow will suddenly become viable. And people no longer will have to "settle" for content simply because it was the merely best that was available among the limited options they had to choose from. People will instead seek out something better - however it is they define "better."
The greater availability and access to high quality content will, in and of itself, expose more people to it and, in the process, raise their standards and expectations.
A mass media culture, in its appeal to the widest common denominator, leads to the formation of institutionalized consensus and orthodoxies making it difficult for controversial and innovative "outsiders" to get a hearing. In a niche dominated world, it is much easier for such innovators to find themselves a core audience to support their initial efforts and which they can build on. Sure, it is also possible for pretentious fools to put their hat into the ring as well - anyone these days regardless as to whether or not they have any talent can inexpensively produce their own CD and promote it on myspace or cdbaby.com or start a blog. But such efforts will never spread beyond the handful of people who somehow stumble across it. On the other hand, works by those who do have talent and do have something to say that is worthwhile will spread by word of mouth to an increasingly wider audience - and on the Internet, word of mouth can travel very rapidly.
Today's technology makes this trend towards quality possible in ways far beyond the stuff we read and listen to online. I was well into my adulthood before I personally knew anyone who shared my interest in '20s and '30s music and old 78 rpm records. This was before the Internet came along. Today, I know several such people here in Texas that I regularly communicate and/or visit with and I have corresponded with countless more in other parts of the world. I would not likely have known any of these people had it not been for the Internet.
I am fascinated with how very new technology is helping to bring back and reanimate interest in "old fashioned" music from an era that was almost forgotten about. After spending years of not knowing anyone who shared my passion for the early 1900s, it has been absolutely amazing for me to watch a growing subculture of people with similar interests spring up out of nowhere on myspace and in other Internet venues. These are certainly among the things that I will be writing about here.
I am a person who lives in the early 21st century but whose heart is, in many ways, in an early 20th century world that ended long before I was born - and I constantly strive to seek out and enjoy the very best aspects of both. That is the perspective from which this blog will be written and which will be its new focus.
I will continue, of course, to post updates about the Internet radio royalty situation as such information becomes available. I will also have commentary about the demise of the old RIAA dominated recording industry and all of the wonderful new technologies and new media venues which are replacing it and providing us with a new world of musical choice and diversity which would have been unimaginable a decade or so ago. I will also provide news about Radio Dismuke in terms of upcoming programing and its progress in exposing the popular music of the 1920s and 1930s to new audiences.
But beyond that, I will post about a wide variety of subjects that interest me and would likely be of interest to many in the Radio Dismuke audience. I will comment about vintage music, vintage films and other aspects of the popular culture of the early 1900s decades. I will provide information and recommendations about new CD reissues and contemporary bands which perform vintage music.
A Blog About The Old And The New
I live in the modern world - what other option do I have? There are some aspects of the modern world - mostly as a result of technological and scientific advances - that I appreciate and value a great deal. But I intensely dislike much of today's popular culture and aesthetics - and to the degree it is possible for me to do so, I simply choose not to participate. Ever since I discovered it as a child, I have been fascinated by the popular culture of the early decades of the 20th century. That is the world that has always inspired me and which I seek to incorporate into my daily life. Thanks to the ability of today's technology to serve niche tastes and to bring together communities of people with highly specialized shared interests, it is increasingly possible to do just that.
Thanks to technology, we have more opportunities than ever of being able to pick and choose between the best that today has to offer and the best that previous decades had to offer. Sure, all of us are impacted by and have little escape from modern trends in areas such as politics and the overall economy. But we certainly no longer live in a world where our entertainment options are largely limited by whatever the elite gatekeepers at the Big Three television networks, the Hollywood movie studios, the RIAA labels and major market FM radio program directors think will appeal to the largest and lowest common denominator. Our access to information about subjects that we are interested in is no longer limited to whatever our local libraries and book stores choose to stock and by the very high cost of publishing and distributing such information in paper formats.
We live in a world where none other than the mighty NBC television network is scratching its head trying to figure out how to stop the loss of its audience not to other networks or cable but to YouTube clips posted by tens of thousands of unknown nobodies. Some of those clips that are draining away NBC's audiences include musical excerpts from previously forgotten films of the 1920s and 1930s. Who would ever have thought that 1920s and 1930s film clips could compete with and jeopardize the audience for prime time network television? On their own they don't - the audience for such film clips is minuscule compared with that of even a single small town NBC affiliate. But when one combines that niche along with all other countless niches that YouTube is able to appeal to - well, NBC along with the rest of the mass media finds itself bleeding to death as a result of thousands of tiny pin pricks.
The mass media culture we grew up with is rapidly dying and will be replaced by a vast mosaic of countless niche subcultures that each of us will get to pick and choose from in terms of the art, music and ideas we choose to partake in and in terms of the people we choose to associate with. Niches, of course, have always existed. But in a mass media dominated culture the number and viability of such niches is severely limited because of the difficulty and expense involved in making people aware that they even exist. In a mass media dominated culture, everything tends to get pushed towards the widest - which frequently means the lowest - common denominator.
In the niche dominated world of the future, I strongly believe things will tend to get pushed in the opposite direction. High quality content that was previously not available because its appeal was too narrow will suddenly become viable. And people no longer will have to "settle" for content simply because it was the merely best that was available among the limited options they had to choose from. People will instead seek out something better - however it is they define "better."
The greater availability and access to high quality content will, in and of itself, expose more people to it and, in the process, raise their standards and expectations.
A mass media culture, in its appeal to the widest common denominator, leads to the formation of institutionalized consensus and orthodoxies making it difficult for controversial and innovative "outsiders" to get a hearing. In a niche dominated world, it is much easier for such innovators to find themselves a core audience to support their initial efforts and which they can build on. Sure, it is also possible for pretentious fools to put their hat into the ring as well - anyone these days regardless as to whether or not they have any talent can inexpensively produce their own CD and promote it on myspace or cdbaby.com or start a blog. But such efforts will never spread beyond the handful of people who somehow stumble across it. On the other hand, works by those who do have talent and do have something to say that is worthwhile will spread by word of mouth to an increasingly wider audience - and on the Internet, word of mouth can travel very rapidly.
Today's technology makes this trend towards quality possible in ways far beyond the stuff we read and listen to online. I was well into my adulthood before I personally knew anyone who shared my interest in '20s and '30s music and old 78 rpm records. This was before the Internet came along. Today, I know several such people here in Texas that I regularly communicate and/or visit with and I have corresponded with countless more in other parts of the world. I would not likely have known any of these people had it not been for the Internet.
I am fascinated with how very new technology is helping to bring back and reanimate interest in "old fashioned" music from an era that was almost forgotten about. After spending years of not knowing anyone who shared my passion for the early 1900s, it has been absolutely amazing for me to watch a growing subculture of people with similar interests spring up out of nowhere on myspace and in other Internet venues. These are certainly among the things that I will be writing about here.
I am a person who lives in the early 21st century but whose heart is, in many ways, in an early 20th century world that ended long before I was born - and I constantly strive to seek out and enjoy the very best aspects of both. That is the perspective from which this blog will be written and which will be its new focus.
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