FolkWolf.Net

Yet another tale of the music industry

Posted by Matt Rose Sun, 11 May 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I'm watching CBC News Sunday, and there's an interview with Alannah Myles. Apparently, she just got her first royalty cheque. April 1st 2008. Her records made $160 million dollars, and she just got her first royalty cheque, 18 years after recording her first album. On the face of it, this looks a lot like a textbook re-enactment of Steve Albini's Some of your friends may already be this fucked or Courtney Love's speech where she does the math.

Now here comes the difficult part. She claims that all of her previous royalties went to pay off the $7 million that she owed the record company.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is an extravagant amount.

$ 7m for two albums. Even with the most expensive producers, and the most expensive studios, and the most expensive backup bands, and videos, and all of the other expenses that go into making a "hit record". That's 3.5 million per album.

Adding up all the album expenses in "fucked" I get a number around 450,000. Now, even given that Atlantic may have wanted to make a bigger splash than Albini's theoretical indie band, I can see tripling that number. This is absolutely inconceivable to me. Most of the people I know, their biggest expense is in studio time, and mixing and mastering, and that usually, comes out to maybe 20 - 30 grand. But let's say that all of the expenses in making the album came out to 1.5 mil.

That still leaves $2mil / album

Now I think, OK, I can't imagine how a record could cost 3.5 mil, so what's being left out? How did she end up owing her record company $7million dollars? I can imagine all kinds of bad decisions being made, if you don't listen to that little voice in your head. If you don't realize that all this money that's being spent on, I dunno, red m&m's or some bullshit like that. That's all yours, and maybe you should keep some track of it.

What other bad decisions did she make along the way?

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I don't know what I'm doing, D'Allaire can defend himself.

Posted by matt Sat, 04 Mar 2006 16:58:14 GMT

I saw this comment from someone in the new Rwandan Survivors blog at this entry:Rwandan Survivors, so I felt compelled to defend D'Allaire. I think I may have gotten a little too impassioned.

His comment:

I don't mean to be too rude but is the irony here not apparent to anyone? Immediately before the post once again touting the heroic General Dallaire, is a post with these words in it from the story of a Rwandan Genocide survivor:"On 6 April, we made our way to the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO), where some people had already sought refuge with the UN. We had protection and felt safe, but on 11 April, the UN troops drove away. As they left, the Interahamwe and government soldiers came. They told us we would be taken to Nyanza. They made us run. Some people were praying, others singing. As we ran, some people were hacked with machetes and others killed…"Now why is it again that the leader of the U.N. troops who deserted these people is a hero? Seriously what did he do that was so wonderful? It seems quite likely to me that General Dallaire's impotence was a leading factor in encouraging the genocide. And he's a hero in Canada? Has the world gone mad?

My response, which I emailed to him as well:

From: mattrose@folkwolf.net Subject: Your post in the Rwandan survivors blog Date: January 28, 2006 11:54:26 AM EST (CA) To: goyomarquez@sbcglobal.net re: http://rwandansurvivors.blogspot.com/2006/01/general-romo-dallaire-talks-tonight.html I saw your comment, and I felt compelled to respond with this comment. Please try to learn more about what happened in Rwanda, so that it can never happen again, as it is about to in Darfur. We, the citizens of powerful nations like yours and mine have a responsibility to speak out, and demand that something be done. You can learn more from Romeo D'Allaire's book and documentary called "Shake Hands with the Devil". To save you the trouble of going back to the site, I have copied my comment below. Thank you Matt Rose Greg, I also suggest you educate yourself before condemning D'Allaire in such a harsh way. The impotence you mention is not that of General D'Allaire, but rather, a result of the uncaring attitude of the world community, including You and I, of shrugging it's shoulders, and turning it's back. We, the citizens of the western world, took away D'Allaire's power, and he is doing everything in his power to make sure that it never happens again. Those forces you mention were pulled out by the Belgian and other gov'ts without his agreement, and against his direct requests for more troops. He asked for 44,000 troops, and after the Belgian gov't withdrew their troops, he was left with far less than 1,000 Should he have done more? Undoubtedly. Could he have done more? I don't think there's anyone that could honestly, unequivocably say yes. D'Allaire did all he could to save all the people that he could, and in reward, the UN pulled his troops out, and left him there to watch hundreds of thousands of people die, while he tried in vain to save those the few people he had the forces to protect. The trauma of that experience mentally and emotionally incapacited him with PTSD on his return to Canada. He ended up attempting suicide.Now, rather than trying to "put the past behind him", or attain "closure" he loves Rwanda, goes back there on a regular basis, and he's going around the world to try and get that message out, so that it never happens again. Although I am a Canadian, and I consider him a hero, he himself does not. I'm sure if you asked him, he would agree with you more than with me.

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Granta: 'How to write about Africa' by Binyavanga Wainaina

Posted by matt Sat, 28 Jan 2006 15:09:32 GMT

Granta: 'How to write about Africa' by Binyavanga Wainaina

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Yay, no more fucking BIOS.

Posted by matt Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:24:14 GMT

In this article:Red Hat to make Linux run on Intel macs, I read this quote:

The current impediment is the Extensible Firmware Interface, a relatively new BIOS replacement designed by Intel that is not yet commonly used or widely supported.

All I could think of was Yay! Somebody finally realized that the PC BIOS, which has been around unchanged since the 80s, is fucking dumb. Even dumber than OpenBoot, which has also been around since the 80s, but had the bonus of being written in Forth, IIRC

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Chuck Norris Facts

Posted by matt Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:35:27 GMT

Phew. Busy today. This site just popped up on my radar again, and I love it

Chuck Norris Facts

Apparently it's just a rip off of this site, but that one sucks, where as chucknorrisfacts.com is slick and contains such Chuck Norris Facts as:

Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.

Crop circles are Chuck Norris' way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the fuck down.

The Great Wall of China was originally created to keep Chuck Norris out. It failed misserably

There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live.

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Irony

Posted by matt Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:39:57 GMT

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- Firemen in a small Japanese town were left red-faced after a party to mark the end of a fire awareness promotional event ended in a blaze that badly damaged their station.

The two-story wooden fire station in Shimohetsugi, southern Japan, was extensively damaged by the Sunday blaze, a spokesman for the Oita prefectural fire department said.

No one was injured in the fire, which is thought to have been started either by a gas canister used for the firemen's barbecue or by a kerosene heater.

"It's very embarrassing that this should happen to people whose job it is to go and put out fires," the spokesman said.

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