After reading an article over at the Consumerist I found a new bit of meaningless corporate double-speak even worse than “Taking the problem seriously.”

“Safeway would take steps to fix the problem…“

Why would you take steps to fix a problem, when you could simply fix the problem instead? To me, saying you’re “taking steps to fix a problem” is another way of saying you’re not fixing the problem.

Imagine if your wife told you to “take out the garbage.” Now imagine replying, “I’m taking steps to rectify the garbage problem” as you continue to channel surf on the couch. Now imagine your wife smacking you upside the head for saying something so fricking stupid.

However, spokespeople love “taking steps” because when the problem reoccurs, as it did in Safeway’s instance, the company has an out. A spokesman can follow up by saying, “We’ve taken steps, but those steps have not been fully implemented” or the “steps were not correctly followed.” Or even,

“We’re taking steps to implement a new set of steps to enstep that steps are stepped upon in the future.”

On the other hand, if a spokesperson claims that the problem is fixed, and if the company is caught doing the problem once again, the spokesperson is screwed because it’s quite clear he or she lied about fixing the problem in the first place.

So “taking steps” is nothing more than meaningless corporate double-speak. When a spokesperson says the company is “taking steps” we can rest assured that absolutely nothing is being done.

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To summarize the experiment, Radiohead released their In Rainbows album for free, but allowed fans to pay whatever they wanted. Radiohead made about $3 million off the experiment without the detriment benefit of a label. By any measure, it was a complete success.

So what exactly is Kim Gordon complaining about? First, she’s upset she didn’t think of it herself. Second, she claims the experiment would, for some unexplained reason, not work with Sonic Youth. Third, that it makes other bands look greedy, by them not giving away their music for free. And lastly, that it makes it harder to make new music, yet again, for an unexplained reason.

Let’s start with the first, Miss Kim didn’t come up with the idea herself. Millions of companies all make money using business models they did not come up with. Who cares who first decided to make a laundromat?! Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea can jump on board and do it too. Kim is not precluded from using a good idea, merely because someone else did it first. Heck, does she honestly think that Sonic Youth was the first band to sell albums via labels? Certainly not, then under her logic, why does Sonic Youth do it?

Second, it won’t work for all bands. I’m guessing that because Sonic Youth has fewer fans, there will be less people willing to take advantage of the experiment, so the band will sell less and make less money. But that’s an asinine reason to avoid the experiment because no matter what model Sonic Youth uses to sell their albums, they’ll always sell fewer albums than bands with larger fan bases. Under Kim’s argument, only bands with massive fan bases should ever bother to sell albums.

“Sure, bands such as the Beatles and the Stones can sell music digitally encoded onto plastic, but that could never work for us, right?”

That argument clearly makes no sense when applied to CDs, so how can it make sense when applied to downloads?

Third, so it’s unfair to come up with a better business model because it makes the idiots sticking with an outdated model look like idiots?! Under Kim’s asinine argument, no one should ever experiment with new models, and we all should just stick with outdated models, so as not to offend anyone. Yeah, Kim, that’s a great idea!

And Kim, let’s get one thing straight: Radiohead did not make you guys look greedy by giving away music. They didn’t give it away. They sold it for a whopping $3 million! So no one made you look greedy, only ignorant of the changing landscape of music distribution.

As to the last one, I’m trying to figure out how releasing music on your own terms is more difficult? Without a label you’re completely free to produce and release as much music as you’d like. And if you want to continue releasing CDs for your old skool fans, you can do it without a label for only 31 bucks a year. How does this freedom keep you from releasing music?

I should point out that Robert Smith (someone I do not have a lot of respect for) from the Cure also didn’t like the experiment and had this to say about it:

You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all and that’s nonsense.

But Price and Value are two entirely different things. Merely because I put a price of $10 on my shit, does not mean my shit has the value of $10. Regardless of the price attached to my shit, its value is still zero.

Conversely, merely because Google charges me nothing, does not mean that Google’s services have no value to me. They have tremendous value to me, completely independent of the lack of a price.

Simply put, value does not equal price, and vice versa.

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Which is bizarre, considering the last break out live album Cox could think of was Jane’s Addiction first release 22 years ago. (Which, was neither a hit nor live, it never hit the Billboard charts and it was a studio recording the label dubbed an audience onto to cover up the roughness of the recording. Which is the exact same thing Guns ‘N Roses did with their first release, Live Like a Suicide. Anyway….)

So exactly how did YouTube kill off the live album 18 years before it even started?!

In my personal opinion, the live album died because of MTV. The masses got used to the idea that a “live performance” should sound exactly like the studio recording. Notice how the death of the live album coincides both with MTV and with the rise of singers lip syncing to backing tapes during concerts.

Update May 28, 2009:

Tech Dirt picked up this story on my suggestion. They seem to miss the point that YouTube could not have killed off the live album, because live albums have been dead for about two and a half decades.

However, upon thinking about it again, I’m not entirely sure MTV is to blame. If you think about the history of recorded music, a break through live album is quite rare. If you think of Frampton’s as the first and the Talking Heads’ as the last, we’re talking about a time period of less than a decade.

I think the break through live album has more to do with awful studio production techniques during the late 70s and early 80s than anything else. If you consider how lame Cheap Trick’s studio albums were, prior to Budokan, you have to ask, “What the frick was the producer and band thinking?” The only way it makes sense is if the bands and producers thought that rock was dead. That the only way they could sell music was by rejecting rock and going pop.

However, those initial lame records didn’t sell. So obviously the plan wasn’t working. So upon a release of a rocking live album, fans would take an interest.

What happened is that because of these break out live albums, producers realized that rock was not dead and started recording albums as if they were rock. That’s why bands such as Van Halen or the Red Hot Chili Peppers never recorded a live album, they didn’t have to.

And let’s not forget that radio does not break out new talent nowadays, live or otherwise. Radio is controlled by large multinational corporations and DJs and local program directors cannot decide to play a particular song unless a group of MBAs at corporate crunch the numbers and give the go-ahead. Which, obviously, never happens.

So, once again, YouTube didn’t kill the live album. The live breakout album was an anomaly that corrected itself.

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“We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it….Stop it. I dare you.”

Does she honestly think that Disney and Viacom would ever let copyright die? Is she completely ignorant about secret meetings to make copyright even more draconian? Doesn’t she realize that copyright is so fricken prevalent in our lives that it’s practically impossible to go an entire day without infringing a copyright?

Nora, copyright is neither dead nor dying. The simple reason as to why there’s so much infringement going on nowadays is because copyright law has been stretched so far to your advantage that nearly every citizen in this country is technically a criminal under the law. Are you happy now?

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The problem is that you cannot really use a rotary antenna with a DVR because the direction of the antenna needs to change for each channel/record. I thought there had to be some interface between the rotary device and a PC/DVR/Tivo so that it would automatically change the direction depending on the channel. But there isn’t. I cannot even find a rotary with a timer, so that it would change the direction at a specific time. (Which I’d forget to set anyway.)

And then it struck me: rotary antennas are dead. They’re buggy whips in the automobile era. Despite the fact that you can receive free HD over the air, the more expensive cable and satellite services won the war.

I personally think there was an intentional effort by the big box electronic stores to eliminate even the idea of over the air HD. If you go to Best Buy, for example, the tips on getting High Definition content at home is buying a Blu-ray player or signing up with whatever satellite company BB has contracted with. Heck, you cannot even buy real antennas at Best Buy. Double heck, even Radio Shack stopped selling outdoor antennas. It’s all about retail partnering with a large corporate content entity and selling a monthly service. Informing people about free HD content would only interfere with that cash cow.

Anyway, I’m weird. When I was a kid I loved using our rotary to find different channels. I did the same thing at our house in Lapeer, well before we moved in, back when it had a giant rotary antenna. I could get channel 28 out of Toledo after WFUM went off the air for the night. Plus Canadian stuff too. Those were the days.

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I’m sure you’re all asking, “Gee Steve, how could you be against something as benign as taking your kids to work?” Let me explain…

There was a time when generations of men would work in the same profession. E.g., generations of men would become police officers, blacksmiths, farmers, firemen, miners, etc. It made sense that if your son was going to do the same job as you, that you should take him to work to get acclimated to that work environment.

But then women groups started complaining that girls didn’t get to go to work so “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” was born. The ultra PC in this country thought it was unfair to exclude boys so it’s now in its present form.

In this present form all I see is a parade of “cute” kids, dressed in their Sunday’s best, going from office to office while their parents shows them off to other employees.

In other words, the concept has transformed from a very practical notion of early job training to an excruciating wankfest where the world is obligated to “ooh and ah” over a bunch of kids. To make it even worse some employees even bring in candy to pass out to the kids as they come through. Thus it’s essentially a springtime version of Halloween except our employers are paying for it through an utter loss of productivity.

Of course everyone I bitch to says, “It’s fun.” As if “fun” is somehow a basis for anything work related. I think it’d be “fun” to spend my day driving a race car, but somehow I doubt that my employer would find that a sufficient basis to buy me the car.

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Makes me wish I knew how to weld.

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But, I’ve been thinking and I think I found the flaw in the argument…

I have no doubt that eliminating barriers to business makes business more efficient. In fact, it’s circular, so not only is it true, it doesn’t really tell us anything meaningful or useful.

What no one bothers to ask is whether it is always to our advantage to make business more efficient. The advantage used to be the clarion call of the free market brigade. Certainly back when the US was the world’s largest exporter, removing barriers to sell our crap to the rest of the world helped us. But now that we’re the world’s largest importer, every one agrees that free trade is killing us. At best they’ll say, “We’ve got to compete, learn to work smarter and harder or we’ll fail.” They’re admitting now that free trade is hurting us! They’re admitting that the free market necessitates that some will win and some will lose.

Now, as usual, I have to come up with an analogy, and here it is…

As I already stated, defenders of the free market claim that removing impediments makes the system more efficient. But what if we apply the same argument to something else, like say, criminal activity. Certainly removing impediments to crime would increase the efficiency of criminals. And like capitalism, there would be some winners and some losers, but the fact that there are losers would not be a bad thing. It’s a necessary part of the system.

But no one argues in favor of that because we don’t like the effects of crime. And here’s my point: We no longer like the effects of the free market. We hate what Walmart does to our towns. We hate that jobs are being sent over seas. We hate that nothing is made in the US anymore. We hate that our workforce has to compete with the third world for jobs. A competition we can never really win. If we hate all this, so why do we and our politicians allow it?!

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“With Democrats and Republicans having merged on free trade, the issues that remained were abortion and guns.”

When both parties are pro business and anti-worker, it’s no wonder that Democrats seem like fish out of water. When it comes to arguing good old fashioned god-fearing morality, the Republican party will always win hands down.

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