Responses to Lust Apple Love - WHAT YOU THINK
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Hey Moses - Once again you hit the nail on the head.  I've always been the "anti-apple" guy and still refuse to buy or use any of their products.  They have leveled the music industry and devalued music by selling mp3's for less than $1.  
 
I remember when having a high def/audio quality CD, with cover art, mattered.  Now it's just a low-fi compressed version of the original song with no artwork.  It's a sad day when consumers pay $3.00 for a coffee at Starbucks, but won't pay more than .99 cents for something that takes 6 months to produce with dozens of people, studio time, and marketing dollars.  (BTW - that is a paraphrase of something I read in Rolling Stone that one of the president's of a major label said...)
 
Regarding SEO: Let me know when you're ready to discuss the search engine optimization of your website.  I'd be happy to walk you through the proposals I sent over last month and isolate the areas where I can help you achive high rankings with a high return on your investment.
 
Thanks and I hope your new site launch is going well!
 
Brett Fisher
President
The Hits Doctor LLC

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f--k subscription ....this ain't the library ......again the artist & the small label gets screwed.... i can't imagine any artist or small label owner thinking this is good 4 them .. the only people who get a chance 2 make any $ is the download site or the big label that can bundle up their shit & sell it off ....not a good idea ....& why isn't anybody talking about the 29% these  download sites r charging     old school hardware brick & morter was/is about 22% ...& they actually had 2 do something .....steve jobs(apple) should b sued 4 encouraging theft of music ...i mean how much fu--ing $ does this guy need ...f--k him ...also  f--k the morons who ran the industry in2 the ground ...it was at least their responsibility 2 protect their masters ...u would figure w/ all the square ass f--k'n lawyers running the bz. the nit-wits would have figured it out ....i hope they all open starbuck's & then have 2 file bankruptcy  ...love pete

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lol... where is Eliot Spitzer when we need him... maybe - 
Just maybe apple was the real culprit that lead to his downfall... as 
it MIGHT have been rumored that apple was client number 8.  Not saying 
I made the whole thing up- BUT that would make sense on why Mr Spitzer 
had a little "love bubble" (the herp) on his upper lip- while there 
was no sign of it on client #9 or his wife for that matter... Hummm I 
say, Moses - I think you single handedly have opened up a new can of 
love bubbles... but don't tell client # 9 or her book wont sell and 
her music wont play- Although, now that I think about it... Betty Ford 
could always use 1 more! :)

KC

ps- awesome article- I needed a good laugh my friend- thanks...

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I don't know which it is, Moses, but the sex is great!

 -Jer Olsen, MusicBootCamp.com

Sent from iPhone

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I've tried to leave my Apple products, but they tell me they love me and I stay.  I know that one day they are probably going to kill me but I don't know how to get out.  Is there a halfway house for battered users somewhere?  A support group?  All I know is that when my Apple is good, it's really good, but when it's bad ... well you know how it goes. 

thanks for the food for thought.  Certainly something to chew on. :)

-- Steve Belkin

Open All Nite Entertainment / Left Coast Music Group

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Like any good mistress, we know they are bad for us, but we just can't keep away."

Someday?  Good or bad, depending on who you are in the "Biz" that "someday" is now and has been upon us since the inception of the iPod. The net along with Apple have revolutionized the music industry. The Music Industry like some curmudgeon tenaciously hanging on to a withering archaic paradigm has already become Apple's bitch and deservedly so!
Apple powered DAW's have long dominated the music production process. This along with the power of the net have given artists (true artists) back the freedom of total artistic expression without the meddling of tone deaf bottom line obsessed AandR!
These are not the days of the Ahmet Erteguns and Clive Davises who's first concern was nurturing art and who knew that if you created great music "they" would come. These are the days of corporate greed who treat music as an accessory to their profit agenda and as a result by attrition have lost their stranglehold! There are now two music businesses. The one of indie artists full of the freedom of expression putting out music created on Apple based DAWS being consumed on iPods. The other of the sinking behemoths trying to adapt to the new paradigm just a little too late. Those that don't drown will have to adapt to their new roles as a purely service oriented business who will take "turnkey artist product" and plug it into their network of promo and distribution. If they play nice they can make a fair and balanced profit in a true partnership with their artists. These are exciting and challenging times and the Mistress of Change has created two sides--those that get it and those that don't! In the end she'll break the hearts of some and be really good to others.

cheers

Marvin A Kanarek

MY RESPONSE:  I hope you're right.  But I think you have too much faith in the tech gurus.  They will screw it up just like the A&R of old.

What makes you think that computer geeks will be more pure or can run things better than the people already running the music biz?

mo

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Personally, I think deep down, I actually WANT complete collapse of 
the recording industry.  I have thought about this a lot, and although 
I would probably deny it to anyone taking a poll ... I'd love to see 
the recording industry "pwned" by Apple.  Since I am not a consumer of 
their (recording industry) "product" anyway, it seems like a nice 
sharp stick in the ear for these folks.  Now,  I realise this is an 
irrational way to think.  It's illogical, and  bizarre ... But worth 
it to me, just to imagine all those smug recording industry execs 
having terms and conditions dictated to them by Steve Jobs (who has 
taken smugness to a new level).  It's a type of schattenfreude I 
suppose.

-s

MY RESPONSE:  That's like saying I want the banking system to collapse so that I don't have to pay back the loan on my home.  You know what the long terms, wide reaching results would be.  Not good.

mo

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All the points you address are strong ones but what's even scarier is
the effective penetration they've made with LOGIC and GARAGE BAND. This
IS indeed the fox not just watching, but feeding the hen house!

I can't tell you how many musicians have gone out and bought m-boxes and
the like from pro tools only to abandon them in disgust for Garage Band.
Digi would do well to include The Musician's Guide to Pro Tools by John
Keane in every package they sell. And our fellow industry professionals
embracing LOGIC? I DO understand Logic's a fine unit, but can't they see
the pill they are swallowing?

If we are indeed going to avert impending disaster, I feel we need to
appeal to "our own" to not feed the monkey. Otherwise, 1984 will happen
indeed - Orwell just got the year wrong....

w3 out

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> Hi  Moses-
>
> I'm enjoying the frequency of your newsletters - and find myself  usually
> agreeing with your perspective on things. Though right now as  an
> independent artist with very little (if none) of advertising  dollars-
> our sales on iTunes in proportion to subscription sales are far  better-
> like 10,000 to 1 when it comes to "cents"...my biggest gripe with  the
> Apple iTunes model is the "pricing lock" they subject everyone  too.
>
> Its obvious especially for record labels that would like to mark  up a
> single lets say to $1.29 on newly released works, can't. That  sucks-
> we'd like to do that to...but find ourselves at the back of the  pack
> even working with aggregators...having more freedom with pricing  would
> help rebuild value points for the music(and business)-(you would  think?)
> -and help pay for an extra set of guitar  strings...
>
> peace-
>
> Chris Baumgart
> Sonic Sugar

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Dear Moses,

There are 2 reasons I am late in replying to your luscious delicious Apple Pie piece.

1. I was too busy working in my studio (which is a hybrid of WinTel and Apple 'puters amongst many other hardware & software devices - not to mention *real* instruments (remember them?)

2. I was then too busy laughing out loud at the thought of what the replies from some of your readers might be. They did not disappoint!

So now - my thoughts. I hope you disseminate them, as I feel that some of your contributors below might need to smell a real cup of coffee.

Apple did not destroy an already mortally wounded music business. Pop had already eaten itself. The iPod was merely one of many devices built at around the same time as many other mp3 players, to play the already omnipresent mp3 music files (which are indeed inferior in sound quality to their full frequency counterparts). And The iTunes store was NOT the 1st to sell downloads - by a long shot!!!

APPLE DOES NOT EQUAL MP3   For those who do not know, here's the skinny: The MP3 is an audio-specific format that was co-designed by several teams of engineers at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany, AT&T-Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, Thomson-Brandt, and CCETT. It was approved as an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. The iPod was released a full TEN YEARS later!!!

And the iPod's software, uncharacteristically, was not developed entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer's reference platform based on 2 ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones. Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.

For the record, I am most assuredly NOT a fan of the Apple Corporation ( - if only their customer care were one 10th as good as their advertising campaigns are!!)

Now hear this, people - Brett Fisher in particular: How dare you rant about Apple's 'downloads for less than a dollar', when UMG have been working for several years to give away their artists' music for free. Hello - we're talking about Universal - arguably the biggest, baddest most powerful of all the Major labels.

Oh, and by the way, 'across the pond' - or the olde country, as Moses calls it, CDs were selling for TWICE the price as they were in the good ol' U S of A. So a CD that sold for $19.99 in NY sold for £19.99 in London - do the math, folks - forty bucks - tell me about the poor poor record companies' plight. They friggin' ate themselves!!!

STATE OF AFFAIRS    EMI is looking ...well, pretty terrible at the moment. And I many have friends who have been trickling out of creative, publishing and management at AOL Records (that's my little personal joke-nickname for the WEA group and its masters).

Last autumn Warner Brothers Records were singing a very LOUD blues, about how downloading had totally killed their industry. Three weeks later poor poor bwoke WEA put in a very aggressive bid to buy EMI. Who's bullshi**in' whom?

As for the last response in your counter-post regarding Garage Band ...oh please - I thought we were talking about REAL musicians(!)    ProTools remains the de-facto standard for recording studios worldwide. (some professionals prefer LOGIC... but LOGIC's strengths lie in the MIDI area, and not in professioanl audio - and the pros who use it are mostly hip-hop dudes). Simply put,  'Tools Rules in recording ...so that argument is simply off-the-mark.

***As for those of us who are in denial that the Music Business did it to itself ...stop bitching about Apple and start developing new paradigms for making/distributing/selling good quality music (i.e. not the Simon Cowell variety)

GET ON WITH IT!

Your pal in the cyber (on a Dell 'puter at the mo)

Elliott

still reelin'

www.myspace.com/elliottrandall
www.elliott-randall.com

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