This is a great read about “How to Connect with Self, Lovers, and Others”
Here are the first 2 paragraphs in her Introduction:
“Have you ever been telling a story to a group of women, and they begin nodding their heads, saying how similiar things have happened to them? As each woman begins sharing her experiences, an energy gets created that spreads around the group like wildfire. Whether the discussions are about our lovers and husbands, our health, our beliefs, our kids, our work, or how we want to create value in our local and global community, we women empathize, connect, and resonate with each other.
GROW -The Modern Woman’s Handbook is aimed at women of all ages who wish to get back in touch with their femine centers, that is, the place where we all remember how to connect; first, with ourselves and the divine; second, with our families and loved ones; and third, with our local and global communities. I believe that the emergence of femine values in society must be the way forward if we’re to create a positive future for humankind. ”
Karl & I just came from church today. 1st time either of us has been to a service in a couple years. Real nice. Had videos of kids from the classes telling “What do you think your dad should do on Father’s Day…?” Cute answers & wonderful natural kid responses.
Pastor made a very relevant comparision. He talked about how fathers should - Tell their kids that - things are going to be OK, be happy, life is good, Our Heavenly Father is watching over us (if you’ve got it right with him) & He will see us through any tough times - instead of speaking worry & doom & unrest to their children. He hit on the current condition of “the world” and that this is a very challenging time & still, we must, (fathers were his target), keep the talk to the children uplifting.
He also hit on forgiving your own father if he had parenting “shortcomings.” LOL The great thing he said about that is —- “Get over it…” I said Gina’s name aloud as she has an issue with her childhood somehow being connected to current problems & constantly goes to the past in justiying the present. And also a few Amens for my own childhood father “shortcomings.”
He told all the kids to hug their dads today until their heads popped off.
That’s a cool line.
Happy Father’s Day to All Dads who nurture & all Men who lead wisely
There’s an ultimately boring article on Wikipedia in today’s “New York Times”. For those scoring at home, the article focuses on editing, with the primary controversial topic being Scientology.
I’ll leave the details out, if you’re that interested, you can click through. But what got me to write this was the sidebar, wherein the genre of Panic At The Disco was delineated to be one of the controversial topics.
I’m thinking Panic At The Disco’s fifteen minutes of fame are just about up, but a synapse fired when I was reading this article and I realized, Wikipedia is just like Google, a dominant resource.
I was sitting in the audience at the L.A. Acoustic Music Festival enraptured by Natalie MacMaster and I started to wonder, what exactly is her story?
I didn’t go to her website, which probably wouldn’t render too well on my BlackBerry anyway, I Googled her Wikipedia site and clicked through and started reading.
Turns out she does 250 dates a year. Fascinating, since she just had a baby in February and already has two other kids… When is she home?
And the wealth of information on Bruce Cockburn was truly exhaustive. Drilling down to his honorary doctorates… And I didn’t even know that Jimmy Buffett did Cockburn songs!
If you go to the act’s website, you get Flash animation, you get hyped, you get sold. Sure, you might be able to listen to some music, but the band’s site is not a good place for basic information. You end up with a history that reads like a corporate bio and tour dates and maybe a message board. Whereas when you go to Wikipedia, the site loads just about as fast as Google and you get the raw information.
In other words, make sure your act has a Wikipedia entry!
Unless you want to build mystery. Then you should have neither a Wikipedia page NOR a website. But that twentieth century game is rarely played anymore. Acts complain they can’t break through, not that their privacy is in jeopardy. Therefore, when you launch a new act, you should create a Wikipedia entry!
If the act is brand new, keep the entry limited. If the entry doesn’t fit the act’s status, it ends up looking like hype and it is ignored. If you’re creating your own Wikipedia entry, think of it as a true encyclopedia essay. They might have a page on the Beatles, but Haircut 100 would get just a few lines. But at least online, every act is entitled to an entry!
If you’re lucky, you’ll become big enough that fans will start adding and changing your Wikpedia page. Don’t worry about accuracy. Mistakes make it look like you didn’t write it, they make fans feel superior, wanting to make corrections or just feeling closer to the band than those editing entries. The key is to have a presence, a starting point, where a newbie can get up to speed, can find out who you are and begin his fandom.
After writing about how Napster renegotiated its deals with record labels to offer its music subscription service at a lower price, I called RealNetworks, which offers the Rhapsody service, to see if its executives were excited about cutting similar deals that would allow it to offer its own $5-a-month music service. For years, after all, people trying to popularize music subscriptions — which allow you to listen to anything you want for a monthly fee — have been telling me the concept is great but the price the record labels want is too high.
But Mike Lunsford, Real’s executive vice president, was anything but excited. Sure, more people will want a service that costs $5 a month than one that costs $13 a month. (Indeed, the new $5 offer is better because it also includes five MP3 tracks to keep each month.)
But even a great value doesn’t mean the service will sell itself. Like any business that sells subscriptions, from Sports Illustrated to Netflix, Rhapsody needs to advertise to attract new customers. Paying for that marketing and the other costs of operating the service is harder with fewer dollars moving through the company.
“At $5 a month, we’d need five times as many customers than we do now to make it all work,” Mr. Lunsford said.
Napster doesn’t have this problem because it is now owned by Best Buy, which can promote the service in its weekly circulars and through its stores.
“If they had to pay for all that promotion, it would eat up all the profit on Napster,” Mr. Lunsford said.
For the last year, Real has been trying to find a way to offer Rhapsody without having to sell subscriptions one at a time. Its idea is to bundle the music service with Internet service and cellphone plans. It hopes that an Internet provider or wireless carrier would see access to unlimited music as a way to stand out from the competition, at a wholesale cost of a few dollars per subscriber.
The company just struck a deal with Vodafone, which will include its music service as part of an unlimited wireless data plan that costs 16 euros ($22) a month.
It hopes to strike similar deals in the United States and other countries. The new pricing flexibility from the music labels will help. But labels still want to charge a higher price for music delivered to cellphones than to computers.
Nokia appears to be in a similar standoff with the labels. It is hoping to bring its “Comes With Music” program — which bundles a service offering unlimited access to music with certain phones — to the United States this year. But so far, it has not been able to strike deals with the labels.
The labels may have a point. If your cellphone could play any song you wanted in an easy and unobtrusive way, that would be worth something.
But over and over again, customers are saying the right price for music is free. Since a free service, like Pandora, doesn’t have the huge subscriber acquisition costs of even a low-priced subscription offering, I wonder whether businesses like Real and Napster, and eventually the music labels, will one day realize that free may well be better for them than cheap.
Monday Inspirations—Here are 3 weekly ideas for song lyric, poems, instrumental titles, photos, video, short story or anything they inspire you to create.Use the title if you like & make something!
31. Cabin Fever Juke Box
Roll out that cabin fever juke box
We’ll all dance and shout
The trees are naked and the sun Won’t come out
Put that song on moves our feet
Roll out that cabin fever juke box
Da Da Da Tweet ~
32. Chew Chew Swallow
a. Children’s Song
b. Adult song about taking life as it comes
c. A food song for a particular product
33. Come On To Me
‘Twas the full moon and all the wolves were howling. One female wolf raised her head from atop a rock and sang to the boys, “Come on to me…”. She was ready for them.
Up to this point in this column, I’ve been writing almost strictly about financial vehicles or wading into the economic muck that we as a nation have gotten ourselves into and trying to bring some clarity to the situation. If I may be permitted, I would like this week to go on a little rant about some things that have been going on in my business and also how the business model for music has pretty much been flipped upside down over the last 10 to 15 years.
Back when I was in GN’R, bands like us could pretty much operate at a break-even point on the road because acts were selling more records than is even imaginable these days. The reason for the dramatic downturn in record sales, of course, was the digitizing of music. Putting music on CDs meant it had to be in digital form; eventually this led to the situation where digital files like the MP3 were divorced from any physical product, making the Internet and home computers the prime means of distributing music. A rock tour back then, at the dawn of the digital era, was really just a huge commercial to sell your record. Because a larger portion of people get their music for free via piracy these days, touring, “merch” sales (mostly t-shirts, but also stickers and pins and anything else you can slap your band’s logo onto), and licensing of one’s music for ads and ringtones must support the average music act these days.
The major record labels missed the only real opportunity to get paid from illegal downloading back in 1997 or so. We all remember the Napster conundrum when Metallica sued them, right? Hey, as far as I’m concerned, Metallica had every right to demand payment for their hard-wrought recordings. But there was another deal on the table then from Napster that was never really publicized—and this where the “major labels” fucked up in my opinion.
Napster was making truckloads of dough off banner ads back then. It seemed the site was the most looked-at space on the Web and therefore a hot property. Car companies, cola bottlers, movie companies, and many others were paying top-dollar to get access to those Napster-glued eyeballs back then. Napster offered to share this ad revenue with the major labels so that artists would get paid for the downloading of songs that Napster made available for free. It now seems like the perfect business model for what was then a largely unanticipated future of digitized music. The majors balked and a huge opportunity was missed.
Again, in 2005 or so, the remaining major labels tried a lawsuit against pirate music source Kazaa. And again, the company under attack offered to share its ad revenues but were turned down. Actually one major peeled off from the lawsuit and did a deal with the Kazaa; the rest just simply dug their heels in and are still in the same spot to this day, left in limbo with neither them or their artists getting paid.
Nowadays, if a band wants an even remote shot at getting a deal with a major label, they must yield to the new business paradigm of giving up a portion of their publishing, their merch sales, and even concert receipts to the label in return for the release and marketing of the band’s music. This all seems dirty to me, but it’s the way things are now done—at least in the old corporate music world.
Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was a grassroots revolt against the then-bloated music industry (read the book Hit Men to get an idea of just how extreme the business had gotten). Independent record labels like IRS, Slash, SST, and Beggars Banquet began to spring up, giving new and different bands a chance to succeed and reach a national audience. The same thing has happened again in recent years as a result of Internet distribution. But right now, there’s almost too much information out there. A club booker now books bands based on how many views they get on their MySpace page. Bands have to hustle—maybe even more than in the pre-MySpace era—just to get a gig at a shitty bar. What seemed like a revolution fueled by the Web now looks somewhat tenuous.
But maybe the rest of the dominoes are ready to fall—and by that, I mean the ancillary parts of the music industry. I hope there is a true music revolution bubbling right beneath the surface of the underground that will hopefully surprise us all and get us away from, for instance, the vanilla agenda rock radio feels it has to follow these days in order to sell ads. Music blogs, internet radio, mashup sites—there’s a lot of things out there, of course. But with the possible exception of iTunes, the world is still waiting for the next wave of tools and institutions that will allow new acts to ingrain themselves into the popular consciousness the way bands like GNR were able to do—to create generational anthems, to mark moments in time for an entire nation, to unite our culture through music. Here’s hoping their arrival is right around the corner.
Here’s an e-mail I received. Tell them Songs2Share sent you. I’ve heard one songwriter we sent to Music Dealers . com got a placement. Hip hip horray! ~ Roberta
Baseball Songs Needed
Hi Everyone, We just got a request for a song about baseball. No real genre / style specifications but it should be upbeat, positive and maybe even a little quirky, not silly but it could have an element that is a little different than the norm (something that makes it stand out). This should be a full song with vocals. The song MUST be about baseball. Nothing that just mentions the word “baseball” or “baseball bat” etc. The actual theme has to be all about the game or culture of baseball. Think nostalgic. To submit to jobs either upload a new track and click “submit to job” on the upload form, or if you have an existing track in the system that works click on the details arrow to the left of the desired track and click “submit to job”. Please do not send MP3’s via email. All submissions must be done through your account at MusicDealers.com. We look forward to hearing what you come up with. - Your Friends at Music Dealers
