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Elton John Says Internet is Destroying Music 709

Posted by samzenpus from the mtv-already-did-it dept.
Jared writes "Elton John says that the internet is destroying good music and "stopping people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff." He laments the way that the internet and the emerging industry of digital music has created a cold and impersonal world for artists to create new music in."
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Elton John Says Internet is Destroying Music More

Elton John Says Internet is Destroying Music

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  • Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kickstart70 ( 531316 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:11AM (#20082033) Homepage
    And Video killed the Radio star too, eh?

    • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:35AM (#20082209)
      Its the same old story. VHS killed hollywood (and betamax, lol :( ). Radio killed live music. Cassette tapes killed the music industry. So it goes.

      Someone really should go show old elton Myspace music section. There are ALOT of young local bands who are finally getting some exposure due to the internet.

      And thats from myspace, the most retarded site on the net. Put some money into something non retarded, and the possibilities are mind boggling.

      • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Air-conditioned cowh ( 552882 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:46AM (#20082975)
        Quite right. A lot of things are supposed to "kill music" but cassette tapes didn't do it and nor will anything else.

        The only thing I can imagine would do it is some pandemic virus that makes everyone tone deaf. And even then, many tone deaf people still appreciate music.

        Does anyone really expect us to buy into the idea that music only exists due to the existence of the record and entertainment industry?

        Speaking of which another song springs to mind,
        "Got along without you
        before I met you.
        Gonna get along without you now!"

        Music existed before, during and after any industry.

    • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Aranykai ( 1053846 ) <slgonser.gmail@com> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:42AM (#20082283)
      Yes, and....
      - No one ever listens to the radio now that albums are available.
      False
      - No one ever buys music now that audio cassettes can be dubbed.
      False
      - No one ever buys movies now that VHS cassettes can be dubbed.
      False
      - No one ever buys music now that CD's can be duplicated.
      False
      - No one ever buys movies now that DVD's can be duplicated.
      False
      - No one ever buys media now that they can download it on the internet.

      Is there a trend here or is it just me?

      • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Informative)

        by daBass ( 56811 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:43AM (#20082951)
        Yeah, except that if you RTFA, you'll see that this is not a "piracy is killing music" stab; not at all. It is about people now making cold electronic music in their bedrooms rather than going out, getting together with other musicians and feed off each other creativity to make truly great music.

        And I think he has a point. Shutting down the internet may be a bit drastic, though.

        • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:55AM (#20083593) Journal

          When I was at school, a few of my friends were in various bands. Most evenings they would be involved in online jamming sessions, where they would make music with other musicians in different parts of the world (since this was the modem era, I presume they were streaming MIDI commands). They were feeding off the creativity of other musicians who they would never have had a chance to meet in the real world.

          Band web site with forums and even (*shudder*) MySpace provide a great way for bands to get feedback. If you play in a club, you have a very limited potential audience; the subset of people in a specific area who like your style of music. If you publish your music online then the potential audience is much larger, and so is the number of people who will provide feedback.

          • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Andrewkov ( 140579 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @07:58AM (#20083951)
            I play guitar in a gigging rock band. The Internet has been great for us. People can find out when we are playing from our website, and it's also our main promotional tool when we are looking for gigs.

            For me personally, over the years I've spent a lot of time on various guitar related forums (when not surfing Slashdot), I was able to learn a lot from other (better) players all over the world who I would never have had access to otherwise. I've collaborated with other musicians over the Internet by sending MP3's back and forth and mixing everyone's parts into one song. Hell, I even met my current band mates on an Internet classifieds site.

            However, there is no substitute for playing with other people in a real live situation, that's where you really learn very quickly from other players, but to say the Internet is hurting musicians is pretty stupid. It kind of reminds me of the old days when they said BBS's and the Internet were preventing people from being social, when in fact it was the opposite, people were spending all their time chatting online and emailing.

            • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)

              by Critical Facilities ( 850111 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @09:31AM (#20084949)

              However, there is no substitute for playing with other people in a real live situation

              100% agree there. I am also primarily a guitar player for the last 20 years. I've since stopped doing the band thing for right now and am composing/writing music on my own. While I definitely agree with you that there is no substitute for playing and collaborating with others, I think you'd probably agree that technology/computers have made the process of CAPTURING those magic moments that occur much easier and thus have contribute hugely to music creation as a whole.

              Now, when you're just "jamming" with some people, you can have a laptop there recording everything so that when someone does something "accidentally brilliant" 10 minutes into a jam session, you have it captured in a very clear, editable form. I don't know about you, but for me, this has been invaluable. There's nothing worse than doing something that just works for a song/piece and then never being able to do it again. One of the deciding factors in my buying my workstation keyboard (a Roland Fantom X6 [roland.com]incidentally) was what they call "skip back sampling". That is, it's constantly recording what you're playing, so if you do something great, you hit a button and boom, you've got a perfect digital copy of what you did. Many a great tune has been born out of an odd chord voicing, an interesting poly-rhythm, or the elusive "blue note".

    • Re:Sure, Elton, sure. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kripkenstein ( 913150 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @03:09AM (#20082441) Homepage
      Elton at least admits he is a Luddite. He's entitled to his opinions, I guess. Anyhow, not all artists are like him; for example, Therapy? bandmembers live in different countries, and much of their collaboration is done by utilizing the internet: sending each other MP3s of song ideas. Then they meet physically for a few weeks and record the stuff (see interview here [google.com]).

      Considering that "One Cure Fits All" (2006) was among their better albums ever IMHO (and I have been listening to them since they got started around 1990), apparently this 'interweb' thing isn't necessarily as detrimental as Sir Elton believes.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rjforster ( 2130 )
        It was the same for Stream Of Passion, except they did the recording over the net too. (Maybe not all, I'm not sure of the details, but at least some.)

        The band name came from the description of how they did the recording.

  • This states it better... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:12AM (#20082041)
    In other news Music has stated that Elton John is destroying it.

  • Sir Elton may be right, but who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by laddiebuck ( 868690 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:14AM (#20082049)
    Sir Elton may be right, but fundamentally, the Internet is far more valuable than the transient phenomenon of pop music. Most of yesterday's tastes are outdated now, and as for what survives, it's enough to tide us over until the Internet and the creative classes evolve to a more beneficial relationship with each other.

    • He's not even right (Score:5, Interesting)

      by abb3w ( 696381 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:53AM (#20082353) Journal

      Check the Sun article

      "In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. [...] Now you're lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality."

      Now, where did I hear something like that before? Oh, yes: Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Winning Short Story, "The Melancholy Elephants" [spiderrobinson.com]—

      "I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely appreciable melodies, and again I'm certain it is quite high, and again I am certain that it is not infinity. There are sixteen billion of us alive, Senator, more than all the people that have ever lived. Thanks to our technology, better than half of us have no meaningful work to do; fifty-four percent of our population is entered on the tax rolls as artists. Because the synthesizer is so cheap and versatile, a majority of those artists are musicians, and a great many are composers. Do you know what it is like to be a composer these days, Senator?"
      "I know a few composers."
      "Who are still working?"
      "Well . . . three of 'em."
      "How often do they bring out a new piece?"
      Pause. "I would say once every five years on the average. Hmmm. Never thought of it before, but--"
      " Did you know that at present two out of every five copyright submissions to the Music Division are rejected on the first computer search?"
      The old man's face had stopped registering surprise, other than for histrionic purposes, more than a century before; nonetheless, she knew she had rocked him. "No, I did not."
      "Why would you know? Who would talk about it? But it is a fact nonetheless. Another fact is that, when the increase in number of working composers is taken into account, the rate of submissions to the Copyright Office is decreasing significantly. There are more composers than ever, but their individual productivity is declining. Who is the most popular composer alive?"
      "Uh . . . I suppose that Vachandra fellow."
      "Correct. He has been working for a little over fifty years. If you began now to play every note he ever wrote, in succession, you would be done in twelve hours. Wagner wrote well over sixty hours of music--the Ring alone runs twenty-one hours. The Beatles--essentially two composers--produced over twelve hours of original music in less than ten years. Why were the greats of yesteryear so much more prolific?
      "There were more enjoyable permutations of eighty-eight notes for them to find."

      Sir Elton John's musical talent may be argued either way, but it doesn't change that he still is an Ignorant Idiot [wikipedia.org].

  • Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe Tie. ( 567096 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:15AM (#20082059)
    Are we not fawning over "celebs" enough? Not constructing enough temple record stores, to be preached to in a condescending manner if we pick up the wrong album? Are we actually daring to put their music in the same store as a lesser known artist? Or, perhaps his music might even be sharing the same server on itunes as one of us common ruffians?

    What's been lost is trivial to what's been gained. I had a grin a mile wide when I realized that some of my favorite artists, talented but not at all well known or mainstream enough to get a label's attention, could be purchased from the same itunes interface as the latest plastic pop idol.

    • Are we not fawning over "celebs" enough? Not constructing enough temple record stores, to be preached to in a condescending manner if we pick up the wrong album? Are we actually daring to put their music in the same store as a lesser known artist? Or, perhaps his music might even be sharing the same server on itunes as one of us common ruffians?

      He's not commenting about music distribution, or about music cartels that manufacture awful music and buy radio stations to reduce people's choice.

      What he's sayin

  • Yeah, blame technology (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:15AM (#20082061) Homepage Journal
    Antisocial people can make music by themselves without the need for the Internet. Sociable people will make music together with or without the Internet and may even use the Internet to help communicate when collaborating on a project. Technology is a convenient scapegoat, as usual.

    • Re:Yeah, blame technology (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Joe Tie. ( 567096 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:21AM (#20082103)
      And it doesn't even have to be one or the other. We moved into a new town fairly recently, and it only took a few weeks for my wife to join a band here. Nor did that fact stop her from continuing to market her solo stuff online. Much in the same way that I can use a telephone on occasion, and yet the scary technology doesn't in any way prevent me from talking to people in person. I'm just hoping that I don't wind up like so many old people when I reach that age, railing against technologies I don't understand.

  • artists are having a hard time not being heard. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by benow ( 671946 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:17AM (#20082079) Homepage Journal
    There's _ALOT_ more out there, and now there is selection where once there was only Elton John and other mass distributed mediocraty. You want to make a change, you do something about it. If you cant, work with it and stop bitching about things you don't improve. Bitching is noise. Progress is beautiful.

    • Re:artists are having a hard time not being heard. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Joe Tie. ( 567096 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:25AM (#20082125)
      And I think that's exactly what a lot of people are terrified about. I've bought a fairly large amount from itunes, and none of it's been from a riaa label. Pandora, lastfm, and word of mouth over the internet actually give me the chance to discover new music that would have been locked in a garage or small town ten years back. And itunes, and similar, the chance to purchase from them. It's a win for the consumer, but a huge loss for both the labels and the select few they decide to favor.

  • Wrong generation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by otter42 ( 190544 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:20AM (#20082095) Homepage Journal
    Maybe Elton John just doesn't get the new ways to create, play, and distribute music? To be fair, Elton John's generation and those before destroyed live music in the household, as who needs Joe-Fred johnson to strum his banjo when you can hear professionals first on record, then radio, then TV, etc... So why shouldn't we move the music to another "space"?

    I wonder if someone were to give Elton John an internet literacy test how he would do. Considering the British judge Justice Opensha had to ask what a website was while presiding over an internet "terrorism" case, I wouldn't be surprised if Elton John considered the internet nothing more than a Kazaa screen.

    • Judge != Elton John (Score:5, Informative)

      by Flying pig ( 925874 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @03:20AM (#20082497)
      Sorry, but I really felt the need to respond to this. British newspapers like to make out that judges are ignorant because it plays to the prejudices of their readers. In fact, the judge had to ask the question because both sides were talking about "websites" but without any definition, and (as any fool on /. knows) websites can be many different things. Judges are not allowed to intervene and tell the court what things are, they have to get the information into the trial record by asking questions.

      In the same way a judge was once ridiculed for asking "Who are the Beatles", but it was necessary because again they were being talked about in a trial, but anybody subsequently reading the trial report would not get a clue what "Beatles" were. Because of the way the British legal system works, on case law and precedent, judges have to assume that a judgement may be brought up many years in the future - when, say, the word "website" will be long gone but the thing itself still exists.

      Incidentally, in that case the question did show that the lawyers on both sides were themselves unclear what they were talking about - not unusual in these cases.

      • My first reaction when I read about that judge was to think 'what a plank' (British English euphemism for the stupid or ignorant).

        However the more I thought about it the more I realised it was a very good question. Just think about some boundary cases. A mirrors. Two different domains on the same IP. Two subdomains on the same host or different host machines. Two different domains with different NIC/IP on the same host machine. Two different user domains on the same host. Wiki's, forum, static and dyn

  • Exposure (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tykho ( 1133421 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:22AM (#20082111)
    There's so many bands I wouldn't have started listening to if I hadn't heard samples or web broadcasts of them on the net. It's certainly broadened my musical taste having digital distribution of music so easily available.

  • Should we get off his lawn too? (Score:5, Informative)

    by mgabrys_sf ( 951552 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:23AM (#20082113) Journal
    Seriously I'm seeing acts both prosper and thrive due to the internet. Even the more established groups like They Might Be Giants have done well thanks to the internet in reaching their fans. If anything there's probably a larger danger of background noise in the amount of chaff produced, but seeing various internet "memes" pop up from time to time I'm confident that the good stuff will always rise to the top.

    Taking an even more commercial example, I wouldn't have heard much about pop-artists like Rogue Traders unless I'd seen an excerpt of Dr. Who from the UK which lead me to wiki the Aus act and find more info than a lone single - which is only reaching US market AFTER 2 YEARS - would provide. The single is available from iTunes - but I'll eagerly await the full album.

    In the retro column, 80s artist Thomas Dolby released a live set recorded in front of a live audience in San Francisco onto iTunes a while back. He's got several businesses and projects going but it's nice to see him quickly produce and bring to market (thanks to the internet) some new material. This wouldn't have gotten the time of day by the traditional business model.

    Good riddance I say.

    BTW - check out SeeqPod. It's cooler than snail snot and the mobile client is SWEET. I've not only found hard to finds, and music out of circulation, but excellent mash-ups that would NEVER BE ALLOWED TO BE DISTRIBUTED BY THE CURRENT OUTDATED RIAA BUSINESS MODELS.

  • OTOH (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Odin_Tiger ( 585113 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:24AM (#20082123) Journal
    That's all well and good if you happen to be in or very near one of the small handful of cities that are 'music centers', but for would-be musicians who aren't in those places and have no reasonable means to get there, the music industry was just as cold before the internet as it is now, if not colder.

  • Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Xaivius ( 1038252 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:26AM (#20082143)
    Blaming the transmission medium for making the environment "cold and impersonal" is like blaming high HIV transmission rates on semen. fairly silly. The environment is what you make of it.

  • Sorry, it was (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:27AM (#20082147)
    the two guys who created the Spice Girls [wikipedia.org] that killed good music, and that was before teh Intarweb had gained rampant popularity. It's all been downhill from there.

  • hahaha completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

    by deathtopaulw ( 1032050 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:33AM (#20082199) Homepage
    what is he talking about
    just because he doesn't understand how to use the internet to meet people, doesn't mean he can make stupid statements like this

    I have an entire network of friends who, using only their computers, instruments of choice, and the internet, make great music between each other
    we're literally friends, and this is real music

    if anything the internet is what will finally set music free
    giving everyone an equal chance to put their stuff up

    it may dilute it all a bit (an effect I hope for with a lot of genres)
    but in the end we'll have more options as listeners
    and musicians will have more options for making money

  • I suggest (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oddster ( 628633 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:33AM (#20082201)
    Elton John check out The Foreign Exchange [theforeign...emusic.com]'s album Connected [amazon.com]. Take note:

    North Carolina-raised MC Phonte, one-third of Little Brother, and Dutch producer Nicolay formed the duo and crafted the ethereally lush hip-hop album without ever meeting face-to-face. Using the marvels of modern technology, the group traded verses and tracks over the Internet.


    Your move, Elton.

  • And rock n' roll singlehandedly killed communism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sakonofie ( 979872 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:34AM (#20082205)
    I have this sneaking hunch Elton John doesn't have a very normal outlook on reality. From TFA:

    We're talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that's not going to happen with people blogging on the internet.

    Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.
    Let's get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging.
    I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.
    You know that old quotation "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail". Well I guess when your life is devoted to ridiculous sunglasses, Disney soundtracks, outrageous/silly costumes and mediocre pop music, you start to get an overinflated sense of music's role in society.

    Next week on slashdot: sculptors suggest we rip out highways so that people can better appreciate sculptures and fountains.

  • Poor guy... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nefarious Wheel ( 628136 ) * on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:37AM (#20082233) Journal
    I think the lad's gone old on us.

  • Ticket prices (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timmarhy ( 659436 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:41AM (#20082267)
    Right Sir Elton, i'd love to be able to afford to see my bands live, but most of them are assholes like you and charge $150 a ticket, hence it's not possible to see more then a couple a year at best.

  • The Internet is helping me make it as a musician (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:41AM (#20082271) Homepage Journal
    I've been a software engineer for twenty years, and I'm sick to death of it. But I have always had a great love of music - I taught myself to play piano by ear starting back in 1984, and learned to improvise. I composed several songs by improvising, and with the help of a pro audio friend, recorded them back in '94.

    But at the time all I could do to distribute my music was to manually duplicate cassette tapes. I just gave a few to friends and family. CD burners were still horrendously expensive, as were CD-R blanks.

    When I got my own website, I offered some free downloads in Sun's old .AU format. I think it's 8-bit, so it didn't sound that good, and the downloads were quite large. But MP3 and psychoacoustic compression was still a ways off.

    The copyright on my music said "All rights reserved" at first, and I specifically forbid sharing my songs over the Internet, but instead requested that those who wanted to share my music direct others to my website.

    But I had always been a big fan of Richard Stallman and Free Software, and I knew that the right thing to do would be to copyleft my music.

    I'm not signed with any record label, not even an indie one. I'm completely on my own. But my music gets downloaded by hundreds of people each month, with the downloads growing over time.

    By learning to play by ear, I didn't learn to read sheet music. But for several years now I've been taking piano lessons and learning to read music, with the aim that when I can pass the entrance audition, I will enroll in music school to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday.

    The Internet is, frankly, a miracle to me as it is enabling people throughout the world to get to know me and my music. When the time comes that I play professionally - or hopefully, symphony orchestras play myy compositions - I expect that there will already be a base of fans who will buy tickets to my performances.

    Please download, share and enjoy:

    I call it "The Rough Draft" because I always intended to compose more pieces for at, and when the time came, to re-record it and to have a "glass master" CD pressed.

    The lot of it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. There are various formats as well as sheet music in PDF and Lilypond (source code) format. (I would be honored if any of you learned to play my music.)

    I've been playing at Open Mics for a couple years now. I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and often visit Santa Cruz on the weekends. If you'd like to hear me live, check my live performance schedule [geometricvisions.com]. (It presently says I'm in Vancouver, but I'll update that in the next day or so.)

    I'm also planning to buy an amp so I can play my keyboard on the street. When I do, I'm going to have a sign hanging off of it advertising "Free Music Downloads", and will have a box of my free music download handbills [advogato.org].

    Last weekend I spent four hours walking up and down Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall passing out the handbills. I got many reactions - most people think it's too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, but most who accept the handbill are quite delighted.

    You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.

  • Experiment? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tim Browse ( 9263 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @03:36AM (#20082567)
    From TFA:

    "I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span."

    If only there was a period in history when the internet didn't exist, so we could make a comparison to it.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:00AM (#20082701)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • My god (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:31AM (#20082873)
    Clearly Elton John hasn't listened to the radio for the past fifteen years. Ignorance is bliss.

    But for the internet, I'd never have discovered the amount of music I have that actually has real art value.

  • Looking at this bass ackwards (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Genda ( 560240 ) <marietNO@SPAMgot.net> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:57AM (#20083029) Journal

    Don't be too critical of Sir Elton...

    Transformative technology doesn't unfold smoothly. The dominant paradigm is shattered, twisted, shocked by the changes inflicted upon it. To the person born to and comfortable with the dominant paradigm, it would look like the death of everything they know and love. They would be quite rightfully frightened and saddened by what they see. But that is born of their devotion to the past, and their inability to see the future. To the catepillar, butterflies look like the end of all things.

    In this messy, rattle-trap process of revoltion, evolution, many new things pop into and out of existence overnight and the new stable state, the new paradigm begins to develop. It is not a pretty process, and the along the way, it's easy to become judgemental and lose sight of why people moved down this path to begin with.

    I can only imagine what it will be like when great artists can meet together virtually, collaborating with hardly more than a moments notice, anywhere in the world. What amzing art they will make for the ears, and the eyes, and all the senses, and the spirit, and the mind. What will be the possibility of an artist who can sing neural songs of profound thought and experience, and what will be possible for our children's childen when they have access to every beautiful thing ever devised at almost infinite speed and resolution. The internet of today is a tinker toy. It's an externalization of the human brain, still in it's most primative state. Nobody is surprised that a salamander or even a gopher is not sufficiently sophisticated to be a channel of great artistic beauty. Why should it be any any wonder that as amazing as it is, our ability to truly connect is stil l terribly limited, that our ability to "ART" is constrained by this tiny, narrow channel. The possibility however, that is something an artistic soul should rejoice in.

    Relenquish nothing, instead we need to push forward faser, harder, we need to stop thinking small. Watching the enterprise of of today's technology wasting precious time and energy polishing turds and calling it business... this is the real trajedy. Let's build something worthy of human artists, worthy of the art of being human. That would be the fulfillment of real transformation. That would be a worthy aspiration for a true network of human beings.

  • He is right about BLOGGING (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shohat ( 959481 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:26AM (#20083453) Homepage
    He has something right about blogging - the current state of affairs was made possible by the Internet. People think that they protest by expressing thoughts online, commenting and writing. Newsflash - you don't protest by blogging, or commenting, or making videos. You protest in the streets.
    The reason why you have less angry people on the streets, protesting and marching against RIAA, against the Wars, against bad leaders, is because the Internet creates an illusion of "we are doing something by getting together and expressing it everywhere". It's just an illusion. People that would otherwise make a huge difference by marching, protesting, suing, find it much more comfortable to Blog, which is just meaningless masturbation.

    • Re: BLOGGING and effectiveness... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TaoPhoenix ( 980487 ) <TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @07:40AM (#20083813) Journal
      Nope.

      Street marches have the data content of an Atari 2600. You get about 20 signs, 5 leaders who know their stuff, and a whole lot of extraneous violence which requires real police to break up. Then that day's rally is over, and no one cares *any more*.

      A sharp, accurate protest blog backed by just a little luck and money can take down titans. Sony is one example. Don Imus is another.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        If you get any significant number of people to get off their ass and protest something, you get press. Certainly much easier than trying to make the press take interest in your blog, if you're trying to do something locally. No, it's not exactly very high data content, but it's a fairly effective way to broadcast a simple and clear message the press can parrot for you.

  • For the love (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fozzmeister ( 160968 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @09:00AM (#20084539) Homepage
    Best music is done by people who just want to play. It may well be destroying it commercially, but who ever said it was good for companies to own our culture?

  • American Idol (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ryanw ( 131814 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @09:12AM (#20084691)
    I would think shows like american idol are destroying the music industry. They are putting out so many new artists each year of mediocre talent. All the ones that are runner ups have albums, and the winners get albums, etc. And even the winners are questionably deserving. Sure there's been Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood... but to get those two talented people we've seen well over 80+ american idol's being pushed in the market place. This distracts from other musical artists.

  • Sir Elton's £30m spending spree (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mojoNYC ( 595906 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @01:13PM (#20088705) Homepage
    from the Beeb: Pop superstar Sir Elton John once spent £30m in just under two years - an average of £1.5m a month, the High Court in London has heard. The singer's lavish lifestyle saw him spend more than£9.6m on property and £293,000 on flowers between January 1996 and September 1997. Time's is hard, 'ay Elton? Flowers and knightships don't come for cheap!

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