Mailbag

From: Richard Griffiths
Subject: Re: I Don't Know

I signed Ozzy to Virgin Music Publishing in about 1983. It was the Bark at The Moon Album. Ralph Simon at Zomba had offered about $750,000 on a 75/25 split. I offered$1,000,000 on 60/40 split. I got the deal. I had known Sharon for a while. Steve Barnett had introduced me. We always understood each other . It was a successful deal for us all. We renegotiated and extended. Always making sure that the cash up frontw was good.

Sharon is probably the best manager I ever had to work with. And she's a laugh! A night out with Sharon and Ozzy was always one to remember.

Then in 1990 I find myself running Epic Associated in NY. I had brought in Micheal Goldstone to run AnR and in between signing Pearl Jam, Spin Doctors and Rage Against the Machine, we set about making Ozzy next album, No More Tears.

It's a masterpiece. Sharon and Ozzy allowed us to really get involved with the sessions. Michael was doing something that Ozzy had never had before. He was being AnRd! And I was doing something that Ozzy had never heard before. I said NO!

I recently saw Ozzy on a flight from London to LA. It was so lovely to see him and he said the nicest thing when he introduced me to his tour manager. "This is the only man who has ever said no to me. And he was always right. Even if I didn't think so at the time"

Michael and I are proud of our work with Ozzy. He is one of the truly great rock stars. You can rain on his tv show as much as you like. But it worked. It resurrected his career. Sharon is a management genius.

We had our fights and we had our laughs.

Working with Ozzy and Sharon with Michael Goldstone by my side was some of the most fun years I ever had.

I have to also add that Tony Martell was there. He had lived through so much of what came before. He was a wonderful man who couldn't quite understand what the fuck Michael and I were doing but he went along with it all and gave us young smartarses with no track record credibility when having to explain to Tommy Mottola why we were spending all his money. Tony was a great man.

Ozzy is a legend.

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From: Roger McNamee
Subject: My thoughts on the opportunity in music

Dear Bob,

As a follow-up to the conference in Santa Barbara, I want to summarize the thoughts I shared in our conversation about the opportunities in music. With your permission, I would like to send this to the email list from the conference.

The industry has been in a defensive crouch since the mid-90s, as its share of entertainment revenues and business model eroded. But the defensive crouch is no longer appropriate. Eight and half years after the launch of Spotify, streaming has transformed the industry, creating a new equilibrium that justifies a positive outlook about the future. With more than 100 million paid customers around the world, streaming is now established in China and India, as well as North America and Western Europe. The time has come to be optimistic about the long term penetration of streaming. It is not crazy to imagine that half of all smartphone users might eventually pay something for streaming services. Given that penetration is 10% or less today, the industry is likely to benefit from a major tailwind for at least the next ten years. Many people will choose streaming plans that cost less than today's $10 monthly standard, but aggregate revenues are going to rise … a lot.

The success of streaming transforms the industry's revenue outlook, and it will provide a safety net for addressing two other problems plaguing the music business: culture and loss of engagement.

The culture problem is the persistent conservatism/pessimism that were the inevitable result of a long, brutal downturn. From where I sit, it is time to trust the success of streaming and take advantage of the growing cash flows it will produce. Don't harvest streaming! Use a portion of growing streaming revenues to ramp up experimentation with new platforms and technologies. Sow seeds for future growth.

The other big problem for the music industry is loss of engagement. In the era of LPs, consumers actively engaged with recorded music. They put an album on the turntable, read the liner notes, rolled a doobie, and focused on the music. Engagement declined with transition to CDs and evaporated with MP3, as music became a soundtrack for other activities. There is nothing inherently wrong with being a background activity, but it is less valuable than being front and center. This helps to explain why concert ticket prices have risen so high in recent years. Concerts are the last area where music demands and rewards deep engagement.

Rising revenues from streaming creates a safety net that should empower the industry to experiment with new products that compel the full attention of consumers … and reward artists and their teams with incremental revenue streams and valuable intellectual property. This is a particularly good time to do so, as the industry's former nemesis, Silicon Valley, is in the early stages of a correction. The much publicized Unicorn cycle is not working out according to plan, which is likely to produce business failures, layoffs, and increased openness to new ideas. Silicon Valley has plenty of capital … and at least two emerging platforms whose success will depend compelling content that does not yet exist: virtual reality (VR) and augmented realized (AR). In VR, Facebook's Oculus division, Sony's Playstation division, HTC and some start-ups have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new platforms that are still a year or two away from commercial viability. VR is positioned to take a large percentage of the $30 billion video game industry, but to do so, it needs compelling content. I am confident that they will eventually crack the code, but they have not done it yet. And they need some new ideas. In AR, Microsoft and Magic Leap have spent hundreds of millions on new platforms that, like VR, are still a year or two away from commercial viability. Both AR players were blindsided by Nintendo's Pokemon Go, which used smartphones (instead of specialized hardware) to create the most successful video game launch in history. Having broken Apple's AppStore during the first week, Pokemon Go has had half a billion downloads in 9 months. This raises the stakes for Microsoft and Magic Leap, who need really compelling content to justify the cost of their hardware. As in VR, the content formula is "to be determined."

VR and AR are two platforms that will enable the music industry to create new products for active, rather than passive engagement. To be successful in this endeavor, the industry must be open to two changes in its business practices. First, the industry has to stop its practice of forcing every new initiative into is standard license model. It must be willing to work with outsiders as partners, with a business model that maximizes the probability of success. Second, it must view new platforms as new media. You can slap songs on just about anything, but the economic value of doing so will generally be modest. A better strategy would be to empower artists to create new art forms on each new platform. What Bjork did on iOS was a step in the right direction. As with all experiments, there is lots of risk in any individual project. To be confident of success, you need to be prepared for failure and persist through it. The first experiments are unlikely to be the ones that create the most value. The beauty of VR and AR is that the categories are brand new; the playing field is level … and it is easy to imagine compelling products based on music. The cost of experimenting today is far less than it will be once the platforms are established. The people backing the new platforms cannot succeed without compelling content, and will almost certainly invest big dollars to improve their content portfolio. They will pay even more for exclusives. Whether they will do so with musicians is unknown, but I suspect you can influence the outcome.

There is one other way the music industry can leverage the tailwind of streaming: re-imagine the scarcity model. The industry still works on a cycle of big events; an album every few years, with a supporting tour. Step back for a minute and think about that. Many artists are only in the market every three years. In a world dominated by real time news feeds on social media, how much sense does that make? I am not recommending more frequent recording cycles or tours, although they will be good choices for some artists. I am recommending aggressive experimentation with new platforms, new media and new forms of engagement on cycles unrelated to albums and tours.

When I worked with the Grateful Dead, I came to appreciate that every band has a pyramid of fans with three tiers: drive-by, standard, and fanatics. The drive-by fans the most numerous. They are the ones who like all kinds of music and develop their tastes from radio, Pandora or Spotify playlists. Drive-by fans have been the bread and butter of the music business for decades. Standard fans like the band, buy the album and generally go to a show when the band tours. Bands like the Rolling Stones, Paul McCarty, Bruce Springsteen and U2 have millions of such fans. At the top of the fan pyramid are the fanatics. They go to multiple shows on every tour. They sport a tattoo. They buy everything the band puts out … and they can never get enough. The Grateful Dead built a monster business on fanatics. Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam and others have followed suit very successfully. It's time for the rest of the industry to identify and engage with the fanatics. They are few in number, but can account for a majority of a band's revenues. There are tons of marketers who would gladly pay for access to every artist's fanatic fans.

There is another opportunity for artists and managers … learn from Marvel Comics and Major League Baseball Advance Media. Marvel Comics was a relatively small media company, with sales substantially less than $1 billion, that sometimes licensed its content to film makers. Then it made a series of moves that allowed it to move up the value chain and dominate Hollywood for a decade. MLB Advance Media created a proprietary streaming platform that is exceptionally good – with more than 3.5 million paid subscribers. They get $25 per month per subscriber during the baseball season. MLB Advanced Media just sold one-third of their technology platform to Disney for $1 billion. Think about that for a moment. A relatively small subsidiary of a sports league sold technology to media company. That's not how it's supposed to work. Media companies exist to provide technology and distribution platforms to content owners, not the other way around. But Marvel and MLB Advanced Media turned the model on its head, with huge economic rewards.

This kind of thing used to happen in music. United Artists, Reprise and A&M are examples. There are more opportunities for artists to control their destiny today than ever before. Examples include the new media I described above, as well as some aspects of traditional music operations.

The good old days have returned to the music industry. Newspapers would kill to be where you are. In a few years, more than a few participants in television and film may feel the same way. Good luck.

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From: Duff McDonald
Subject: The Golden Passport

Bob - Duff McDonald here. Thanks so much for the shout-out to my new book in your recent missive. I agree wholeheartedly that the majority of business biographies aren't worth much more than the paper they're printed on, and are mostly whitewashed revisionist histories that strive to claim foresight and planning where the truth was usually luck and timing. The purpose of my book is to take a good hard look at just how MBA-style analytical thinking has had a corrosive effect not only on decision-making at individual companies by individual people, but also how it has led to a narrowing of the frameworks by which all sorts of decisions are made across all of society, when what we need to be using is a more holistic approach that takes into consideration that multitude of factors that can't be counted, measured, or gamed. I hope It resonates with readers as a call for a rethinking of what we value as a society away from that which can be shoehorned into a spreadsheet.

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Subject: Re: The Periodontist

Bob,
What you're experiencing is something many baby boomers are going through.

We were the first generation of Americans to get regular dental care but we also grew up before the invention of dental sealants. Why is this important? Because when our teeth first erupt into our mouths the enamel on the chewing surface is not completely coalesced. So for the first several months it has tiny openings to the dentin, which is softer than enamel and prone to decay. Fluoride helps offset that vulnerability but it isn't perfect. Sealants, which did not come about until we were in our 20's covered those openings while the enamel finished coalescing and prevented decay much more effectively than fluoride alone, so the generation after us has a drastically lower incidence of decay

So we had cavities; most of us now in our 50's and older. But instead of getting teeth pulled like the generation before us, we got them filled. But fillings wear out. And when they get replaced they often have some recurrent decay around the margins so the replacement filling is bigger than the one before.

So the cycle goes something like this:
Get a cavity at age 8 or so and get it filled. Then 10-15 years later the filling gets replaced with a bigger one. Then 10-15 years later THAT filling is worn out and gets replaced but this time a replacement filling is going to be too big to be stable so you get a crown. For some teeth, all of that cumulative work has been very stressful for the nerve so at some point after the crown is placed (from as soon as a few weeks to as long as several years later) the tooth starts to hurt and you need a root canal to remove the offending nerve and fill in the empty space the nerve used to occupy.

At this point, the tooth has had so much work that more of it is restoration than actual tooth, and cracks in what's left of the tooth (namely the root) can develop. Root cracks or fractures are the bane of modern dentistry. Cracks hurt us in 2 ways.
1. When we bite on a tooth with a root fracture the mechanical movement of the two fractured pieces against the jaw bone to which it is attached is physically uncomfortable.

2. The fracture line itself becomes unattached from the surrounding jaw, creating a pocket for bacteria to live in and cause additional pain.

We have no restorative material in dentistry that will both bond the root fracture, AND be tolerated by the surrounding jaw bone to allow the attachment to reform. So the only choice at that point is to extract the tooth.

Factors that add to the potential for a tooth to fracture are diet (particularly a person who chews ice) but especially habits like clenching or grinding. If a person is stressed (and who isn't?) that stress can sometimes manifest itself in clenching or grinding, which fractures teeth over time. Most of us clench and grind when we sleep and aren't aware of it. If you think you might be doing that I would suggest you get a nightguard.

A nightguard won't stop you from clenching, but it will cushion your teeth and help preserve them. Nightguards can be as cheap as the $20 ones you can purchase at WalMart to several hundred dollars for a custom fit one that your dentist makes.

I am an Endodontist and don't place implants, but they are highly predictable and successful and yours should do very well for you.

I know you like to know a person's credentials so I will tell you mine.
BA Indiana University 1981
DDS Indiana University 1985
3 years of service in the US Navy
MSD and Certificate of Endodontics Indiana University 1990
I maintained a practice in Gainesville, Florida for most of the 1990's and also taught, part time, at the University of Florida College of Dentistry, Department of Endodontics for 5 years.

Feeling the pull of the Music City, I relocated to Nashville in 2002. Also, I am a Diplomate of the American Board of Endodontics since 1997. You might want to ask for that credential when you visit your next specialist (oral surgeon, Endodontist, periodontist)

Becoming a diplomate, or "board certified" is a long (years), three part process involving separate written, oral, and case presentation exams graded by existing diplomates within your particular specially. Becoming a diplomate is not required to practice as a specialist, but attaining that status is considered the pinnacle of achievement by the profession.

Just so you know that you're getting more than a fancy office and slick presentation next time you're visiting someone new and trusting your health to them.

I always enjoy your letter, even if I don't agree with everything you write. You've also become a trusted source for me and I give your recommendations a lot of weight. I hope this response has given you some information that is useful for your decisions on your oral health.

Sincerely,

Jim Blaney
Nashville, TN

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Subject: Re: I Don't Know

Bob
Respectfully The Stake (written by David Denny) was different and had a 4 chord preceding the similar 4 note riff which kept it out of the courts. 8 notes in a row is the precedent for melodic plagiarism, but who's counting?

Kenny Lee Lewis

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From: Johnny Lloyd Rollins
Subject: Re: Relationships & Power

Hey Bob. Check out Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. Following its principles, we took a small candy store making 200k a year to 2mil in less than 3years. Our year over year growth is exploding like crazy.

Scaling Up. Best book on business I've ever read.

Cheers

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From: Ed Trunk
Subject: Re: I Don't Know

Bob

Randy was a monster and a star. But the real secret sauce of Ozzy was Bob Daisley. Ozzy is not a songwriter. Contrary to what some credits read, Ozzy only wrote melodies. Even Geezer Butler wrote lyrics in Sabbath. I've talked to so many about this and it's fact. The lyrics on most Ozzy solo albums, including the classics you reference, were all written by Bob Daisley. Bob also played bass on every Ozzy recording from the first album through No More Tears. For a brief time Sharon had the bass and drums (by Lee Kerslake) re recorded on the first two albums to get out of paying these guys over a royalty dispute. Jake E Lee wrote Bark At The Moon, even though he was screwed out of credit. When he talked about this on my TV show (That Metal Show), he was uninvited to a recent Sabbath show.

I'm not for a minute trying to diminish Ozzy's role in his success. But there were many unsung heroes and history has somewhat been revised over the years. But nobody looms larger than Bob Daisley. His contributions are massive and should be recognized. I hope you print this because more people need know.

PS: Lemmy is also a co writer on Mama I'm Coming Home.

Eddie Trunk
TrunkNation SiriusXM Radio
Eddie Trunk Rocks FM/Syndicated
The Eddie Trunk Podcast /PodcastOne & Itunes
Real To Reel AXS TV
www.EddieTrunk.com

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Subject: Re: Claremont McKenna

From a guy who did live through the 60s, some of it in prison, I just want to say that you've hit the nail on the head.

John Berg

_______________________________________________

Subject: Re: Thursday Playlist

Dear Bob,

I was in The Journeymen with John Phillips and Scott Mckenzie before John started the Mamas and Papas. I agree that 12:30 is a wonderful song. Another lesser-known song of his called Strange Young Girls captures the whole concept of lost innocence : "offering their youth, on the altar of acid." Another entirely different excellent song is me and My Uncle, recorded by Judy Collins and the Dead.

I wouldn't call John a folkie, though. Before The Journeymen, John had a group called The Smoothies, who stood somewhere between the Four Preps and the Four Freshman. He was also a tremendous Ray Charles fan.

Besides being a superb songwriter, John was a wonderful vocal arranger. He liked nothing more than to get a bunch of people together and teach them vocal parts to a song. Trying this, changing that, until he was happy with the result.

The Mamas and Papas had such a specific sound that John was stereotyped as a folk-rock songwriter. There are dozens of songs that very few people have ever heard that cover a wide variety of musical styles and subjects. That's the tragedy of his musical life and legacy.

Dick Weissman

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From: Andrew Oldham
Subject: Re: Thursday Playlist

bob;
glad you are too a 12.30 fellow.....
" i used to live in new york city, everything there was dark and dirty ..... "
the universal john !
who BTW renamed his former manhattan cellmate allen krime ....
best, o

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From: Stein, Seymour
Subject: FW: Re-The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore

Andrew,

Have been tied up all week and only just seeing this now, or I certainly would've chimed in.

You covered all the bases and left me very little room to comment further about Bob Crewe. Most importantly, I want to state that I've made several attempts at nominating Bob Crewe for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Hopefully, your and Bob's comments, and this barrage of mostly favorable emails, will do the trick.

Also, might have mentioned Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, who I believe Bob discovered, and wrote great Four Seasons songs like "Working My Way Back To You," "Don't Worry 'Bout Me," "Let's Hang On," together with Crewe, and one of their best songs, which Linzer co-wrote with Bob Gaudio, "Dawn (Go Away)." To me, Randell and Linzer's greatest song was "A Lover's Concerto," which went a long way toward helping launch Bob Crewe's Dynavoice/New Voice labels, and also the follow-up, "Attack!"

Then, there was that fabulous triplex apartment on 5th Avenue overlooking Central Park that Bob shared with Alan Stroh, Mitch Ryder's first manager. Remember all the great parties and goings on there, one of Bob's sidekicks, and our dear friend, Roberta Goldstein, and of course, Bob's brother, Dan.

Bob (Lefsetz), if you print this, allow me urge your followers to email me their thoughts on Bob Crewe being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

One last thing. Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, two of my great mentors, were huge fans of Bob. In fact, Jerry took Bob down to Memphis and co-produced a relatively undiscovered album of Bob Crewe, titled "Motivation."

All the best to you both, and your readers,

Seymour

_______________________________________________

From: Neville Johnson
Subject: RE: Re-The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore

Bob Crewe was a despicable person. He never paid royalties to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. He sold his catalogue to Morris Levy, who didn't pay them either. I had to threaten Rhino with litigation, which did the right thing, and they've been getting paid since. Mitch writes about his horrible experience with Crewe in his award winning biography, Devils And Blue Dresses. Yes he wrote some great songs and made some good records. Remember them, not the man as he deserves no accolades for his morals and business practices.

_______________________________________________

From: Terry Gottschalk
Subject: Future

Podcasts are the new hit-song. Nobody has told a colorful story in a song since...I don't know. Ice-T? In the late 80's??
These stories that we're all listening to are completing that cycle started with radio stories from the long- or almost -dead. It's fascinating to...listen to! When might one of these assholes (pop/rock stars) finally tell a simple story instead of a vague moment hinged upon emotion?
...and how long does country music get a pass for having not been original for the past 50 yrs?

Love your stuff!

T

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From: JJ Israel
Subject: Re: The John Oates Book

My date had "RIch Girl" played for me at our senior prom. The lead singer of the band said my name into the microphone for everyone to hear; I was humiliated.

We had gone as friends. We had been friends since we were little kids. Our whole class in our small, cloistered Michigan town had grown up together. We started out with 68 kids in our kindergarten class and graduated with 74 kids in our high school class. My date knew my family and I knew his; we had similar backgrounds. I just couldn't believe he would've done that to me. And I didn't feel like a "Rich Girl" at all! Our whole town was pretty upper middle class. There were MANY families who were more well off than ours; my family was just average in our town. I didn't know that our town of some privilege fit differently in the world at the time.

When I told my date that I was upset about the dedication, he was honestly surprised. He thought I'd actually LIKE being called a Rich Girl. He thought all girls in our town wanted to be Rich Girls and so he thought he was doing something really nice for his friend. I forgave him and I'm glad I did. We lost touch over the years. I moved away from our small town -- most of my classmates migrated away from Michigan in the 80's because there were no jobs or opportunities to be had. There was no hope for any kind of future in my beautiful lakeside hometown back then. Things are changing now. I know some people who have moved back and are managing to make good livings and are enjoying all the gorgeous natural resources in the area. As you get older, it's easier to see the cycles life can bring. Hopelessness can give way to hopefulness.

Unfortunately my date didn't live to see this. He died of alcoholism about 10 years ago. Even though I hadn't seen him in over 20 years I was really sad to hear the news. Our small class has lost quite a few too soon to the disease of addiction. I've heard people in their 50's suffer from depression at a lower rate than most other age groups. Makes sense to me because we get to have a perspective we didn't have at any other point in our lives, and we, for the most part, still have our health. I wish my friends had had the time to see all this.

But anyway, your post about John Oates made me think about my friends and my senior prom and all of it. Coming of age in the 70's, Hall & Oates were definitely part of the soundtrack of my life. Thank you for bringing me down my own little memory lane.

~Jenny

ps I wish more women responded to your posts! I suspect you include as many women's responses as is feasible, but we're SO outnumbered. Maybe women could fix the music business if they had more power -- it still feels like an old boys network.

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Subject: chuck berry

Bob - In 1978, I was 17 when the band I was in (Teaser) was hired by the concert promoter to play as Chuck Berry's band at the Roanoke Virginia civic center. No rehearsal of course. The band was expected to know his repertoire, which we did, although Chuck changed the keys and tempos of his songs freely. It was memorable. The capper was when he invited a decent crowd up on the stage during his encore. He then unplugged and stepped off the back of the stage and into a limo inside the arena near the loading dock. He left us in mid-tune with a crowd on stage - it was shaking and alarming! A lucky experience! RIP Chuck Berry

Josh Gutfreund

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Subject: Re: Life Rules

Good post, Bob.

I've always worked on the basis that I know my story so it's much more interesting to discover other people's. It's one of the things that pushed me to make documentary films for over twenty years. That's certainly a bonding experience.

What always surprises me is how poor people are at asking questions and yet it is a key skill. You can't know everything, though there are plenty of people out there who pretend to, but if you can ask the right question in a polite manner, you can basically unlock any information and, perhaps even more importantly, virtually any person.

Unfortunately, many seem to think that scoring points over the person in front of them is more important than genuine communication. But that's a lonely path to travel in my view.

Best wishes,

Richard Conrad Morgan

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From: Jody Whitesides
Subject: Re: Re-Money

Bob, I direct this at Byron Udell from AccuQuote:

As someone who lived in Park City before Deer Valley existed - Byron, you're reasoning is part of what makes me think the property taxes should be 10X the rate of us that live here full time. The giant shells of wasted space & resources dotting our community is disturbing. Not only do the people who waste money on Uber McMansions create problems for locals, they also have some warped sense of entitlement for the few times of year that they show up. It leaves a really bad taste in the mouths of full time residents who have to put up with elevated costs of living due to people with too much money stealing space by any means possible.

What would make a lot of us full time residents feel better is to require even more from those who think its ok to destroy our nature for their 4th or 5th home. If you don't agree, locate your ass in Park City full time then bitch about the overbuilding, property taxes, infrastructure, and quality of life. Currently I can count 8 houses surrounding our full time residence that are all used about 2 to 3 weeks out of the year. They chew up our view, have eschewed proper building practices by throwing money or lawsuits at the city and quite frankly make our neighborhood and town look like shit.

Jody

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From: Sandro Pugliese
Subject: Re: Internet Privacy

Thanks for bringing attention to the important things, as always.

One quick correction, it isn't your browser history but your entire history of all internet access at the ISP layer, which is infinitely worse. If it was your browser you could fix this problem. This is all your online activity by your browser, your email and your apps. Enjoy the oppression. Time for router level VPN services.

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Subject: re: Money

Hi Bob

I have great difficulty believing those pro-trump mails you get are from real people. Given the spread of Kremlin-sponsored hacking, I suspect they are the work of bots.

Regards,
W.R. German

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Subject: Re: "I Wrote Six Songs That Weekend"

Bob, PLEASE read this:

I went to listen to the new Kendrick Lamar record Friday morning. I made it through a handful of songs when, all of a sudden, I heard something that blew my mind....and it's not what you think....

The song FEEL. uses a sample with some warped vocals and some eerie synths. That sample is downloadable from Splice, a now commonly used library of licensable samples that can be searched by instrument, genre, bpm, key, etc.

I learned all about it when I moved to Barcelona, went to a music studio, and saw no instruments, no microphone, not even a midi controller. All this producer/writer/DJ did was use Splice :0....

So back to Kendrick.....that sample I HAD USED TO MAKE A SONG WITH 5 MONTHS PRIOR.... And while we had different drum beats, the song was essentially exactly the same. Same key, same bpm, same exact Splice sample. His instrumental and mine would constitute a court case 10 years ago. He didn't even bother cutting up the sample or going somewhere else with it. He didn't even drop it out for a bar or 2.

So he literally dragged and dropped that song...no instruments, no music writing, nothing. Just drag, drop, track vocals.

So what does this mean?

Are my decades of honing my craft almost useless in the pop world?

Being able to improvise off a riff that Bach wrote might be a cool YouTube video, but it doesn't mean I have a better shot of putting money in the bank than someone who just uses Splice.

And what does this mean for copyright laws?

If people are making big hits using these licensable samples that can be purchased and used legally for a fraction of a penny, are we close to seeing the end of "sound ownership"? In the same way music went from $20 for a CD to basically free, is the music creation and ownership process itself going to depreciate to zero?

Would love your thoughts,
On so many levels, we live in a Brave New World .

Pianist, Composer, Producer, Ex Pat,
Dylan Charbeneau

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Hello Bob,
I hope you'll be able to speak about my friend Allan Holdsworth who passed away yesterday.
Allan was the Picasso of guitar, the Einstein of his approach, and to this day is regarded as the most groundbreaking guitarist of all time. No exaggeration.
He was also overlooked by the mainstream, and now his family is using social media to try to raise enough money for a proper memorial and funeral.
I would naturally assume that you're aware of Allan, and I have many great stories of our times together as well as the music we made, but right now it's most important to make sure he's laid to rest with dignity and with no more hardship for his sad and suffering family.

Thanks,
Jeff Watson

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