Okay, I came across this thing in France today. Basically the French government is trying to encourage legal downloading by paying half the price of downloads. Interesting. I wonder if the USA could afford to do that if they were willing to abandon the idea of being a global police force. Just think if the entire budget spent on the military outside of US borders went to pay artists to stay alive.
While I’m talking about weird political stuff. I’ve often wondered how places like Meritline & Deal Extreme can ship me things for under a dollar including shipping. Well, I found out. It ends up that the Chinese government subsidizes shipping on most items which explains a lot of why you can buy Chinese stuff so inexpensively despite it being shipped halfway across the world. Tania clay blog can guide you more better on this.
So I (like everybody) am really surprised about Taylor Swift (or anybody for that matter) selling over a million copies of her album in a week. But here’s an interesting bit, according to Soundscan (the company that tracks the sales numbers) only 5000 units were sold in indie music shops. ~600,000 sold through Walmart/Target type places & ~350,000 digital downloads & I’m guessing the other 50,000 goes to Amazon & the like. It would be really nice if indie stores took advantage of these kind of things & pulled people into their shops for it, but if I know the indie music shops they will only stock it by special order. Me, maybe I’ll review her last album at Finally Checking It Out if I ever get around to it.
The woman (Jammie Thomas-Rasset) who has been in court about sharing Gloria Estefan & Guns N Roses on Kazaa just got out of court again. A thirdd jury found she should pay almost 1.5 million dollars (the last one said 2 million & the first one said a couple hundred thousand) for damages. I think years ago that the RIAA asked her to settle out of court for $2500 & her refusing that & insisting that she had the right to share the music & didn’t do anything wrong to me sounds like something worth her losing her house over. But I suppose I am pretty extreme on protection of intellectual property.
This morning I spent thirty minutes trying to fill an order because I had a box mis-labeled & didn’t look into it (I’d stuck some copies of the first Hotel Hotel disc (allheroesareforeverbold) that I have on consignment from the band in a Heller Mason box). But the good news is I found a few copies of the out of print Candice Recorder by If Thousands & you can buy them.
Did some work looking for more bloggers to add to the Silber promo list & got a few hundred more messages out promoting the Thorn1 release.
As I’ve been doing more looking into blogs & all this stuff, I’ve been thinking I should start a blog (or two) that is no exclusive original content & just a bunch of RSS feeds in from the couple hundred blogs I occasionally check out. Anyone interested in helping me out with something like that?
Also I’d like to give a shout out to my friend Helen for helping out with trying to iron out some of the kinks on this new blog. I think there is still some kind of an issue with the RSS (I don’t know how to use one, so I can’t even be sure), but we’re trying to work it out….
if the US gvt. did this, some banker will figure out how to make that download a commodity to trade on the markets and create a new “download bubble”. Besides, I thought you were right leaning and preferred less regulations
by regulations i meant govt. interference in business
Well, I am fundamentally against government involvement. But I’m even more against a third of my income going towards still maintaining military occupation in Germany & Japan 65 years later when it could be used better by either helping out local businesses or just leaving it in my pocket in the first place. There’s a fine line that I seem to keep treading as far as doing business practices that I feel are good & moral versus doing the business practices that can help me stay in business. This either trickles up or down to nations as well right now.