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Will Contracts Own Not Just Your Music, But How You Made It?


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There's a scene in Mission Impossible III where Tom Cruise gets the bad guy to say enough words into a recorder that they can reproduce his voice. Well, now there are programs that can take your words and produce voiceovers and spoken word files in your voice. Not a big deal, right? 

 

Well, according to an article in Motherboard, "Voice actors are increasingly being asked to sign rights to their voices away so clients can use artificial intelligence to generate synthetic versions that could eventually replace them, and sometimes without additional compensation, according to advocacy organizations and actors who spoke to Motherboard. Those contractual obligations are just one of the many concerns actors have about the rise of voice-generating artificial intelligence, which they say threaten to push entire segments of the industry out of work."

 

So...what's to prevent getting every single Jeff Beck track that was ever recorded, and coming up with "new" Jeff Beck solos that have his timbre and phrasing? If you sign a contract with a record company, will they own the notes you play as well as the final piece of music?

 

I have to say I'd love a program that would reproduce my voice by just typing in words, it would save me untold hours when doing narration. But signing that away to someone else? No thanks.

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Film actors traditionally have had to commit to availability for ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement or Additional Dialog Recording). This was frequently contentious because the process called people back from their next project to revoice pieces of dialog needed to finish and release their previous project. So plenty of actors and their managment will accept this new arrangement. Can't stop technology, man (or the agent's 20%). Time's money. Ship it.

 

1 hour ago, Anderton said:

I have to say I'd love a program that would reproduce my voice by just typing in words, it would save me untold hours when doing narration.

 

Some of these projects actually started with the development of open source programs in Speech to Text Technology (STT) and Text to Speech (TTS). They involve the same modeling that was used to transcribe live audio. One that I have been following is from https://coqui.ai/. Their github is over here https://github.com/coqui-ai

 

If cloning does come to the music space it will be brought in by the kind of end-to-end merchandise and media and touring and personal managment with all your rights sold away from jump. 

 

 

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11 minutes ago, spokenward said:

Film actors traditionally have had to commit to availability for ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement or Additional Dialog Recording). This was frequently contentious because the process called people back from their next project to revoice pieces of dialog needed to finish and release their previous project. So plenty of actors and their managment will accept this new arrangement. Can't stop technology, man (or the agent's 20%). Time's money. Ship it.

 

That's a relatively benign application, as would my using it to expedite doing narration. But, what if you get James Earl Jones to do an audiobook, acquire the rights to use his voice, and the next thing you know, "James Earl Jones" is doing a commercial for Kal Kan where he says "Help me, doggie-wan kenobi, this premium beef stew is awesome!"

 

Now, James Earl Jones is probably going to have a good lawyer who will look over the contract, and make sure that the use of his voice is limited to changes to one specific project only. But if lesser-known voiceover talents are willing to sign their voice away because they need to pay the bills, that could lead to unintended consequences.

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Cutting a deal for the unique timbre and inflections of your voice. More likely once they’ve developed a library of voices large enough they won’t even need a source voice over artist anymore at all. Only the biggest budget productions will use live people.  Much cheaper to use the synthetic in animation, video games, commercials.  

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The problem for voice over actors is that if they don't sign, those money hungry companies will keep searching until they find someone who will sign. Companies will build up big catalogs of voices and another source of jobs will fade away. Next we will see more breakthroughs in 3D modeling for animation and then companies will produce animated videos without need of actors or voice overs.

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43 minutes ago, RABid said:

The problem for voice over actors is that if they don't sign, those money hungry companies will keep searching until they find someone who will sign. Companies will build up big catalogs of voices and another source of jobs will fade away.

 

Exactly. It will be another instance where the real is replaced with the artificial to make more money.

 

It almost seems like some of the content I read on the web is essentially doing a "human" version of ChatGPT - scraping the net to put together something with the "look and feel" of a piece of writing, but with little or no original thought. I guess I shouldn't complain, maybe that's why companies still want me to write articles.

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Tom Waits sued a company who used a voice-alike when he declined to do the job. He won, saying "Having my work used for a commercial is like having a cow's udder sewed to the side of my face: painful and embarrassing."

 "I want to be an intellectual, but I don't have the brainpower.
  The absent-mindedness, I've got that licked."
        ~ John Cleese

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Yet another swing of the pendulum. 

There will always be indiscriminate music lovers and there will always be fads, people who are briefly blazing hot and endless horrendous garbage produced and sold in all creative genres. 

 

Round and round we go. As Craig mentioned 60,000 new songs daily, will it matter if there are suddenly 300,000 of them? I can maybe listen to one or two and not always new ones. It has always been true that some new (to me) music makes me want to turn it off immediately. That's just how it goes. 

 

The giant green "girl" projection that sings in an artificial voice and tours "live" on stage is a thing right now. Do you think it will be a thing in a few years?

Some other stupid and annoying something will be a thing instead.

 

I can't wait until robots can play football. Then they can literally tear each other's heads and limbs off and nobody will care because nobody will have died. Boring, eh?

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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7 hours ago, Anderton said:

So...what's to prevent getting every single Jeff Beck track that was ever recorded, and coming up with "new" Jeff Beck solos that have his timbre and phrasing? If you sign a contract with a record company, will they own the notes you play as well as the final piece of music?

 

That depends who owns the Copyright SR (Sound Recording).  They are different from generic song copyrights.

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2 hours ago, KuruPrionz said:

There will always be indiscriminate music lovers and there will always be fads, people who are briefly blazing hot and endless horrendous garbage produced and sold in all creative genres. 

 

Yeah, but this voiceover thing is different. It's not a fad or something for pop culture, it's a way to cut humans out of yet another process.

 

Of course, automation has been taking workers off assembly lines for decades. Self-checkout has gotten rid of cashiers (well, not really...it's just turned customers into unpaid cashiers). "Creative" types tended to feel a sense of immunity from being replaced by automation, but it's happening, and will continue to happen. We'll end up with an artificial culture, based on artificial emotions, created by artificial entities, whose experience is based solely on pre-existing experiences of others. And people will just accept it...because it will be all they know.

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44 minutes ago, Anderton said:

 

Yeah, but this voiceover thing is different. It's not a fad or something for pop culture, it's a way to cut humans out of yet another process.

 

Of course, automation has been taking workers off assembly lines for decades. Self-checkout has gotten rid of cashiers (well, not really...it's just turned customers into unpaid cashiers). "Creative" types tended to feel a sense of immunity from being replaced by automation, but it's happening, and will continue to happen. We'll end up with an artificial culture, based on artificial emotions, created by artificial entities, whose experience is based solely on pre-existing experiences of others. And people will just accept it...because it will be all they know.

Valid observations and one possible outcome. There is lots of doom and gloom to share, we've never come up short on that. 

 

Logical uses imply that eventually football games will be played on television screens by "virtual teams". Why? Because money. 

Robots will make robots and 3d printers will print more 3d printers. Why? Because money.

 

Eventually humans will no longer have jobs or get get paychecks. That is the final outcome of continuing in this direction. 

 

I think this is the part of the equation they may not have figured out or are too greedy to consider. 

Everything will have to be free since nobody will be needed for anything anymore. You won't be able to sell anything because nobody can buy it. 

 

Pretty simple, really. 

 

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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Perhaps live performance will roar back into popularity. People can be reasonably well-assured that there's someone actually performing. Unless they really perfect holograms, of course.

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18 hours ago, Anderton said:

So...what's to prevent getting every single Jeff Beck track that was ever recorded, and coming up with "new" Jeff Beck solos that have his timbre and phrasing?

It won't be the same.

 

People have tried to make Beethoven's 10th symphony by using the few sketches he left behind, analyzing what Ludwig did, and came up with a couple of different versions. But they don't make the cut. They sound like recycled Beethoven phrases.

 

Like Beethoven, if you listen to Jeff in the 60s, 80s, 00s and beyond, you hear creative differences.

 

The artist grows and is always pursuing new ground, using what he/she has learned, being influenced by what she/he is exposed to, and using that unidentifiable creative spark that makes a great artist great to forge new ground with each new creation.

 

I don't think AI is any more capable of that than the scholar/composers who tried to write Beethoven's 10th are.

 

My big concern with AI and voice is getting enough samples to make people say things they didn't say. I know the technology is already there, but in many cases there are clues to expose the fraud. With AI, it might not be possible. Say: if a political candidate for office can use AI to make his/her opponent say something the would surely make him/her lose the election, it could be a disaster for the public.

 

Notes ♫

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

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The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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8 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

Perhaps live performance will roar back into popularity.

 

I really hope you're right, but there aren't a lot of venues popping up where bands can play. It actually seems the number keeps going down.

 

There's a sports bar near where I live, and it used to have live music every weekend. It was quite a draw, and that was the problem: the restaurant's management felt they couldn't turn dinner tables around fast enough, because people would hang out and listen. People having drinks at a bar wasn't making as much money as people eating dinner and having drinks.

 

It always gets down to money over quality of life, doesn't it?

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3 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

 

 

My big concern with AI and voice is getting enough samples to make people say things they didn't say. I know the technology is already there, but in many cases there are clues to expose the fraud. With AI, it might not be possible. Say: if a political candidate for office can use AI to make his/her opponent say something the would surely make him/her lose the election, it could be a disaster for the public.

 

Notes ♫

 

It is the deep fake stuff that concerns me more than anything else.

 

And it cuts both ways. Obviously, we're concerned about getting faked out this.

 

But the other thing is that we keep devolving because no one believe anything anymore. It's already happening where people dismiss scientists, historians, scholars, virologists, epidemiologists, health professionals, and more. People dismiss peer-reviewed studies by simply saying, "I don't believe it." I think deep fakes/AI will continue leading us down that path. And that doesn't bode well for a society in general.

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3 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

I don't think AI is any more capable of that than the scholar/composers who tried to write Beethoven's 10th are.

 

It's not. But will most people care as long as something has the "look and feel" of music? Remember, according to the streaming services of this world, people don't listen to music, they consume it.

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2 minutes ago, Anderton said:

 

I really hope you're right, but there aren't a lot of venues popping up where bands can play. It actually seems the number keeps going down.

 

I don't even know if I'm "right" or not. But there's usually some sort of reaction against the norm, against what is going on, i.e., people embracing acoustic instruments and singing such as in Americana as a reaction against really "synthetic"-sounding pop.

 

Whether it's a large movement or not, I don't know. But if we're increasingly approaching an age in which nothing is real - music sounds synthetic, music might be made by AI, deep fakes abound, etc. - then people just might embrace live performance again to fill that sort of void.

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3 minutes ago, KenElevenShadows said:

But the other thing is that we keep devolving because no one believe anything anymore. It's already happening where people dismiss scientists, historians, scholars, virologists, epidemiologists, health professionals, and more. People dismiss peer-reviewed studies by simply saying, "I don't believe it." I think deep fakes/AI will continue leading us down that path. And that doesn't bode well for a society in general.

 

You are 100% correct.

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18 minutes ago, KenElevenShadows said:

But the other thing is that we keep devolving because no one believe anything anymore. It's already happening where people dismiss scientists, historians, scholars, virologists, epidemiologists, health professionals, and more. People dismiss peer-reviewed studies by simply saying, "I don't believe it." I think deep fakes/AI will continue leading us down that path. And that doesn't bode well for a society in general.

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

 

A very wise colleague of mine told me the first time I met her, "I believe sense-making will be the most important skill for young people to cultivate in the coming workplace". 

 

Could not agree more.

..
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21 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

I really hope you're right, but there aren't a lot of venues popping up where bands can play. It actually seems the number keeps going down.

 

There's a sports bar near where I live, and it used to have live music every weekend. It was quite a draw, and that was the problem: the restaurant's management felt they couldn't turn dinner tables around fast enough, because people would hang out and listen. People having drinks at a bar wasn't making as much money as people eating dinner and having drinks.

 

It always gets down to money over quality of life, doesn't it?

It is always about the money.

 

What we did, was pitched having a mid-day party, in the slow period between lunch and dinner. The restaurant/bar is usually vacant during those hours, so filling a table is more important than turning a table.

 

And since Florida is a big retirement state, we chose to play music for the 50-year-old set and up. It's a big market it here.

 

We took a pay cut at first, a modest flat fee plus a percentage of the register. We did it in an outdoor venue, on a weekday afternoon.

 

By the third year, we were getting more than we typically charge during the middle of the tourist season, and less during the shoulder season. On our 13th year there, COVID hit, and the place got sold. The new owners, who were restaurant people, didn't like that our people came in, rearranged the tables into big groups, had a late lunch and sat there until about 3:30 or 4:00 PM. They were used to turning tables, but didn't realize there were no people waiting for the tables, and even if some people had one drink, and others a few, they were making money during the normal dead time. They offered us a lowball price, we refused.

 

So we pitched it to a competitor, and this time just have him our normal flat-rate price. The first day he had one waitress on. The next week he had four on. That's job security.

 

One year later, we are doing 3 days a week at the same venue, and he keeps us on during the summer slow season too!

 

The days of gigging from 9PM to 2AM at a singles bar, 6 days per week, are long gone. I was lucky to grow up in that era. DJs have that part of the business, along with the weddings. Open mic nights, karaoke, trivia nights, sports bars and other diversions have also reduced our gig opportunities.

 

In these days of diminished job opportunities for live musicians, we need to get creative. We're doing 15-20 gigs per month.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

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Bob "Notes" Norton

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21 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

It's not. But will most people care as long as something has the "look and feel" of music? Remember, according to the streaming services of this world, people don't listen to music, they consume it.

This is true, probably always has been.

 

When we were with Motown, Berry Gordy told us the same thing he told all the other budding songwriters, "Don't write anything new, just keep writing what already works."

 

So the idea was to write pretty much what was happening and perform it in the same style.

 

Music more often evolves than makes radical changes.

 

But I guess I'm drifting OT here.

 

There were people who sold their name to the record lables, and had to fight to get it back. Prince and John Fogerty come to mind. I suppose if you sell your voice, nothing is changing but the technology.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

 

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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21 hours ago, KenElevenShadows said:

Whether it's a large movement or not, I don't know. But if we're increasingly approaching an age in which nothing is real - music sounds synthetic, music might be made by AI, deep fakes abound, etc. - then people just might embrace live performance again to fill that sort of void.

We see that happening.

 

Places that used to hire DJs for their private parties, are hiring us again. They are enthused by seeing the musicians play the music. They are delighted to see that we are having the time of our lives playing that music, and the joy is contagious.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

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Bob "Notes" Norton

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Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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5 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

In these days of diminished job opportunities for live musicians, we need to get creative. We're doing 15-20 gigs per month.

 

That's great to hear. It's all about finding an unfulfilled need, and filling it. That's the philosophy behind my eBooks. For example, there are a zillion "Studio One 101" videos and books, so I wrote something for people who already knew the basics, but wanted to take the program further. There's no competition there.

 

I sometimes watch Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares where he tries to resurrect a failing restaurant. Much of the time he looks at the competition, and recommends doing something else. For example in one episode, he noticed there was a surplus of Italian restaurants, and the failing restaurant served Italian food. He noticed that what the area lacked was a good steak house, so he advised changing the menu to provide something other restaurants didn't provide.

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In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man isn't just king; he's also overworked to death. Everyone else is stumbling around, knocking things over, while he rushes to keep the largest vessels on the table. No time for those individual glasses. That's why the floor is always wet, slippery and sprouting broken glass like posies.

 

I could almost call it schadenfreude, but I got to live through several 'golden ages' and enjoy them without an excess of PC 'concern' and toxic technology to throw them off track. $200 concert tickets can get bent. I saw three bands for $20 back when and they were distinct from one another. That world is in my rear-view now and 'the kids' are having to live with watered-down versions of everything except Panic. Sorry you were born too late! 

 

I'm in Grandpa Simpson's realm now.

Lisa says "What do YOU have to be afraid of?"  

"EVERYTHING! Changes in air temperature, Dutchmen and fear of the impending gloom!" 🥳

 

I have lousy days, but I've experienced a great deal of Good. I can walk into the darkness without complaint.

 "I want to be an intellectual, but I don't have the brainpower.
  The absent-mindedness, I've got that licked."
        ~ John Cleese

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1 hour ago, David Emm said:

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man isn't just king; he's also overworked to death. Everyone else is stumbling around, knocking things over, while he rushes to keep the largest vessels on the table. No time for those individual glasses. That's why the floor is always wet, slippery and sprouting broken glass like posies.

 

I could almost call it schadenfreude, but I got to live through several 'golden ages' and enjoy them without an excess of PC 'concern' and toxic technology to throw them off track. $200 concert tickets can get bent. I saw three bands for $20 back when and they were distinct from one another. That world is in my rear-view now and 'the kids' are having to live with watered-down versions of everything except Panic. Sorry you were born too late! 

 

I'm in Grandpa Simpson's realm now.

Lisa says "What do YOU have to be afraid of?"  

"EVERYTHING! Changes in air temperature, Dutchmen and fear of the impending gloom!" 🥳

 

I have lousy days, but I've experienced a great deal of Good. I can walk into the darkness without complaint.

Ahhh, the three band concerts!!! I went to one in Fresno with Rory Gallagher opening, Fleetwood Mac in the middle and Deep Purple closing - $7.50 for general admission (all "seats". Rory ate everybody's lunch, hands down. Great show, nobody sucked. 

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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3 hours ago, Anderton said:

That's great to hear. It's all about finding an unfulfilled need, and filling it.

If you look at which animals survive during changing times, it's the opportunists. While the pandas will go extinct if their one food source, bamboo, goes away, the opossums, coyotes, and gulls expand their range. Meat, seeds, fruit, human trash, carrion, whatever they can find. That's how to be a survivor. Survival doesn't go to the fittest, it goes to the most adaptable.

 

That goes for musicians, too.

 

When we got on the cruise ships for a 3-week contract in 1985 we analyzed the ship. The baby-boomer generation was hitting 40, tired of keeping up with top 40 songs, and the singing grape commercials were a hit. (For the young folks, they were singing Marvin Gaye's “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The ship had an orchestra, a piano bar, a disco, a single guitarist doing country music, and a Filipino band doing a lot of Latin American. On deck was either a Reggae or Soca band, and there was no baby-boomer music.

 

The first day of the cruise ship had an introductory show in the main theater and then nothing special planned for the rest of the night. We asked if we could introduce ourselves, the cruise director said no duo had ever asked that question before, and he said he would be happy if we did.

 

We introduced ourselves and did a little Schick telling the audience the 20 different kind of music we play, ending with "one opera song". Then we added that tonight, after the introduction show, we will be hosting a 50s, 60s, and 70s party in "Smuggler's Lounge", our home on the ship.

 

Smuggler's lounge was on the main deck, but a small niche. People check out the bigger rooms first so they hit us last. On our first couple of weeks, they would find us at the end of the cruise and tell us they wish they found us earlier. Our 50s-70s party solved that problem, and it gave the ship the kind of music it was missing.

 

Before long, we broke all-time revenue records for that lounge. The management in Miami looks at the revenue in each bar to see where the people are hanging out. They are going to spend the money, but where are they spending it? We even made more money than the disco a few weeks, and the disco was open many hours more than us, and it was over twice as big.

 

Our 3 week contracted was extended to as long as we like, and after 3 years, Mrs. Notes' mom got sick so we put in our notice to take care of her.

 

Soon after we started jamming the lounge, we also got the 'raise' of a passenger sized cabin with a porthole. Something few musicians get, even the orchestra leader didn't have that.

 

To survive in music, someone told me a long time ago to be a chameleon and play anything and everything. That's good advice, and I add, be an opportunist too.

 

We play music to the best of our ability, but we also need some survival skills too. What do they want to hear? What is the best market in our area? What are unfulfilled niches? How should we dress? Should we talk on the mic or not for the particular gig we are on, and so on.

 

When I was 40, we chose the retirement audience, back when it was Sinatra, Glenn Miller, and other standards. It's a big audience in South Florida, retirement heaven. We've changed with the times, still playing to that audience, but as the old folks pass on, and the younger ones enter, we play what they want to hear whether it's Elvis, Beatles, Eagles, or Adele. Chameleons.

 

And I get to make a living doing music and nothing but music. I'm living life on my own terms, not being a wage slave who is owned by some faceless corporation, enjoying what I do, and looking forward to every day that I get to work.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

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Bob "Notes" Norton

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The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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2 hours ago, David Emm said:

I could almost call it schadenfreude, but I got to live through several 'golden ages' and enjoy them without an excess of PC 'concern' and toxic technology to throw them off track. $200 concert tickets can get bent. I saw three bands for $20 back when and they were distinct from one another. That world is in my rear-view now and 'the kids' are having to live with watered-down versions of everything except Panic

I remember top shelf drinks going for 49 cents, draft beer for a dime. Gas was 32 cents a gallon.

 

Then Nixon and the GOP decoupled the dollar from the price of gold and inflation soared. In retrospect, that wasn't a good idea.

 

In round approximate numbers: So instead of making $10 per gig, you make $100 per gig, and instead of $0.39 for a gallon of gas, you pay $3.90. Everything seems the same, jut the decimal point moved.

 

Until you consider your savings. That $100 you put under your pillow in the 1960s, today, would buy what you could have bought for $10 in the 60s. It lost 90% of its value. Almost makes it not worth it to save anything.

 

I'm glad I grew up when I did, and I'll be leaving before it goes to hell.

 

I think corporate capitalism has let us down. I'm not smart enough to know what the solution is. Communism was obviously not the right way out. I hope someone smarter than me figures out, gets to do it, and saves the future generations from the hardships I see them headed towards.

 

So today's musicians have to be more creative in nonmusical ways than we did in my generation. See the holes and fill the holes.

 

Sorry if that's too political. I'm a moderate, middle-of-the-road, equal-opportunity complainer and applauder.

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

 

Inflation_1913-2015.jpg

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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Okay, I'll bite :)

 

Inflation isn't an entity in and of itself. Significant inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods. Your chart above could have been labeled "Growth of materialism is overall society compared to overall availability of goods," and still be accurate.

 

As to the solution for society, you already hit on it in the previous post - adaptability. I believe any societal system can work as long as people are cool, but that no system can work if they're not. Trying to force society into "pure" systems like communism, capitalism, socialism, anarchy, you name it, will never work because systems can be gamed so easily.

 

So, until humanity becomes more enlightened, the system that best creates an environment where people have to be cool to hold society together will be most successful. 

 

You can see this in the "happiest countries on earth" ratings. They all involve countries that have adapted a mix of socialism and capitalism. Enterprise is free enough that you can get rich, but you have to be cool and plow some of that money back into the society that gave you that freedom. On the other end of the spectrum, there's enough socialism that you don't have to worry about starving or going bankrupt because you got sick. In return, you're expected to behave, not go around shooting people randomly out of fustration, and not steal things, because your basic survival is covered.

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11 hours ago, Anderton said:

You can see this in the "happiest countries on earth" ratings. They all involve countries that have adapted a mix of socialism and capitalism. Enterprise is free enough that you can get rich, but you have to be cool and plow some of that money back into the society that gave you that freedom. On the other end of the spectrum, there's enough socialism that you don't have to worry about starving or going bankrupt because you got sick. In return, you're expected to behave, not go around shooting people randomly out of fustration, and not steal things, because your basic survival is covered.

I like that idea. I'd vote for that.

 

But will that happen? When corporations have free-range to donate zillions of dollars to candidates campaign funds (tacit bribes?) in the name of free speech?

 

I would propose a $50 limit for a campaign contribution per candidate from any one person to every candidate he/she wants to support. And I would stipulate that only registered voters should be allowed to make contributions.

 

But I guess that's a dream.

 

Meanwhile, we just need to keep on keeping on, making the best of every opportunity that presents itself, and doing all the things that bring us joy, as long as we are respecting others while we do so.

 

And I will not sell my voice to any ChatABCDEFG that comes along. Unless the price is really, really, really high. :D

 

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

Bob "Notes" Norton

Owner, Norton Music http://www.nortonmusic.com

Style and Fake disks for Band-in-a-Box

The Sophisticats http://www.s-cats.com >^. .^< >^. .^<

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