Sunday, June 29th, 2003

Stylized Ampersand

This afternoon I went to see the Jays play the Expos for maybe the last time (since the ‘Spos will be hightailing it out of La Belle Provence at some point in the near future), and a right royal thrashing was laid on the hometown. A two-hit 11-2 rout by the Expos. Ouchie. But it was nice to just veg at the ballpark for a few hours.

R.I.P. to Katherine Hepburn. I think I saw On Golden Pond about a zillion times when I was a kid, on account of it being one of maybe three movies that my family had on tape when we first got a VCR.

Maybe… Just MAYBE, someone in the music industry is getting a clue:

” . . . The problems at Sony Music, as in the rest of the music business, run deeper than costs. They also run deeper than Internet file-sharing, the industry’s favorite scapegoat. In fact, with some critical interpretation,

the rise of Napster and its successors can be seen less as a cause than as a symptom of maladies that are profound and structural – ranging from overpriced CDs to formulaic product to an outmoded business model based mainly on distribution and marketing muscle. The movie business may be screwy, but it’s not fundamental broken. The music business is.

“Sir Howard [Stringer, the new vice chairman of Sony,] agrees. ‘The music industry has offended the consumer,’ he says. ‘It has offended the retailer, offended the artists, offended the publishers. The radio stations are basically a duopoly now; they’re not helping the situation. MTV is no

longer playing music videos – they’re doing something weirder. You’ve got all this anger out there, you’ve got all this fragmentation, and so the music business has to be reworked, reinvented, and reorganized from the ground up.’

“That Stringer sees this – and that he’s not simply yelling ‘Piracy, piracy!’ – is the first encouraging sign for the future of Sony Music. . .”

[Credit: Business 2.0, July 2003 issue, page 37 – part of an article entitled “Can Sir Howard Save the Music Biz?” by John Heilemann]

np – Unrest / B.P.M. (1991-1994)

By : Frank Yang at 8:44 pm
Category: Uncategorized
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  1. Kyle says:

    I ended up going to the Jay’s game too! I left when it was 8-2 though.