Never Mind the Bullocks ... Here's Katy Perry Topless!

You know, just because the Taliban are loathsome little creatures who are allergic to this millennium doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything.

As they began controlling territory in 1994, the Taliban would ban music from being played in it. This proves that for people who insist on returning to the seventh century, they're ahead of their time on certain important issues. 1994, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, is the precise moment that music began to suck mightily.

On April 5th of that year, Kurt Cobain went to the greenhouse above his garage, put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Subsequent events leave no doubt that the bullet went through the wall and killed the music business, although its body was never found.

It took awhile for the public to notice because the public is famously dumb, but notice it eventually did. Between 1999 and 2009, music sales have dropped by almost two-thirds, a plummet that would have killed most industries long ago. By the middle of the decade, the only people who were reliably buying CDs were housewives, who don't tend to buy very many of them.

The Recording Industry Association of America, a scumbag lobbying group that represents the tangibly evil record companies, blamed illegal downloading and set upon suing their own customers.

That business model worked about as well you would think it would and the recording industry is now in a state of utter collapse. Being the savvy masters of the market that they are, it never occurred to them that people might actually get tired of endless variations of Britney Spears, Staind and Nickleback. Go figure.

It was only a matter of time, but live music is dying a rapid death now, too. And, oddly enough, the major labels have nothing to do with it. This is due almost entirely to the corruption of the promoters and the greedhead stupidity of the fucking "artists."

The old golden goose ain't what she used to be. The North American concert industry, counted on to compensate for the plunging sales of recorded music, appears to be in some trouble itself. Rolling Stone magazine is calling it the “summer-tour meltdown,” noting cancelled shows and empty seats at large venues. The much ballyhooed return of Sarah McLachlan's touring Lilith festival, for example, has been beset by soft ticket sales, with shows in Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal moved to smaller venues, and others in the United States cancelled outright.

Music-business blogger Bob Lefsetz has written extensively on widespread two-for-one ticket deals and has floated the (unverified) figure of 200 cancelled concerts. It's not July yet, and the numbers obviously aren't all in, but the widespread sentiment is that the hot-weather concert schedule, which was hobbled early with the news of Bono's bad back and the postponement of U2's blockbuster 360° tour, is buckling under the bloated weight of the music industry.

The ill-fated return of Lilith Fair is a special combination of greed and stupidity. Festival tours are notoriously expensive and not given to profit when everyone involved in them is irrelevant. But Sarah McLauchlan has a new album out next month and needed something big to hype it. Putting her name above the most disastrous tour ever probably wasn't what she had in mind.

The world's biggest concert promoter, as can be expected, wants you to know that it isn't their fault.

While many are blaming ever-escalating ticket prices in an otherwise recessionary world, Riley O'Connor, chairman of Live Nation Canada, disagrees. “I don't think the pricing is an issue per se,” O'Conner says, “as opposed to how many acts think they can go out there, year-in, year-out, and come back 12 months later and sell tickets for the same show they put on the year before. It's an impossibility.”

Case in point: the Eagles. The harmony-laden country-rock legends were ahead of the times in the 1990s, singing Take It Easy as they took all they could get, selling seats at record-setting prices. Since 2008, the band has toured its Long Road Out of Eden album, hitting Philadelphia twice, for example, and nearby Hershey, Pa., once. This summer, concerts in those markets, oversaturated with the Take It to the Limit band, were cancelled.

Live Nation is about 50% of whats causing the bloat in the business in the first place, mostly because they are to live music what the Standard Oil was to market competition generally.

In the beginning there was Irving Azoff. He made his name, oddly enough, managing the Eagles. Then he started Frontline Management, which primarily sets up tours now that the record business has ceased to exist. Frontline was bought by Ticketmaster, which is an effective monopoly in retailing (and scalping) concert tickets. The merged company was later acquired by the world's biggest concert promoter, Live Nation, which Azoff now heads.

One company now controls artist management, promotion and ticket sales for a huge percentage of the concert industry. If Irving Azoff doesn't manage you, he will promote your show or sell the tickets to it, and probably both. Oh, and ticket sellers have exclusive agreements with venues, which means that if you want to play, say, Carnegie Hall, you have to go through a specific ticket retailer. Most likely, this will be Azoff.

Business practices like that didn't work out very well for the consumer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and there's no reason to believe that they'll be any better now.

While I'm at it, fuck the Eagles. They represent almost everything that's wrong with the music industry, and that's why they're such a good case study of what's wrong. They are the Root of All Evil.

After doing nothing for a quarter of a fucking century, Messers Henley and Frey decided that they could tap a motherlode of money if they could stop hating one another for a year or so. So they forced Joe Walsh into rehab, dragged Timothy B. Schmidt out of obscurity, and the money started rolling in, mostly because people like you would pay top dollar to hear note-perfect versions of songs that no reasonable person cares all that much about.

Are Desperado and The Last Resort cute songs? Sure, but they aren't the kind of songs that sane adults would pay a hundred bucks to hear played live. But sane adults did pay a hundred bucks to hear them. And the year after that, they paid three hundred bucks to hear them. And the year after that, and the year after that.

It used to be that artists didn't make money on the road. At best, they'd break even and, more often than not, they'd actually lose money touring. But in the Good Old Days touring drove record sales, so bands would make money in the end.

The problem for the Eagles was that they still hated each other enough that they couldn't bear to be stuck in a recording studio with each other for fourteen years after they reunited. Without a record to sell, they needed a payday that touring alone didn't provide.

Which brings us back to Irving Azoff. Irving figured that there would be enough paunchy morons with disposable income and a burning desire to hear The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks out there that he could force promoters (before he was one himself) to give the Eagles a guarantee per show. It didn't matter if anyone went to the show, the Eagles still got what was rumored to be a million dollars a night.

Once the Eagles pulled that off, everybody in the business took notice. Not only did it no longer matter if your latest record sucked, you didn't need a latest record at all. You could play sheds for three months and keep yourself in limousines, cocaine and underage groupies for the next three years. So everybody did it. And, since Irving Azoff isn't running a goddamned charity, that was reflected in the ticket prices.

If you ever wondered why you were paying a hundred bucks to see Christina Aguilera or Stone Temple Pilots, now you know. Feel better?

Actually, no you don't. What Christina Aguilera and Stone Temple Pilots didn't notice is that you're having trouble paying the mortgage this year, so you're not as inclined to see if Xtina's tits pop out or if Scott Weiland falls down a lot as you were just two years ago. You'd be surprised how much you hate The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks when the alternative to hearing it live for the forty-second time is losing your fucking house.

How is the industry responding to the latest crash? By selling two-for-one tickets and deep-discount lawn seat. Which only infuriates the loyal fans who paid a fortune for first-day tickets and feel screwed now. Think that might discourage them from buying tickets early on the next tour? I don't, and I'm not assuming that they'll buy tickets at all.

I'll pay premium prices to see Leonard Cohen in a small room, but that's rare and beautiful enough to warrant almost any cost. Besides, after deciding that sleeping with and subsequently breaking up with his business manager was a good idea, Leonard could use the money. And he is our greatest living artist, after all.



Beat that! That's something you should pay a lot of money to see. But you won't because the greed, stupidity and short-sightedness of Iriving Azoff, the fucking Eagles and the U.S government - who, after all, allowed monstrosities like these mergers to happen - have made it almost impossible.

I saw the great Ray Charles sing so perfectly that it brought tears to my ears at the old Ontario Place Forum, and it cost all of seven dollars. In 1992, which really wasn't that long ago. The year before, I saw James Brown at the same place. For seven dollars.

As a bitter old bastard, I don't make it a habit of feeling any sympathy for young people because, well, fuck them. But kids these days are being denied truly magical, life-changing experiences because of monumental corporate fuckheadery. Those stupid bastards are pissing away several lifetimes of making making really good money, just so they can make a ton of money now. But the business model itself is self-destructing in the process. Sound familiar?

That's why I posted a picture of, and devoted this tiny essay to Katy Perry's breasts. They're the only worthwhile things left in the music industry, and everyone pretty much knows it.

But they're damn fine titties.


Picture ruthlessly stolen from The Superficial