Steve Jobs steps back a bit from Apple; the media lionizes him as the Tech Messiah.
Steve Jobs, RIP (Sneak Peak)
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
6 Comments. Leave new
I don’t get it. Are we supposed to accept as given that musicians were paid much more than 99 cents per song in the past? Because I doubt that it’s true.
Also, the invention of the record and the rise of the record stores probably destroyed the traveling minstrel trade and also decimated the trade of fresh, home-grown local musicians in favor of mass-produced music. So if you view it from this angle, that bastard record shop owner is just getting his just comeuppance. (I do not actually believe this, but neither do I believe that the rise of digital music distribution is evil. I think both arguments are equally lame.)
Let’s put it this way.
Blondie snorted millions of dollars in the early ’80s.
A similar band today would never EARN that much in the first place.
[…] the original here: Steve Jobs, RIP (Sneak Peak) | Ted Rall’s *{margin:0; padding:0;} ul{ list-style:none;} #socialbuttonnav {width:90%; […]
Ted, I think your love of recorded music is getting in the way of your hatred of corporate exploitation of working people. First of all, working bands seldom make millions. Instead, companies that sell plastic discs containing artificial replicas of highly edited musical performances are more likely to make the millions. The musicians are often billed for the studio time out of their contract and then paid in cocaine or some other dust-based uselessness. Type “Steve Albini Rant” into your favorite corporate search engine for details.
Deborah Harry apparently had no personal use for cocaine, so the white mountains shoved in her door were freely distributed to whoever asked. Perhaps she was too busy working to start up coke dealing as a sideline business. Or, as Joe Boyd put it “cocaine is a likely reason why so many great musicians of the 1960s made terrible records in the 1970s.”
We are in a transitional phase in the music business right now. The big corporate labels had a monopoly on the distribution of plastic discs. That was the sole advantage to signing a contract with Warner Bros: Your plastic disc would appear in Tower, Virgin and Borders.
Saying Steve Jobs killed music is like saying computers killed the typewriter repair shops. And there still ARE typewriter repair shops. Instead, Steve Jobs should be criticized for overpriced hardware and software that’s scarcely as functional as the free stuff.
It’s still ridiculous that Jobs is seen as dealing with the devil for supposedly killing the supposedly great “music industry”. I wonder how rosy is the picture of Marx’s afterlife considering the hundreds of millions of victims laid out at the feet of his glorious theories.
Rather than Steve Jobs, what should be criticised is absurd copyright and patent legislation which both hinders innovation and impoverishes creators and innovators (as opposed to so-called «rights-holders» and their lawyers, who profit immensely. When Apple can get an injunction and then a court rulling in Germany to the effect that Samsung can’t sell their tablet because (despite looking nothing like Apple’s product) it was found to violate Apple’s «Community Design Registration», we can see that the rot has escaped the boundaries of the US, to which it was hoped it could be confined, and metastised to the rest of the world….
Henri