A Barking Dog

ESTA is set to offer a certification for entertainment electricians. They’ve put a panel together to determine what should be on the test. The panel is looking for folks like us that do this sort of thing to help give them input as to what should be tested.

From the Theater Sound mailing list by John Huntington…

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I’m a “subject matter expert” for this certification process, and I
lobbied hard to get on the panel so that (in addition to lighting, of
course) sound, video, control, scenic automation, etc people are
represented in the process (I’m the only sound guy on the
panel). To make sure the survey reflects all of us, we need your
help. While we will write the questions, the results of the
survey >>determine<< what is on the test, so a large response is
critically important.

If a significant part of your job is working with electricity, please
sign up today!!!

From ESTA ETCP:

Your input needed

The ETCP (Entertainment Technician
Certification Program) needs input from Electricians for the proposed
ETCP Electricians Certification and will be conducting a broad
reaching survey to help perform the job analysis. This analysis will
determine the common factors in what entertainment electricians do
and the relative importance of those tasks. Many hundreds of
responses are needed to ensure a fair and statistically significant survey.

If you are an experienced electrician, in any entertainment field or
venue, then please help by completing the survey. You can learn more
and sign up by submitting your name and address at this
page:- ETCP Electricians Survey

(If the link does not work try:
http://etcp.esta.org/survey.php or
http://etcp.esta.org and click on ‘Calls For
Action’ on the left.)
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Is this guy stalking me? After a thread at the LAB I went into a reliving the past mode trying to figure out my history of concert attendance so I thought I’d Google the concert dates I remember from way back when. I thought that Pink Floyd Animals was my first show but it turns out that KISS at that same venue almost a year prior was where I broke my concert cherry. The funny thing was, as I sat watching the guys at FOH I wished I could have such a gig but thought I was way too late. I was 15, a freshman in high school. Almost 30 years later and what have I been doing for almost all of my adult life? Being that guy I saw on the scaffold so many years ago. Is this a great life or what…

I stumbled on this site http://www.kser.org/shows/exposure/my_concert_tickets.htm that had stubs from some shows, several actually, that I’d done in Seattle. The guy is Peter Dervin a DJ, err I mean air personality from the outskirts of my former home in Puget Sound. So many shows that it looked like a history of the work I did up there. There are also a few shows that he saw in LA prior to my moving to Seattle that I was working as well. Not only that, but I was at some of those shows pre getting into the biz as a punter. Spooky, but if I was able by being a sound dude at those shows to help Pete enjoy the show that’s good enough for me.

If he starts posting Vegas stubs I’m gonna have to track him down. For good measure, I’ve got the cans on, cranked to the max with the iPod locked on KISS Alive.

To the regulars that lurk here (both of you) this one isn’t my usual schtick on pro audio or the music biz but one of those once in a blue moon karting posts. The 2k5 season was pretty suckola for me as far as karting went. Only two testing days, aborting the partial season then doing the usual spending most of the year on the road much of it out of the country. One of the reasons I moved down here, other than to stop touring and take a house gig, was to spend more time racing. It’s way more motorsport friendly than in the Northwest. Year round racing, gotta love it. A bit of a note to the karting types that are stopping by for the first time… A Barking Dog is not kid safe for sensitive kids or parents. If you don’t want your kids exposed to adult situations, language and humor, they shouldn’t be reading it. Same goes for you… That said new readers to ABD might want to check out the Mexico Tour series for a peak at what being a show biz roadie is all about on a dysfunctional tour with a well known artist in a foreign land (it’s in reverse cronological order, which means start at the bottom and work up) and “The Glamour of Show Business” short film (it’s big 20MB) that is a video peak at a tour I did about a year ago.

There’s been a recent thread on eKarting News about some of the road race karting clubs withdrawing from the sanctioning body the IKF. Good. It’s about time. While there have been some good, well meaning people on the board, the organizational structure is about as useful as tits on a bull. In my view, it’s a disfunctional, fractionated organization that while bearing a charter to serve the recreational karter, is really nothing more that an insurance broker. The board is elected by the members (which I was for three years) but the board really isn’t accountable to the membership. It can be a pretty defensive bunch which is understandable considering how high strung most karters are. Especially parents of karters. Some of them make hockey dads look rational by comparison. Karting is supposed to be fun. That’s why I started. But it’s hella expensive, and when everything is going well, it’s hella fun. There does need to be a structure in place but when that structure falls out of touch with the racers, it is less enjoyable. That wouldn’t be so bad if the structure was able to deal with change and serve the needs of most of the racers. Sadly, this one can’t.

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The recent statement from EMI honcho Alain Levy that he thought the iTunes Music Store would introduce tiered pricing in the coming year has produced some comments from people that might wish to stick to their chosen professions. One of these would be Joel Spolsky, long time Internet wonk and CEO of Fog Creek software. I’ve been reading Joel On Software for several years now and used some of the insight in project management during my reign at ProSoundWeb/Universal Concept. Joel knows software, but Joel doesn’t know the music biz. Or about the concept of fair use with regards to US copyright. Sorry babe, but you don’t and can’t control how others refer, link to or quote your work. You can’t impose your narrow rules on others fair use, that ain’t how it works, babe.

Earlier today Spolsky came up with Yet Another Music Industry Conspiracy Against the Artist or YAMICATA as I’ll term it. Anyone that’s read anything here knows that I’ve got no love loss for the policies of the labels with regards to music over the Internet. There are some pretty big gaps in logic on this one and I just had to comment on it. Basically, Spolsky says that the labels are pushing iTMS to use tiered pricing as a leverage against artists and also use the pricing to somehow make the users feel that a tune for two and half bucks is better than a tune that costs a buck no matter how good the tune. Oh shit, I’ve just violated one of Spolsky’s rules which says I can’t paraphrase him. Bummer. This is so wacky, I will quote it just so I’m clear.

“Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they’re new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they’ll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are.” So says Spolsky.

You gotta be shittin’ me. No, really. Prior to that he gives an analogy to movie theaters in that they don’t raise the prices for popular movies or lower the prices of the stinker. Huh? Movies in theaters aren’t CDs. Damn it, I did it again, I paraphrased him. Hope he ain’t mad. Hold on, it gets wackier…

“And now when a musician gets uppity, all the recording industry has to do is threaten to release their next single straight into the $0.99 category, which will kill it dead no matter how good it is. ” So sayeth Spolsky.

If this were a Python sketch, it would be funny, but I think the guy is serious. Now let’s look and see how the music biz really works. When the Mega Pop Artiste of the Week or MPAOTW label releases that work on a Tuesday it’s usually in coordination with lower prices during the initial promo period. The hell you say Dave, the stuff that’s tracking on the Hot 100 is likely to be discounted? Well, yeah, pretty much the opposite of what Spolsky proposes. He might want to go into a record store, even if it’s in a Best Buy, Target or Wallmart. I don’t know about y’all, but for me and most of my music listening (and music making) buddies we buy music based on what it sounds like and how much we enjoy the tune. Actually, that’s not entirely true, we get metric buttloads of legit music for free in the form of promos. The music we do buy is not because it’s more or less expensive, it’s because we like it. If it’s too expensive, people will just get it from a Darknet.

Then why do the labels want tiered pricing? Well, they’ve been screaming since iTMS came out that .99 is too low a price point. That was one of the big sticking points when Jobs initially started the concept of iTMS. To understand why the labels say that, one has to know how records are made in the first place. With ala carte song pricing at a buck, that has to support the rest of the dead wood on that CD. For example, the CD is recorded, mixed and produced pretty much all at the same time and paid for with a large hunk of money. Same with promo, the gack, hookers and payola come from one big pot. That’s a big fixed nut to recoup. Let’s say the artist sells 100k records. On that record are a couple of good songs, some mediocre songs and perhaps a few turd logs. If they’re selling CDs at 15 bucks a pop and you’re really only listening to a couple of tracks the bottomline is really gonna take a hit when you can get what you want for a couple of bucks. By increasing the price of each track to two and a half bucks they not only help insure that by buying only a couple of tracks they can support the rest of the record and they make it more likely that you’ll find more value in buying the whole thing rather than just a couple of tracks. The labels want to sell as many of whatever it is they can sell and make the most they can from it. The idea that they’ll charge more for crappy songs and use price reduction to punish artists is so not right it’s not even wrong. Sounds to me like someone is either on the pipe, or has been hit in the head with one.

Nokia is about to ship the long awaited Nokia 770 Internet Tablet in the US. You may be thinking “that’s swell, another little techno do dad for you guys to play with”. True that, but it also has some ramifications in the pro audio system control realm. Over the last few years tablet control apps, like the Lake Contour, have been subject to the relatively spendy pricing of tablet devices. These days you can get a pretty good Wintel laptop for under a grand. The same capabilities in a tablet or slate will cost more than two or three times as much. For audio control apps, many of the features that are in a full size tablet aren’t needed.

These are purpose built devices and only require a few controls and the ability to use a stylus. How it works is the tablet runs software that remotely controls the host PC or device. The 770 is a Debian derivative Linux powered tablet that is optimized for mobile Internet access. The 770 in and of itself won’t make that big an impact in pro audio but what it will open to the door to are more vendors making generic Linux powered slates. If this thing hits, look for more powerful, larger models. If it tanks, well it was a neat idea anyway. It won’t be too long after this device hits the market that there will most likely be some hacks that will divorce it from being an Internet only appliance. it’s been out for about a week in Europe already. Based on preliminary info (many rumors in there as well no doubt) from tech sites and blogs around the net it’s possible that with a bit of work that devices like the Meyer Gallieo or LCS LX300 might be able to be controlled by the device though in practice this particular device lacks a suitable display size and resolution (4″ 800×480) and video subsystem to do things like realtime meter updates, the latter being something that even mid range tablets have a difficult time doing. If pro audio vendors could buy low cost, high value generic tablets and load them with Linux distros that were developed for embedded apps. Mameo, the Debian based Linux distro that powers the 770 if sucessful in the consumer multimedia handheld space could be a contender for use in pro audio apps like control surfaces and tablet controllers. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Still getting settled in and meeting various people down here. In the last month I’ve visited more people coming through town than in the last couple of years in Seattle. Everyone pretty much comes through all the time. I’ve also been making the rounds and seeing some of the shows that I might not get to see when I was coming into town with a touring act. On most of the shows the production values are pretty impressive. As I was hammering away at a prototype of a new blog search tool called Sphere, I stumbled upon a series of related sites for tech crew in the Vegas area. The first, a site called Bright and Loud hosts a blog and forum that could use a bit more traffic. I know how tough it is to get traction going with a forum. The thing I found cool there was something called Intermod, a Windows based intermod calculator for RF apps. There is also a good little primer on mic techniques for theatrical apps. There is a feed available for those that are using aggregators.

Following a link to a sister site I found Advance Entertainment operated by a guy that mixes one of the large B-way shows in town. There is a listing for gigs in Vegas though the listings were behind by a month or so. Both of the sites have good instructions on the hows and whys of getting a gig down here. It’s the same sort of stuff other locals told me in June when I first started planning the move though it’s handy to have it all in one place on the Web. Pretty much all of the casinos and resorts have gone to an all online application system and the big guns won’t even take apps any other way unless you know someone inside. There is also a reprint of a three part series on making the transition from concert audio mixer to theatrical mixer. When I first started doing theatrical apps some years back I was lucky that we had a couple of consultants who were already well established in the field. That helped my learning curve and this series will let those that wish to make the transition aware of what the differences are between the two apps. It’s always good to meet more locals. If you are down here and want to meet for coffee or perhaps an adult beverage, give me a shout.

As part of a settlement with the RIAA and labels, Grokster has agreed to immediately halt the distribution and support of the Grokster program. Co defendants Streamcast are going to keep the battle going. Though the RIAA is sure to proclaim victory, it’s pretty hollow and really not going to put a dent in piracy or file sharing. You can’t unring the bell or put the genie back in the bottle. Besides, suing grandmothers and trying to stop P2P does nothing to stop what the real danger to revenue is, copies sold in other countries (and also available on the streets of NYC) that are direct pirates of masters. Those are leaks from within the studio that need to be plugged. The movie industry is really getting throttled with that an not by some teener or twenty-something spending an hour or two to download whatever trendy flick of the week. Besides, the cool kids aren’t using Grokster anymore and haven’t for quite sometime. The RIAA is still playing digital Whack A Mole and losing badly.

The enforcement actions of big music isn’t working. Earlier today during my now twice a day workout I was catching up on my podcasts and on Leo LaPorte’s awesome This Week in Tech (TWIT) podcast from a couple of weeks ago with Larry Lessig a panel guest. Interesting discussion on licenses, copyright and models for downloadable content. Whatever braindead, MBA wannabe hipsters are running the labels these days, need to pull themselves away from their Blackberrys long enough to start paying attention. The EFF has recently published a paper on the effects of the enforcement actions with regards to the popularity file sharing. Since the enforcement actions have started, file sharing has doubled. You can’t use a carrot and stick method when you have no carrot.

This shouldn’t be a free for all on downloading copyrighted works without the owner’s permission but the inability of the current regime to find a suitable solution is leading to an entire generation of think nothing of downloading infringing works. There are only a handful of solutions, NONE of them from the labels and only really one that has any commercial attraction and that’s because it’s tied to a well liked, trendy music (and now video) player. By floundering for almost six years and punishing some of the very people that have made the record biz so profitable in previous years the biz isn’t doing itself any favors. There is now a model where the labels can’t control the distribution and the media format and they don’t know how to respond. And they’ve had more than half a decade.

Looks like it’s about time for some new blood at the labels. Any takers?

Sprint has just launched an music store for PCS phone customers according to a Pollstar report from over the weekend. I often wonder who thinks of these ideas and how they’ve managed to keep their gigs. First off, it only available for Sprint (and not Nextel) customers and you need a particular handset to support it to boot. It’s more than twice the going rate for a single song (US$2.50) but they license two copies one for the phone, one for the computer. Two copies? BFD. Plus you have to sign up for the multimedia service and pay for the airtime/data transfer. There are only 250k songs and you can’t see what is in the library until you sign up. Weak.

I suppose it’s a natural extension of the ringtone sales phenom but it seems to me to be more a case of “quick, let’s do something fast” instead “let’s do something really good”. Want to bet that this thing will be swept under the rug in less than a year?

As announced in a press release earlier today Meyer Sound Labs has aquired LCS Audio (known way back when as Level Control Systems). I’m sure you all are familiar with Meyer Sound Labs but some may not be too familiar with LCS or its products. LCS is/was run by a couple of Canadian dudes in BC with US HQ in Sierra Madre, CA. They build some pretty complex DSP frames used in most Broadway and Vegas production shows in addition to installs, theme parks, etc. There is also a sort of Uber surface called Cue Console that integrates with the frames. It’s pretty impressive stuff. Think of it as a D5 meets Soundweb London, meets Media Matrix, on steriods with show control options. That’s an over simplification but thats kinda what they do. You can’t swing a truss monkey over your head in this town without hitting an LCS install. Bus bourne rock roadies aren’t likely to run across too many LCS products though they are in some major installs. I first saw it may years ago as a computer running the late great BeOS (I just donated a PowerMac 7300 that had a Be install on it) in a booth at AES. The software now runs on OS X, Linux and alas, Winders XP. You can read the details in the press release but LCS had a hand in the new Meyer Galileo, IMO one of the most impressive pieces of techology in the biz today. Or soon to be in the biz, don’t think they’ve shipped. One of my first thoughs was that it was sort of an LCS Lite for roadies. More about LCS at http://www.lcsaudio.com.

A while back I posted that Clear Channel Communications had decided to divest itself of the behemoth Clear Channel Entertainment unit. Responsible for 140 plus venues and almost US$3 billion in revenues, CCE was the rock that was dragging down Clear Channel faster than Big Pussy sank after being tossed off The Stugots. The plan was to create an entertainment empire by using aquisitions of existing promoters then “leveraging synergy” between the CC radio and promotion units and owning the venues to create an unstoppable force in the live entertainment biz. Darth Promoter, if you will. The problem is it failed. Badly. On the scale of Waterloo. The tactics they used to drive the competition out of the market bit them in the ass as they were paying too much to too many to ink exclusive deals. I’m all for paying the bands that draw the crowd handsomely but some of these acts hadn’t made a new record in a decade or better and continued to do the same rehashed shed tours with other acts of the same ilk for far too much money. And CC continued to pay them.

With the May announcement of the divestiture I was expecting that they would sell the whole thing and exit stage right from the entertainment biz. I was wrong, they weren’t going to sell it per se, but divest it to a publically traded company in which neither CC or the new company would have anything to do with each other. I suppose that’s why I have a bunk on the bus and not a seat in the boardroom. The thing is so damn big I doubt anyone could have bought it anyway. Or would have wanted to. Here is how it is going to work, according to docs filed with the SEC a couple weeks back. A new company, the current working name CCE Spinco (to be rebranded just prior to the divestiture) will aquire the assets of CCE from parent CCU including 109 owned venues worldwide and exclusive contracts at another 41 venues, the concert and Broadway promotion arm of the biz and the motorsport and sports end as well as and the mountain of liabilities from the failed attempt of making a profitable go at taking over the concert biz. There will be a distribution of one Spinco share for an unspecified number of CCU shares. You’ll keep all your CCU shares and gain whatever Spinco shares are determined in the final deal. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. CCU will not hold any Spinco stock, Spinco will not hold any CCU stock. They’ll operate as two separate companies though share some directors and the chair of Spinco will still be the CFO of CCU in addition to some operating agreements between the two corporations as a requirement of the divestiture.

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