Comments on: Let Them Eat Cake

By: john

john — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:41 +0000

Well my only personal contact with the entertainment industry has been with NBC Burbank and Warner Brothers Records. If they are an example then about half the managers are pretty smart and work really hard, and the other half make Paris Hilton, Leona Helmsley, and Donald trump look like angels.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:38:45 +0000

If deteriorating education standards is indeed at the root of the jury decision, perhaps the record industry executives are equally affected:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/03/riaa-our-antifan-law.html

Seems like rational decision making is hard to come by anywhere.

By: john

john — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:17:54 +0000

Well the RIAA itself gets paid to do what it does for the industry. So from their POV, whatever the record industry wants is the right thing. The industry itself has been run like a plantation for decades, and they are just now getting a reality-check.

To me it’s absurd to spend $100,000 ( or much more) on producing a pop band – either they can play or they can’t. Unfortunately they mostly can’t play, and the *sound* depends on studio gimmicks. But I don’t like pop music, so maybe I am not being fair.

By: Caitlin

Caitlin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:20:27 +0000

I think that this is another scary symptom of deteriorating science and math education in America. You need to actually examine the assumptions and postulates behind people’s ideas and arguments. The problem with that jury was most likely that fancy lawyering fooled them to that fact that they were effectively assuming that all those people who listened to music for free would have bought it and that none of them went out and bought some of it because the listened to it for free and liked it. These assumptions are on the face of it ridiculous-think about how many times you may have tried something for free-whether a legitimate free sample or not-and try and figure out when, if any of those times, would you have bought the product simply because no free sample were available.
I have to wonder, though since I don’t really think the RIAA are idiots, if they just don’t care what it may do to business in the medium to long run as long as it makes the individuals in charge look good /effective right now.
Also, maybe they had lousy science education as well and do not understand the absurdity of making sweeping assumptions without justifying them in some way-in other words very bad science.
We need to drill the scientific method into people!!!

(Then maybe once in a while they will actually look for evidence to justify assumptions-or at least understand when they are making them.)