putting dates on these posts. There is probably an easy way to do it. An automatic way, in fact. I don’t really know how to use Word Press properly. I’m not using the built in template that bloggers use which puts in the date and relevant stuff, and I don’t have time or patience to figure out how it works. Let’s say it’s Monday the 20th of November, and leave it at that. For someone with 8 followers on Instagram and a little over 100 subscribers on Youtube, not a lot of people read this anyway I would think. I don’t care.
Yesterday I was trying to clean up this mess of a room and found some boxes of cassettes. I started listening to them and discovered songs that I had written and had forgotten about. I still have the original cassette recording of the first ever get-together of the band that would record my first EP, Ian Stephen’s Schizophrenia. I haven’t listened to both sides of the tape for many years, but there is a whole session of music, and not just the four songs that made it to the EP. The recording is compressed and squashed by the fact that it was recorded on a cassette. I don’t think there was a microphone involved, it was the inbuilt mic on the cassette deck probably. It sounds pretty good considering. I’m going to digitize all of this stuff and upload it to the Internet Archive. I’ve got Go Wild in French, The Armchairs, an Autodrifters tape, a group called the Sparnetts, whose guitar player played in the Armchairs, and lots of Slaughtermen tapes of live shows including the one from Moomba that gave us the epic God’s Not Dead single.
Ever since records and subsequently CDs became obsolete, music has become more and more valueless. Record companies could take bets on different acts, and still enjoy huge record sales based on the ones that were successful. This is often how obscure music managed to survive. The Australian country music stars of the fifties and sixties kept the Classical music catalogues in the stores, because the revenue from country sales exceeded everything else. Now recorded music is virtually worthless. People download everything, or they subscribe to Spotify who pay people like me fractions of cents in royalties. I have statements that show 00000.0 cents remuneration for the playing one of my songs. Spotify’s market cap is 34.35 billion USD. Someone is making a lot of money from music sales, but it’s not the creators of it.
It would be easy to just give up, because there’s no money in it any more. The weasels that own these companies like Spotify don’t care anyway if I quit. There are a thousand more people like me, who just want to make music and put it out to people. They don’t care about money and Spotify knows this. There is no organized lobby of musicians that I know of, who have the will to go in and negotiate for better “pay”. Musicians are, for the most part, compliant sheep like everyone else, and have no backbone when it comes to standing up to anything like injustice, unless it’s self loathing injustice.
Pete Seeger’s banjo. What if people hate your fucking music? Does it still work?
I saw part of a performance on Instagram on the weekend by an Australian singer. One of the band members (a girl) was wearing a t-shirt that said “Destroy White Supremacy”. She appeared to be white herself, so I have no idea why she was even standing up there in the first place. Look in the fucking mirror. She’s a child and a fool of course, and maybe one day she will get a clue. She probably thought it looked cool, like Woody Guthrie, a communist sympathizer whose father was a member of the KKK, who painted “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar in the 1940’s. It ultimately means fucking nothing, and it’s just political posturing, but idiots think it looks cool, and it’s a “statement”. Anti white hate speech like that is tolerated at the moment though, because it’s politically correct and acceptable to a minority who think that they can take over the world with their woke bullshit. It’s all falling apart, kids. The vile, degenerate and mentally ill adults who have led you down that rocky path are losing their portfolio at a rapid pace. People are sick of it all, and are starting to push back.
The world is rapidly changing. It’s accelerating in fact. Watch and see.
Daryl got together with Robert Fripp. It’s not bad at all.