royalty statement. $AU 5.36, I think it was. It was for three songs, none of which were mine. I’d better not spend it all at once. Still thinking of becoming a rock star? Be prepared to live in abject poverty for most of your life. It’s not about how good you are, it’s a lottery. Fortunately I don’t have to live on royalty checks. Five bucks a month doesn’t go that far. The whole music business is rigged from beginning to end. Certain people control most of it and they decide what you should be listening to, not you. You think you like band or an act because you discovered them yourself? Think again. Nothing gets into the mainstream without “juicing”. Payola never went away. It’s just disguised as something else. It’s a joke. I will concede that their are organic viral breakouts of different artists from time to time, although I can’t think of one at the moment. For the most part, everything you see is manufactured bullshit. You only have to watch old episodes of MTV. Beavis and Butthead at least was entertaining, but a great majority of the stuff that they were promoting was pure throwaway garbage. Most of it has disappeared without a trace. Try it sometime.
Record Companies, by and large, now seem to be run by weasels with no musical taste. All they do is concentrate on is garbage of the worst kind. They were always weasels, but It’s not so much a record company any more as a tool for social destruction. Why do you think they keep promoting the toxic shit that they do? This isn’t music any more than we have fair elections. It’s malevolence. I know that everyone always says that the music of their youth was the best of all time and everything else is inferior. You could say that about art and literature too. You could say it about anything. “World War Two was much better than World War One. The planes, tanks and uniforms were better for a start.” In truth, everything has been fucked for ever. Popular music, art, politics, and literature is mostly catering to the masses. If anything good slips by, it’s by chance, and who decides what is good anyway? I sometimes wonder how much music of great, yet unknown classical composers we didn’t get to hear because they didn’t know the right people. If things then were the way there are today, probably many. For every Beethoven there might have been three others who were just as good, if not better. They didn’t have the right connections.
What am I talking about? I’m just talking. I don’t really care about these stupid royalty checks. I wish they wouldn’t send them. They are just a reminder that nobody is playing my music anywhere in a commercial setting. I make a better income from downloads, but nothing I could live on. In the face of that, I don’t know why I even bother to do anything, or even write this journal actually. It’s because I can, and because I am almost compelled to. It’s not something I have control over. I started it during the fake pandemic, and like a freight train without any brakes, it just keeps rolling along, seemingly unstoppable. It’s something that has become habitual now. The good part about it is that I can say more or less what I like, and nobody is trying to cancel me (yet) for having an opinion which is unpopular with the mob. I can talk about things here that would get me cancelled on TV. Some people reading this for the first time might be quite shocked. The world they thought existed has a parallel point of view. Especially in Australia, people don’t like opinions that conflict with what the media have told them. A few of them used to be my friends, but I’m so far off in space now, that it’s like being in another world. Obscurity has it’s benefits. This is like living in a forest and simultaneously on top of a mountain where no people have ever trod. There are plants growing in here, and maybe even undiscovered species that nobody has seen. It’s a wilderness. There’s nobody here, and you can see for miles.