[Holy crap, I'm old.] 

"Uhh.... I'll be... um, 25 in June."

It's a standard question asked of most people. "How old are you?" I always thought that it was when you were about 39 that you started freaking out about answering that question.

Nope. It apparently starts at 24. At least for me it did.

At first, I was freaking out because I couldn't remember how old I was.

But then I was freaking out because I remembered.

And what I discovered later today didn't make me feel any younger. While I was sorting through and trying to organize the mass of Word documents I've accumulated in my "My Documents" folder, I came across a 21 kb file called "A Prepared Speech Upon Weirdness."

It was something I remember very well. I even remember the day I wrote it. I was 12 years old. My dad had just brought home a new computer - a 386 with a beautiful 15 inch monitor and running Windows 3.11 with Microsoft Word pre-installed. Well, I was so thrilled to move up from our 286 that I fired up Word and wrote the following, which appears (based on the title) that I thought I would be giving as a keynote speaker at an Amway conference. I'm simultaneously proud, embarassed, and convicted by this little peice. And in a strange and sad way, it still seems like the best idea I ever had. Here it is. (It's painful to watch, by the way.)

A Prepared Speech Upon Weirdness by Adam Brault
The biggest problem today is that not enough people indulge in insanity. Has it become almost unheard of to be weird? I have looked deeply into this subject and concluded upon the fact that nobody has any fun any more. To be weird is not a curse it is more of a gift....a talent if you may. After injected with the "miricale" medicine of fun, you can truly experience life without having to worry about what others think of you. You can look at things nobody else could EVER see. If you just daydream and let your mind run through the field where Kevin Costner is you just may find the answer to a problem. Once loosened up, you can then go about solving your problems in a more enjoyable fashion. If people in this world were to lighten up and see through the media's negative poison and goof off a couple hours day, do you know how many people's lives would be saved?...how many wars would be stopped?...how many starving people could be saved? How can you know unless you allow yourself to kick back and relax an act like a total moron, but not worry about it.

By the way, the whole field where Kevin Costner is came from having just watched "Field of Dreams" eight times the previous week.

Yeah. I misspelled "miracle" ("miricale?" sheesh!)... but to me today, those are actually some powerful thoughts and I really like the fact that I wrote them when I was 12. But they just kill me today.

Why? Because I am not the person who wrote that anymore. I'm so boring in most situations that if I happened to stumble across myself at that age from some parallel dimension, I would probably kick me in the shins. Hard. No kidding. Well, maybe not kick me in the shins... but I'd certainly throw tic tacs at myself, perhaps from under a table.

Yup, I'm still a weird guy to those who know me very closely. But I realized recently how much that's not me anymore when I heard two people in one day say to me, "Man, Adam, you're always so serious."

Crap. What do I say to that?

I don't want to be serious. I wish to death I could be 15 again and just hang out and do the craziest stuff with guys like my cousin Steve, my ultimate hero in more ways than one. (He's not only the most brilliant, creative and weird guy I've ever known, he's also amazing at Flash animation! Okay, I made that part up. Sorry, Steve.)

Anyway, sometimes I get these bursts that just run through me from my socks up to the tips of my ears and I feel like I'm 14 or 15 again. And at a creaky-jointed 24 and three quarters, I long for the days of my youth when the most exciting things in life came out of spontaneous explosions of creativity that were about as weird as they come.

But that's just fiddle faddle! I'm going back to my newspaper. Harrumph.
[Posted by adam.b at 10:18 PM] comment on [Holy crap, I'm old.] permalink

[MP3s: two links and a rant] 

This article says that web "piracy" (particularly referring to "unauthorized" mp3s) will basically disappear when widespread high-speed mobile web access proliferates, when price-fixing ends, and when the music industry actually opens up its full catalog online.

He says most of the current online music stores are more of a "wink-wink, nod-nod" than an attempt to actually create a viable business solution.

But the most interesting (and dead on!) point he mentions is this:

"It costs $20,000 to fill an iPod from iTunes Music Store. Quite simply, no one looks at a 40 GB iPod and thinks, "it will cost me $20,000 to fill it". It's a polite fiction. It's a looking the other way."

(And one million songs sold by iTunes would only fill 28 iPods!)

...

PC Magazine's John Dvorak has another great take on this subject. Read it.

...

Here's what burns me.

Whenever I get into an argument with any "adult" over mp3 "sharing" (or whatever euphemism you want), I will regularly mention the small share of profit that an artist gets, the huge amount that the record company takes, and how many people take chunks out of that pie.

To which some have responded, "You can't fault a distribution channel! There have to be middlemen! You don't go down to a farm and buy your tomatoes, your apples, your cow, so you can take it home and save money. The people in between save you time and you pay them money for that!"

Sure. That's reasonable.

Except the entire idea of digital music is that it absolutely eliminates the middlemen. It absolutely hacks the distribution channel down from 20 guys with their hands on it to (potentially) two. And when you get that close, profits get a lot slimmer for everyone on the distribution side, because the real authority then belongs to the artist.

The recording industry should die.

We don't need a seven-mile long distribution channel. The internet has proved that.

What we truly need is a worldwide music-level combination of amazon.com and ebay with in-depth comments from individuals and a way to track what is good that's out there, as well as the right for people to pay what they're willing to pay for something -- and paying it straight to the artist.

What I'd like to see is artists take back the responsibility for marketing and sellling that music. Of course, that means MTV and corporate radio would have to die to create a level playing field... but I'm more than okay with that. It's just too bad that the cream doesn't rise to the top of the music charts... just whatever is dictated to be (over)played the most on radio.

There is a reason that the non-payola/plugola college music radio stations have a completely different sales & popularity chart than corporate radio. (See CMJ's charts vs. Billboard's charts.) And it has absolutely nothing to do with college students' tastes. And, truth be told, mainstream hits do make it on college radio as well. (See Outkast's massive successes on both independent and corporate radio.)

The difference between independent (usually college) radio and corporate radio sets the standard for the entire music industry. On one side, it's about diversity of ideas, styles, and personalities. (Kind of like life, which I heard is what art imitates or is it the other way around?) On the other side, it's all about profitability, and there sure is a lot more profit to be made from selling a million of one album than ten thousand of a hundred different albums. And so the playlists shrink. You don't hear it, you won't buy it.

I love music to death. The recording industry loves money to death. Money ain't dying any time soon. And music ain't dyin'.

I know that I will die. And so must the recording industry.

There's nothing wrong with the recording industry dying. If the corporation is legally viewed as a person, as these guys illustrate can't a corporation or an industry get to a point where it just dies? I mean, people die all the time. Yeah, you're darn right it's not fair! Death sucks! I'm certainly not looking forward to mine! But who died and guaranteed everlasting life for the corporation?!

Sorry.

I have no sympathy. If you don't like it, go invest in the movie industry! Oh, wait...
[Posted by adam.b at 6:40 AM] comment on [MP3s: two links and a rant] permalink