Blogger Week

This is week that small bloggers band together in part by writing about blogging. Go to Jon Swift or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo for details, and please participate if you can. There are links for these guys on the right if you don't already know them.

My theme this week is, resolved: blogging is like rock and roll.

Rolling Stone Magazine has a story on the business this week that they didn't trouble with putting on their site. Bottom line is that records sales continue on a free fall for a total in lost sales of 36% since 2000. I find this drop in consumers as nearly parallel to the drop in readership and viewers of newspapers and television news. The tiny difference being that the music industry doesn't seem interested in knowing why people don't want to buy CD's anymore. "lalalalalalal I can't hear you!" is the industry's response, while dishing up more crap nobody wants to listen to. Like the MSM, they lost control of the monopoly they held for fifty years and have not been able to adjust to the new technologies people would rather use. Music is air, once it's out, it's gone. When recorded on to a disc, CD, tape or whatever, a clever person can sell it to someone else. This has been the industry formula forever. Now it doesn't work anymore because people don't need the delivery system anymore - they can use a handy computer to capture that music filled air. Neither do they need TV's or CD's. The industry hubris is the same as the MSM's: leave this to professionals. You can make your own noise but that doesn't count. You have no discipline; you lack standards.

Whatever.

Artists/bloggers own their content, image and means of production, now. No stifling orthodoxy, no "standards," no rules. The people are still there. Like I've said before, if your jokes are funny, people will laugh.

Run with it, chilrin', go forth and multiply.