Regardless of whether or not artists could be smarter about their expenses, Courtney Love's example still says all you need to know about the greed and crooked nature of the recording industry.
A $500,000 budget to record, for a newly popular band, might not be all that unreasonable. What about said band being in it for the long-haul and deciding it's best to invest that money up-front to put together their own studio and hire their own professional recording engineer to operate it? What about a band that's trying to do "cutting edge" things and wants to produce a music CD with the "Plus" (computer-readable data) content on it? That gets into paying for professional photography to display on it and possibly even things like paying a computer game developer to write a mini-game with the band and album as the theme.
A lot of the new musicians out there are relatively young people too. They may not really have much experience in dealing with complicated legal contracts, and are prone to believing that "this is the way it's done", courtesy of MTV and their peers (who are just hyped up on the fact that their buddy's band got signed).
Sure, it's technically a business agreement, not a gift. But business agreements are expected to be reasonable. When you deposit your paycheck in your bank, you expect that the amount you put in will stay in there until you use it. If the bank had fine print in the "totally free checking" account saying they would take 65% of all deposits out for themselves -- how long do you think that policy would last? (Would you *really* just say, "Well, the people should have read the terms of the contract - so no reason to feel sorry for them!"??)
I just bought a new car back in March, that came with a free 3 month trial of XM/Sirius. About a month before the trial ran out, they started calling my cellphone at all hours of the day and night, trying to get me to subscribe. The telemarketing campaign was SO annoying, I vowed not to subscribe based simply on that! (I have a home phone number, so why they kept calling my CELL instead, I don't know?)
When I let the trial expire, they started mailing me postcards offering special pricing for "coming back", and waiving the $14.95 "re-activation fee". (That's kind of insulting in itself. I have to PAY to re-activate, on service I never, ever paid for in the first place?!)
Well, *finally*, their latest "please come back" type offer was good enough, I actually considered it. Basically, an entire year for about $78, and they were even willing to bill me, vs. keeping a credit card on file. For under $80, I was ready to go for it (despite the sound quality being pretty bad for their music stations). But THEN when I was in the process of ordering, they mentioned the extra $12 or so for these new "royalties" and said there was absolutely no way to waive that charge. (Since it says NOTHING about that on the card they mailed me, and their quoted price says it's good through August 28th. -- I fail to see how they can legally refuse to honor that?!) So again, I told them to forget it.
Well, honestly, I don't think it's appropriate for customers to expect assistance with virus removal on a support phone call.
It's fine for a company to do enough troubleshooting with the customer to determine that, yes, the system is indeed infected with a trojan horse/virus. But many trojans and spyware prorgams are getting advanced enough so they can lodge themselves into Windows at the kernel level (rootkits). You simply can't ensure they're removed without doing a reformat and reinstall, period.
Many times, yes, a technician who knows what he/she is doing can get a system cleaned up successfully. I used to do on-site computer service calls and often did just that for people. But on average, a proper cleanup took about 2 hours - and I relied on noticing the little details to determine if I really had it clean or not. It wasn't the type of thing most customers would notice and report to you over the phone. (EG. Is it pausing a little longer than usual when people first log in to XP? Is one of the icons for an all-in-one printer device not showing up as active in the system tray?)
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Re: a business agreement, not a gift
Regardless of whether or not artists could be smarter about their expenses, Courtney Love's example still says all you need to know about the greed and crooked nature of the recording industry.
A $500,000 budget to record, for a newly popular band, might not be all that unreasonable. What about said band being in it for the long-haul and deciding it's best to invest that money up-front to put together their own studio and hire their own professional recording engineer to operate it? What about a band that's trying to do "cutting edge" things and wants to produce a music CD with the "Plus" (computer-readable data) content on it? That gets into paying for professional photography to display on it and possibly even things like paying a computer game developer to write a mini-game with the band and album as the theme.
A lot of the new musicians out there are relatively young people too. They may not really have much experience in dealing with complicated legal contracts, and are prone to believing that "this is the way it's done", courtesy of MTV and their peers (who are just hyped up on the fact that their buddy's band got signed).
Sure, it's technically a business agreement, not a gift. But business agreements are expected to be reasonable. When you deposit your paycheck in your bank, you expect that the amount you put in will stay in there until you use it. If the bank had fine print in the "totally free checking" account saying they would take 65% of all deposits out for themselves -- how long do you think that policy would last? (Would you *really* just say, "Well, the people should have read the terms of the contract - so no reason to feel sorry for them!"??)
I didn't go for this either...
I just bought a new car back in March, that came with a free 3 month trial of XM/Sirius. About a month before the trial ran out, they started calling my cellphone at all hours of the day and night, trying to get me to subscribe. The telemarketing campaign was SO annoying, I vowed not to subscribe based simply on that! (I have a home phone number, so why they kept calling my CELL instead, I don't know?)
When I let the trial expire, they started mailing me postcards offering special pricing for "coming back", and waiving the $14.95 "re-activation fee". (That's kind of insulting in itself. I have to PAY to re-activate, on service I never, ever paid for in the first place?!)
Well, *finally*, their latest "please come back" type offer was good enough, I actually considered it. Basically, an entire year for about $78, and they were even willing to bill me, vs. keeping a credit card on file. For under $80, I was ready to go for it (despite the sound quality being pretty bad for their music stations). But THEN when I was in the process of ordering, they mentioned the extra $12 or so for these new "royalties" and said there was absolutely no way to waive that charge. (Since it says NOTHING about that on the card they mailed me, and their quoted price says it's good through August 28th. -- I fail to see how they can legally refuse to honor that?!) So again, I told them to forget it.
Re: virus help
Well, honestly, I don't think it's appropriate for customers to expect assistance with virus removal on a support phone call.
It's fine for a company to do enough troubleshooting with the customer to determine that, yes, the system is indeed infected with a trojan horse/virus. But many trojans and spyware prorgams are getting advanced enough so they can lodge themselves into Windows at the kernel level (rootkits). You simply can't ensure they're removed without doing a reformat and reinstall, period.
Many times, yes, a technician who knows what he/she is doing can get a system cleaned up successfully. I used to do on-site computer service calls and often did just that for people. But on average, a proper cleanup took about 2 hours - and I relied on noticing the little details to determine if I really had it clean or not. It wasn't the type of thing most customers would notice and report to you over the phone. (EG. Is it pausing a little longer than usual when people first log in to XP? Is one of the icons for an all-in-one printer device not showing up as active in the system tray?)