PANDORA - LET THEM EAT T-SHIRTS (the streaming swindlers)

Go ahead, Seniormole. Tell me "They are lying. The greedy artists and record executives are making up figures. Poor Pandora, they don't have the money to hire a lawyer to reply."

Listen, Lord of the Foot-in-Mouth, do I have to squeeze shit out of your dog Muffin and rub it in your face to make a point? Artists get SHIT. Songwriters get SHIT. And gee, even the greedy, nasty, super-slick record companies...get SHIT.

I am not letting anyone forget how they fucked the music world with their ignorance...Dave Marsh and Billy Bragg and all the dimwits with the stupid names like Mephisto and Deathknell and Cal E. Fornia. They ALL said the same thing: piracy is GOOD, Internet streaming is the ANSWER, and if music shouldn't be outright FREE, it should be available for next to nothing, and artists can make up the difference by "selling t-shirts."

I said it then and I'll say it now. BULLSHIT.

I said it then and I'll say it now: what do YOU do for a living, you arrogant asswipe? Do YOU let jerks tell you what to charge, and whether you should have a pension or not? Do you let scabs come in and do your job for you at a lower price? Do YOU resent it when somebody NOT in your business starts yapping about what YOU should charge?

No matter. It's over and done. Tower Records isn't going to come back and open up new stores. ALL you'll be getting now is ridiculous pap like "Happy" and the latest sound-alike garbage from Viley Virus and Justa Beeper and NO Dimension and whatever shit-head Sherrin or stupid Sam Smith gets thrown at you. Maybe some wheezing new album from Kiss or Alice Cooper will amuse you if you're old and senile enough.

The great new indie acts? You won't know about them. Pandora and Spotify (and iTunes) are glutted with too many amateurs. How do you find anyone good? In the old days, the music mags helped. They'd tell you about the promising new act called The Kinks, or an oddball named Randy Newman or Loudon Wainwright or some underground group of punks. Now? No. You killed the music world.

And yes, I know first hand because I was part of it. Take Tower Records. They had their own magazine. While I wrote for many other ones, I also wrote for them. Every issue told you about great new artists of all types. The store also had intelligent sales people who could tell you what gift to get that classical music fan or jazz fan, if you didn't know.

Christ, I detest conspiracy theorists, smug idiots who know it all, deniers of all types...people who, in their absolute ignorance, and in the face of all logic, drool out the same tired lies and delusions. There is no climate change. There's plenty of fish in the ocean. Fracking is good. Everybody in the music business makes a fortune. Creative people should go take a day job and somehow have enough energy on a weekend to go write the great novel, research the great non-fiction work, paint the meticulous 9 foot-high mural, or go into a REAL studio with REAL drums and REAL musicians and put out 10 killer tracks to give given away FREEEEEE. Then they can take time off from their day job and tour (in the magical mystery bus) ALL those venues that pay them $10,000 a night, and where fans eagerly stand in line to buy T-SHIRTS.

Jesus Fucking Christ.