Every time I turn around it seems like one of the music industry organizations is doing the darnedest to destroy what's left of the tenuous grasp they have on their fate. Add to this companies like Wal-Mart turning off their DRM servers leaving hordes of purchasers with little to no option other than finding some way of negating the DRM. Now, it would seem that Apple has the same dumb-stick beating them about the head and shoulders, as they threaten to shutdown iTunes in response to the Copyright Royalty Board threatening to raise the royalties paid to the publishers by 66% to .15 per purchase.

All of this has nothing to do with the bands, the music, or the consumer; it is simply another way for a large corporation to illustrate that they can influence governments, other companies and organizations and continue to siphon money out of everyone's pockets. The RIAA sues people without computers, 12 year old kids and dead people, while claiming to represent the interests of the artists. With Apple firmly in the sites of this ship of fools, they have decided that the revenue from the 500 million or so downloads is not enough. It's pretty easy to do the math here too, .9 cents per song, times 500 million; so I guess 45 million bucks is just not enough money.

I know I have said this before, but the Recording Industry as a whole is making it virtually impossible for people to want to get songs legally. Every time they screw over another company or consumer, they push more people into the realm of downloading music via nefarious means. It's an endless cycle of incurably retarded behaviour that seems to have no end.

If Apple is forced to absorb this rate increase, and shuts down iTunes I don't know what I will ultimately do. I have hundreds of albums that I have purchased through iTunes. What I do know is that if Apple actually kills iTunes, they will not be able to pass it off and divert blame and all of the associated rage that will follow that decision. Steve jobs is heralded as being a shrewd and intelligent businessman, so I would suspect that this is just chest pounding since a move like that could quite easily send Apple into an unrecoverable downward spiral, alienating potential buyers as well destroying relationships with their core group of zealots.

I'm sure this isn't then end of it, but this war on music isn't doing anything but making it harder for good musicians to get folks to buy their music.

I am just about up with my week at Summerfest and getting ready to come on on this Tuesday and I have to say this is the coolest music festival I have ever had the pleasure of attending. So far over 200 bands have played on the various stages in the festival park, and a lot fo the bands are top-notch bands. I have seen Sevendust, The Old 97s, Katie Todd, Theory of a Deadman, and a boat-load more that are just on the Zippo stage which we are facing the 12 hours we are there every day. The days are long, and my dogs are barkin' by the end of it but it is a blast and I enjoy just about every minute of it.

As with any concert, part of the attraction is always people watching – and this is no exception. the crowd of folks ranges from young to old, yuppie to redneck, and often includes a variety of drunkards from every stage in between. The only thing that really tends to get meworked up is the selfish jack-witts who bring their 6 month old babies to a music festival where my ears are ringing when I leave evry day. I make the choice to go and endager my eardrums – a baby doesn't have that choice and these folks are screwing with the hearing of very small children and doing far worse damage to their ears than have been done to mine over the 2 decades and hundreds of concerts that have put the hurtin' on my ears. If it were my festival, I would make it so that kids would have to be a certain age – and be made to wear hearing protection – infants do not belong at a death-metal concert.

I have met a ton of cool people, rocked out to some cool bands (of course some not-so-cool bands too), and shot around 12 gb of images over the course of the last few days. It's going to take me a while to sort through them, but since I was posting – I put together this panaramic using DoubleTake. Milwaukee is a really cool town too – makes me miss the city as it reminds me quite a bit of Portland. There is a river running right through the middle of the city – the Root River in fact. As I was walking down to the park on Friday, I ran across a stray Catfish just sitting on the sidewalk. It looked like it could have just jumped right out of the river and landed on the sidewalk, except for the fact that it was 300 meters from the water…. Random. I wish I had more time to roam around and see the city, but alas I am here to work – and I only get 1 day off.

See ya when I get home….

Metallica's latest WTF moment comes from a Listening Party they hosted in London where they invited journalists to come and listen to a few rough tracks off their upcoming album. Journalism is apparently a new concept to them, because after at least one of these folks posted a review ( a mostly positive one to boot); they were requested to remove the article. Or maybe the page was just a figment of our collective imagination in the first place.

Trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, I figured maybe they're just too old (Hetfield turns 45 this year) and simply don't get the web. It's possible, some people just don't grok the whole interweb thing; how to use it, what it's for and the implications of working with it. No matter how much you try and explain it to them, their cranium will simply never absorb how this whole thing works and how to embrace it to make things click.

As it turns out, this wasn't Metallica's WTF moment at all, it was the jack-wit managers of theirs, Q Prime. Take a look at their website and then tell me that it all just doesn't make sense? These guys have an impressive list of artists, but they are the ones who lack the technical grok-how to fully implement a webs trategy for anyone – even themselves. I usually will say any website is better than no website – but not in this case. These guys are with no doubt pullin' back some serious scratch, and yet they have a 1991 style frontpage website? WTF?!

I'll be interested to see if the review ever comes back, and what they have to say about the upcoming album. I hope it's better than the last one, or I might come to the conclusion that the Metallica goodness left along with Jason.

**Update: The reviews are back up before I could even double check the post…. check em out at The Quietus. And I have to say it's an excellent review and while I can see why some would say take it down, what they should be saying is "is it true?" While I don't agree that St. Anger was complete and utter shite, i would say it is by far the worst Metallica album, with Reload coming in a close second.

Mr. Mulhouse you are right sir;

Staying loyal to them after this many years isn’t easy….