Jim Alfredson

I just lowered the price of the CD on CDBaby.com to $11.99. Now's the time to act!!!!

God, I wish I would've found this before I signed up with them (I'm sorry, my Organissimo brothers... ) From a webpage I found on google about making and distributing your own CD. Hindsight is 20/20. I just hope we don't get burned. I was talking with my brother-in-law today who is a lawyer and he signed a distribution deal for a book that he wrote with an independent distributor in the Traverse City, MI area. He dropped off 500 copies of his book and sold 420 of them in the first month. After not getting any money from the company for a month he calls them. They give him the "cash flow" excuse and say to wait about four weeks. So he does and calls them again. The person says "We can't talk about this now. Just wait..." so he does... And two weeks later they go bankrupt. Here's the real stinker: He did some research on the two guys who owned the company. They are professional independent intellectual property distributors. In other words, they buy or start up these independent distribution companies for books, music, etc. for a small amount of capitol, pay themselves huge salaries for two years, file for company bankrupcy, and walk away. The worst part: He got a transcript of the bankrupcy court filing and found out that the court actually approved these guy's salaries for the previous year. The CEO made 1.9 million dollars... his second in command made almost $900,000. The CEO lives in a 10 million dollar house on a private island off the coast of Florida and has a helicopter, a jet, a huge yacht, the works. This is what they do professionally and if you try to fight it they come at your with high-priced lawyers and you're fucked. He took them to court to at least get his 80 remaining books back, but to this day has not seen a bit of the money. He said he wouldn't be surprised if they own CDStreet.com. I'm hoping they don't.

Good suggestions, Dmitry, thank you! I found CDStreet.com on the Dallas BBB website and the email of the person who handles complaints for CDStreet. I emailed him explaining the situation and threatening to file a formal complaint with the BBB. We'll see...

As some of you may know, back in March of this year we used the services of CDStreet.com to sell our CDs online. They gave us the ability to accept credit cards, we gave them 20% of each sale. In March we sold 33 CDs which totaled about $420 after CDStreet's cut. As of now we have only received $42 of that money (10%). They paid us for every other month we had sales, but we still have not gotten our $360 from March, which is a good deal of money to us. I keep emailing and calling them to no avail. So I'm asking you, my fellow board members, to boycott CDStreet. Do not buy anything from them. If you find an interesting artist that uses them, I urge you to email the artist explaining that you will not order from CDStreet and order the CD directly from him/her. If anyone has any ideas how we can make a stink, please let me know.

Soul Stream, I assume you have Shirley Scott's "One For Me" on Strata East with Harold and Billy Higgins and Shirley's wonderful tune "What Makes Harold Sing?" I LOVE that record.

Well damn, they got computers over there, don't they??!

Reminds me of a story: A drummer friend of mine once related this to me. His wife and kids were out of town one weekend so after the gig he decided to rent a porno. He goes to the video store, picks one out that's a little older looking and goes home. He puts the tape on and the porno begins with this funky ass organ music. He said it was a total surprise... the music was really happening. Well, he watched the whole video but didn't even care what was going on in the scenes... the music was BAD! Turns out it was Bill Heid! He used to pay the bills by making porno music IN REAL TIME! They used to play the film for him and he and his band would just start up a nasty groove and funk out.

Just wondering what happened to Weizy. Is he on vacation?

When the kid wins this case (and he will) he should send a letter to the principal that says simply: Fuck You.

The blues is the fundamental basis of jazz. Without it, jazz doesn't exist.

skeith, what web browser are you using and what version?

That mag is such a piece of garbage. I would pay 1 cent per issue for it. In fact, if they gave it to me I'd pay them to take it back. It's a joke...

Good to hear it... Now brownie, can you upgrade Navigator?

Hm. I'll post on the Invision board and see if anyone knows a fix for this.

Yes, let me know if any other invision powered board does the same things. When I installed the new version I couldn't get the posting feature to work (kind of important for a bulletin board). After researching it on the Invision board I found out that there was a file I had to install that wasn't mentioned in the instructions for updating. Maybe the same is true in this instance.

If you want to do a little research on your own, the makers of this board software have a website. Invision Power Board Maybe they have the answers. They also have a forum. See if you have the same problems there. Concerning Navigator. Any chance you could upgrade it to the newest version? I think they're up to 7.0 now and it's free. How old and what speed is your computer? Concerning Opera: I have no idea if the software has even been tested for Opera. I would doubt that is has. See if Opera has some sort of controls for Cascading-Style-Sheets. That's what this software uses to create the pages... CSS standards.

He then shot himself in the head.

Well... no Sugar tonight as promised. We played my Patterson tribute instead. That's a fun tune to solo over. Interesting gig tonight... I had a lot of fun! I did have a revelation, too. I finally realized where I stole the changes for my tune "Jimmy Smith Goes To Washington". Who wants to guess?

I'm making a decent living playing gigs. They pay fairly well around here. I would hope it would only get better as the group gets more exposure. CDs are a promotional tool, not a money-making tool for most musicians. As long as you go into it knowing that, you're fine. You gotta spend money to make money. I feel no sympathy for the RIAA. They've been fucking musicians and listeners for decades.

Berigan, I'm sorry to hear about your mother. I lost my mother to cancer in 1997. Any chance of getting her into the Mayo Clinic? I would at least call them and talk to them and see what they say.

I'll just say this: We're down to probably 200 CDs left of our inital run of 1,000. And we're not even close to paying off the debt it cost to make the CD in the first place.

Let It Go... good idea. That is a nice tune. I'm not familiar with "Shower You With Love". Perhaps this is a good thing?

STILL THE KING!

"Baby got backlog..."

That's a stupid analogy. What it's akin to saying is that a painter shouldn't make his money on collections of paintings in books (ie, album) he should make it by getting those paintings in as many museums as he can (ie, touring) so people can see the real painting up close and personal. I see no problem with this. As a musician I don't think musicians should expect album sales to support them. They should play live for their money. They should WANT to play live. I don't want to sit here and sell millions of records and never play a gig. That would suck! Besides, most musicians are not making a living selling records. The record companies are making a living selling records. The RIAA can try all they want to stop file sharing or they can get with the times and create a new business model. For instance, CDBaby, the independent music service that Organissimo uses to sell our CD online, is becoming a digital distributor. Here are the online services they've signed up with... - Apple iTunes - Emusic.com - BuyMusic.com - Rhapsody aka Listen.com - AOL's MusicNet - AudioLunchbox.com - eMePe3.com ... and more on their way. That means that our CD (and eventually CDs) will be available as downloads for the measely price of 99 cents per song or less to anyone who wants it with no overhead, no materials, no shipping from us. That's brilliant.