“Resurrecting the Champ” is a Rod Lurie vehicle that stars Samuel L. Jackson as a onetime heavyweight fighter now homeless and Josh Hartnett as a Denver newspaper reporter who turns the fighter’s tale into a big story. It’s just the latest movie that tries to take a bite out of journalism and winds up looking uninformed.

A column in the LA Times (via Romenesko) goes after the film for needlessly fictionalizing the real story it’s based on. The original Los Angeles Times Magazine piece told about the reporter first discovering the fighter on the streets and then gradually coming to realize his tale wasn’t true. In the film, set in Denver, the story is much different: the writer publishes the story and basks in a wave of accolades. Then he finds out the fighter was lying and wavers about what to do long enough to lose control of the situation.

Filmmakers can do whatever they want with their stories, of course. But there’s something cheap about taking a story about one responsible reporter’s odyssey and turning into an unethical reporter’s Waterloo. Lurie uses all of this to drive a morality tale about sons and fathers and how prevaricating reporters are.

The real problem with switching the story around is that it’s so implausible as to be risible. This isn’t a Jayson Blair- or Stephen Glass-style case, where a fraud was deliberately perpetrated by a writer against a publication. Here, the entire story is driven by something fairly unlikely: An outlandish story like that’s getting into the pages of a reputable publication (a Denver paper’s Sunday magazine) with zero fact-checking. The first thing an editor says is, Where’s his trainer? Where’s his wife? Where’s his friends? “Resurrecting the Champ” leaves all of this out.

Little in the film squares with how daily newspapers work. The film makes it seem like the paper’s magazine is an hoity-toity independent publication. (This one even has a publisher who gets involved in minor editorial decisions.) A key plot point is a paucity of information on the boxer’s life; we’re told that Hartnett’s bedroom-eyed researcher is quite industrious, but for some reason she was unable to go to a library and check out a book, or suggest Hartnett call up an actual boxing authority.

Another important aspect of the plot is that the real boxer’s son is threatening to sue the newspaper; it’s never clear what exactly for, but it seems to be an implication in the story that he had neglected his father. But when Hartnett had called the son, he had uttered an expletive and hung up on him. If the writer had really implied anything bad about the son in the story, he would most likely have been asked by an editor to try to call the son back again. The published story would detail that he tried more than once to get a response, which would have probably limited the paper’s liability.

(Another small but telling thing: The boxer through some contrived reason makes Hartnett promise that he won’t contact his [the boxer’s] estranged wife. In the film, Hartnett is portrayed as a petty liar but unaccountably keeps this agreement, whereas in real life this would be the promise a real reporter would most likely break; or, more likely, the one he would not ever make in the first place.)

And finally, another plot point is driven by the fact that Hartnett doesn’t immediately tell his bosses when he finds out the story wasn’t true. He tells his wife, who works at the paper as well. It is inconceivable that the two wouldn’t have immediately told superiors. Amazingly, Hartnett even continues with a new gig hosting a Showtime sports special. (The blatant product placement allows a Showtime exec to wildly boast about Showtime’s boxing programming.) They would both know that the news would get out sooner rather than later, and keeping quiet would turn a professional mistake into a much bigger ethical one.

These are just the major problems. There are many smaller ones, and it’s also one of those movies with head-scratching screenplay issues on every page. (For example: By the movie’s math, the Jackson character would be close to 80 years old! For example: The film opens with a group of three frat boys who, we are supposed to believe, routinely wander around darkened trash-filled alleys looking for an elderly homeless guy to beat up. I guess they were doing it “for kicks.”)

“Resurrecting the Champ” is just the latest heavy-handed and wholly implausible look at the reporting industry. Some will say this is a zeitgeist issue reflecting society’s alleged distrust of the media. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. What’s really going on here is artless clods making flop movies getting their kicks by trying to get back at a press they resent. They don’t work logically, artistically or commercially. (”Resurrecting the Champ” has made a big $2 million its first week of release and had a per-screen average of $78 on Wednesday.)

Another recent press-bashing film was Woody Allen’s “Scoop.” It was about a young college journalist, played, with a chesty voluptuousness unseen in most newspaper newsrooms, by Scarlett Johansen. The film opens with Johansen going in to interview a film director and sleeping with him. After that entirely gratuitous start, a ghost (don’t ask) gives her a lead, and she and an elderly Allen go on the trail of a rich British guy who might be a murderer.

The semiotics of her character are difficult to parse. Allen’s own relations with the press, in the wake of the Soon-Yi Previn affair, have not been good, so when the young journalist is schtupped by the film guy Allen is presumably getting his own back. On the other hand, over the rest of the film Allen is finally forced by his age (he’s now 71) to not actually be romantically involved with the comely young actress he’s enticed to star in his films, which can be read as a sort of impotence. So Allen is left to pant over her indirectly in two ways, first through his character and then through his camera, particularly in an overlong sequence in an indoor swimming pool in which Johansen, reclining in a resplendent red one-piece, has her impressive, ah, musculature extensively examined.

That’s what I mean about how mixed up it all is… there are at least three “Allens” on the film; the offscreen director, the character he plays, and the director via his camera. The acid portrait of the loose young journalist, however, is then confused even further, when she becomes an intrepid truth seeker, which lurches back into the standard heroic tropes of journalism in the post-Woodward & Bernstein era. But even this gets muddied because the catalyst for her interest is, well, a ghost, which seems to be a shot at Deep Throat. In the end, she fakes out the murderer when he tries to kill her (in yet another leaden bit of plotting) and she’s off to a splendid career in “investigative journalism.”

Boy, I guess I should have included one of those “spoiler alert” warnings.

Again, little in this film reflects journalism in the real world; Allen’s goal, rather, is to belittle the profession in every way possible, from cheap shots against the media in general to smirking at the idea of investigative journalism.

Finally, another recent film that ventured into this territory is “Thank You for Smoking,” in which Aaron Eckhart plays a big-deal lobbyist for the cigarette industry in DC. He meets a Washington Post reporter, who seduces him and then trashes him in an expose. The reporter is portrayed as blandly, even gleefully, corrupt in her seductions. In the end Eckhart gets his revenge and the reporter winds up in the boonies. Here again, heavy-handedness gets in the way of the facts. While I’m sure some reporters do sleep with people they meet while doing a story, it’s extremely unlikely that a reporter at the Post would do what the woman in the film does (deliberately sleep with the primary subject of her story to get the information she needs to hang him), for the simple reason that the person she burned in that fashion would immediately tell her bosses and she’d be fired.

Hollywood gets every industry wrong of course; what set these films apart is that it’s obvious the makers are working out issues they have with the media; the result is some cheap shots—and, in the case of “Resurrecting the Champ,” some even cheaper box office receipts. The film’s most bizarre scene has Teri Hatcher, as a corrupting Showtime exec, trying to lure Hartnett into all sort of clutches. “There’s no journalism anymore and no news,” she coos. “The last thing people want is the truth.” That’s Ron Lurie talking.

Brooks Barnes reports in the NY Times:

NBC Universal, unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes.

The media conglomerate—which is the No. 1 supplier of digital video to Apple’s online store, accounting for about 40 percent of downloads — notified Apple of its decision late yesterday, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

The article speculates that, combined with Universal’s recent disagreements with Apple, major media companies are feeling “emboldened” to challenge Apple’s hegemony.

The companies have a right, of course, to do whatever they want with their material. But the fight over iTunes’s strict pricing comes down to one thing: The media companies want to do what they have always done, which is price hot product higher. That is the process that gave us ever-increasing CD prices in the 1980s and ’90s: The labels would soften consumers up with so-called “superstar product” (crap from Madonna or Garth Brooks, whoever) that would debut list prices a dollar higher.

This worked—until consumers discovered they could get everything for free on the internets, or from friends, and were finally free of the control of the greedy labels. While it’s probably true that keeping media product prices low benefits Apple (which makes money on hardware, not selling songs on iTunes), it’s even truer that keeping it lower keeps people buying from iTunes. Jacking up the prices will simply drive people back to swapping songs illegally on the file sharing networks, or on bittorents, or via mp3 discs. As storage space and bandwidth gets bigger it will become easier and easier for people to do the same with video.

On the other side of the equation is just this: That most media business execs, rather than trying to make things easy for their customers, instead lie awake at night with the sinking feeling that they could have screwed one of those customers out of an extra nickel or two.

In the new Conde Nast Portfolio, there’s a two-page spread on “influential tastemakers” in the music industry. Whatever. Anyway, one of them is songwriter Diane Warren. The blurb on her says “Because You Loved Me,” the Celine Dion hit from 1996, “sold more than 50 million copies.” I don’t see how that can be remotely true. It could be the magazine meant that the industrious Warren’s hit songs collectively total fifty million in single sales; or it could be an overzealous publicist was totalling up the sales of every single–and every CD sold in the world–that had that song on it, which could conceivably total fifty mil, and passed the nugget onto the magazine. If I’m wrong and there have literally been fifty million individual sales of that track I would love to see how the sales broke down.

As predicted. From Ben Charny in the WSJ ($):

Apple Inc. is expected next week to introduce new versions of its digital music players that have more features, but cost the same. The new gear, say analysts, typifies how the Cupertino, Calif., company is focusing on its core businesses after expanding into the cellphone industry earlier this year with its iPhone.

Last month, Apple unveiled a similar update of its iMac desktop computers, in which it added more features and in some cases dropped the prices.

Apple, in an emailed invitation, would only reveal that it has scheduled the media event for Wednesday in San Francisco.

Taking off from rumors on the mac sites, the article speculates that Apple is beginning work on an “iCar” device that might work as a car stereo system, but quoted a Volkswagen spokesperson saying “there’s nothing going on.”

Other potentials (and please note, all Apple developments are highly speculative) include:

* A touch-screen iPod;
* A wifi’ed iPod;
* HD content and movie rentals from the iTunes Store;
* The ability to turn your iTunes songs into iPhone ringtones; and, inevitably,
* The long-awaited availability of Beatles songs in the iTunes Store.

Macrumors is here.
Apple Insider is here.

From the Times:

Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of New York punk and art-rock in the 1970s and was the inspiration for musician-friendly rock dives around the world, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 75.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son, Dana, said yesterday.

Looking more like a lumberjack than a punk rocker, with his bushy beard and ever-present flannel shirt, Mr. Kristal cut an unusual figure as the paterfamilias of the noisy downtown music scene. But for nearly 33 years his club was an incubator for generations of New York rock bands, and performing within its dank, flier-encrusted walls became a bragging right for musicians everywhere.

It can listen to your cell phone conversations. Wired News has the story, posted a few hours ago:

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

The Wired News story is based on documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the Freedom of Information Act. Predictably, the EFF had to sue to get the documents released. More:

Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.

A Clinton-era law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, forces the telecoms to give the government complete backdoor access to their networks.

“CALEA revolutionizes how law enforcement gets intercept information,” [the FBI’s Anthony] DiClemente told Wired News. “Before CALEA, it was a rudimentary system that mimicked Ma Bell.”

Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn’t stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law’s reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance.

The R. Kelly trial, set to begin in Chicago next month, is a font of down-the-rabbit-hole developments:

1) No one has clearly explained why it has taken five years to bring a pretty simple case to trial.

(You will recall it involves a videotape that shows Kelly, the R&B superduperstar, doing all sort of colorful things with a young woman, whom police say is underage. Reports in the Chicago papers have the police saying they know who the woman is, and that she could have been as young as 13 when the video was taken. Jury selection begins Sept. 17.)

2) Several associates of Kelley and even members of the girl’s family are expected to testify that the woman in the video is the daughter of one of Kelly’s associates; but the women herself is as of now not going to testify. She has told police in the past it is not she.

3) The R&B singer Keyshia Cole told MTV last week she was going to be opening for Kelly on tour in October. How Kelly could mount a tour while he is on trial wasn’t explained; Kelley’s camp later said he would not be touring this fall.

4) Last week, the New York magazine web site, waxing all goofy, called Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” videos “the cultural event of the year”: the New York Times repeated the quote as if it were serious. As I noted below, the story mentioned Kelly’s legal problems only in passing.

5) Meanwhile, in Chicago, the judge in the trial again ruled that the videotape would be shown at the trial. Reported the Chicago Tribune:

The judge in the R. Kelly child pornography case on Tuesday upheld his ruling allowing the public to view a videotape that allegedly shows the R&B singer having sex with a minor.

In a hearing held to discuss several motions before the trial starts next month, Assistant State’s Atty. Shauna Boliker again urged Cook County Criminal Court Judge Vincent Gaughan to bar the public from viewing the tape in court, which she said would be harmful to the girl portrayed in the video.

“The state alleges it to be a re-victimization of the [girl in the tape],” Boliker said.

In his earlier ruling, Gaughan said there was not an “overarching interest” in keeping the media and the public from seeing a tape that is the “linchpin” of the case.

This is strange, isn’t it? There’s no public interest in further degrading the victimized girl, whoever her assailant in the video is. (Kelly has denied it is he.) Remember, it’s a videotape of a girl being raped and—I hate to keep mentioning this—urinated upon. (Granted, the thing has been on the file-sharing networks for years.) It doesn’t matter who the girl is; assuming, if what the prosecutors and many associates of Kelly have said is true, that the woman is underage, by definition she’s been abused once, and doesn’t deserve to have the tape played in public, right?

Here’s the most bizarre part of the Trib story:

On Tuesday, Gaughan said that because the girl has denied that she is on the tape, there is no victim to protect. Prosecutors said they do not plan to call the girl as a witness.

“If the alleged victim testifies, I’ll change the ruling,” Gaughan said.

How does what that woman says have any bearing on further humiliating the girl who *is* on the tape?

Here’s another nice passage:

In another motion, Kelly’s lawyer Edward Genson asked the court to exclude from trial a portion of the tape showing Kelly urinating on the girl. He argued that such a display would be prejudicial to the defense.

Boliker said that part of the tape is central to two of the charges in the 14-count indictment against Kelly and that it should not be removed “just because something is shocking or distasteful.”

Gaughan denied the motion.

Here in Phoenix, there’s a lot of news coming out of a raid at the Scottsdale home of rapper DMX last Friday. According to the local papers, based on a tip from a neighbor earlier this month, sheriff’s deputies looked at the house and then called one of the rapper’s lawyer to let him know there were animals in distress. A week later, deputies entered the house and found twelve undernourished dogs, three dog carcasses, a cache of guns, cars with license plates that weren’t registered to the cars they were on, and a big powdery pile of … something.

Another of DMX’s lawyers told the Arizona Republic that the rapper hadn’t been at the house for months; the sheriff said that neighbors had told his deputies that he had been seen there in recent weeks. The lawyer said there was a caretaker who was supposed to look after the dogs.

Stacey Richman, a New York attorney who also represents [DMX], told The Arizona Republic that word of the animals’ conditions was “very upsetting to us. We cannot understand who this can possibly be when we hired someone to care for those animals.”

When asked about a caretaker Saturday, [Sheriff Joe] Arpaio said he was “not going to get into him right now.”

The AP reported that there was no evidence that the dogs had been used for fighting, a la Michael Vick, and it wasn’t as yet clear whether the guns were unregistered. The sheriff’s office has said the half pound of powder was a suspected illegal narcotic, but hasn’t said yet what it was.

DMX, whose real name is Earl Simmons, comes across as a charming guy in the AP story …

In 2002, Simmons pleaded guilty to animal cruelty, disorderly conduct and possession of drug paraphernalia in New Jersey. Police said they found pipes for smoking crack cocaine, a pistol and 13 pit bulls at his home in 1999.

… and even more charming in the Republic:

In 2004, Simmons slammed his car into a gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York after telling a parking attendant that he was a federal agent.

Later that year, he pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment and driving while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. He was sentenced to conditional discharge but ended up in a New York jail in 2005 for violating those conditions.

A year later, the rapper was cited for carrying a concealed handgun outside a Scottsdale nightclub.

Two publications late last week detailed firmer-than-usual rumors about new iPods. Apple Insider said the important technical development (if less of interest to consumers) will be a new strain of Apple’s OSX. But there’s more:

People familiar with this year’s plans say Apple’s iPod roadmap for the fall now calls for as many as four new models–most, if not all, will employ NAND flash–including major evolutions of both the flagship video iPod and iPod nano lines. It’s these two iPod product families which are expected to receive the Mac OS treatment, though to varying degrees.

Ars Technica, by a country mile the most sophisticated and thoughtful of the technical blogs, says the announcement will be Sept. 5:

The fifth is odd day for an event (a Wednesday instead of the typical Tuesday), but we are told that the reason for this is the long holiday weekend. Whatever you say, your Steveness. It’s also possible that Apple will make announcements on the 5th while shipping later in the month, which would validate the date range provided by AI’s sources.

Our sources are slim on details for exactly what will be announced, but said that at least one of the things that will come out of September 5th will be a new iPod.

Apple Insider story here.

Ars Technica story here.

We’re all so dependent on the internet for research now it’s glaringly evident when internet outages strike news outlets. At least, that’s what I assume is happening at all the various organizations creaming their jeans over R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” videos but somehow being unable to vouchsafe to their readers the details of Kelly’s legal problems.

What generally happens in cases like this is that the writers create a sort of “boilerplate graf” they can shove into each new story to bring readers up to speed on the background of the subject. This has been missing from virtually all the stories I’ve been reading on Kelly recently.

Like this one and this one and this one and this one.

Also this one and this one.

As I said, I’m thinking it has to do with an inability to do that sort of rudimentary research the internet makes so easy these days; so, since my internet connection, at least, is up, I’d like to help the team by proffering the following background graf gratis to anyone who needs it in their assiduous chronicling of Kelly’s latest project:

Kelly, now 40, has a long and lurid history of sexual involvements with young girls. In 1995 he was found to have married a 15-year-old girl, the singer Aaliyah; the marriage was annulled. In 2002, a tape came to light showing what appeared to be Kelly and a young girl engaged in a variety of sex acts; one involved Kelly urinating on the girl. After five years of delays, he is to go on trial for 14 counts of child pornography in Chicago next month; charges involving having sex with a minor were dropped because the videotape did not show the two having intercourse. Kelley has denied the charges and said he is not the man in the video.

Kelly was arrested in Florida in 2003 for 12 more counts of child pornography stemming from photos in a digital camera found in a house he was renting that showed him having sex with an underage girl. These charges were later dropped after the search warrant used to raid the house was ruled unjustified.

There’s some good background on the Florida case here.

More on the Chicago one here.

The NYT says that the show has advertisers feeling queasy:

The network has filmed only one sting operation so far this year, compared with seven in 2006. In several ways, the high ratings for “Predator” have come at a high price for NBC. Some advertisers say they are wary of being associated with the show’s content, in which men lured to a house by the promise of a sexual encounter are instead surprised by Mr. Hansen and then arrested.

Critics have also raised ethics questions about the series because NBC coordinates the investigations with a private watchdog group and local police departments. And two lawsuits are pending against the network, one by a former producer and another by the sister of a man who committed suicide as police officers approached his house, accompanied by NBC camera crews.

[…]

Some media buyers were hesitant about buying ads on the series even before the recent spate of bad press reports. Andy Donchin, director for national broadcast for the advertising agency Carat USA, said advertisers could be wary of the show’s unsavory theme. “We’re all concerned with what content we’re associating ourselves with,” he said.

Crazy Nikki Finke has caught box-office fever. Her latest post is titled:

OFFICIAL! Summer 2007 Smashes Record

Gotta love the opening clause of her breathless report:

Because of (or in spite of) all those blockbusters and threequels, Summer 2007 today crossed the $4 billion mark, setting a new record for total domestic gross receipts.

Because of (or in spite of) the fact that movie ticket prices are always going up, this really isn’t a record summer. As I wrote below, 2007 is running a hefty percentage below audience tallies earlier this decade. Since there is a constant that can be looked at—in this case, actual attendance figures—this focus on dollar amounts isn’t a harmless fetish. It’s a smokescreen for the industry (”Hollywood setting a record!”) to obscure the truth (”Hollywood not setting a record!”).

Reading Finke is always a pleasure. Lower in the item, she gets around to mentioning the fact that actual ticket sales are below record highs. Here’s how she puts it; I leave her uneasy grammar and colorful punctuation intact:

[A]verage ticket prices in 2004 was $6.21 versus $6.85 in 2007. (Which is why Hollywood box office figures are starting to resemble baseball statistics with lots of asterisks after every record set…)

Why is this “starting” to happen? Hasn’t it always been that way? Why do we need asterisks? Wouldn’t we be able to eschew the asterisks just by focusing on the information that means something and ignoring the information that doesn’t? ? And I’m not a sports person, but aren’t the (very few) asterisks in sports based on extraordinary circumstances? Isn’t this movie issue the opposite, just the banal reality that prices always go up?

A piece by Ben Worthen in the WJS ($), in discussing the launch of Windows 95 twelve years ago, says:

MSWindows 95 was a cultural event. Thousands of tech enthusiasts waited in midnight lines so they could be the first to get their hands on a copy. And as impossible as it now sounds, Windows 95 was the first time that the Rolling Stones let one of their songs be used in an ad campaign. (Yes, Microsoft got the Rolling Stones to sell out.) Microsoft was the hot tech company, the young buck challenging IBM’s establishment.

Emphasis added. It is impossible. In the early 1990s there was a Budweiser ad that used “Wild Horses,” as sung by the Sundays; besides that, the Stones themselves appeared in Budweiser ads around the time of what must have been their 1994 tour; splitting hairs in interviews, Mick Jagger argued that the ads were advertising the tour, not the beer. That’s not how they came across on the air.

Right now, of course, you can hear the Stones’ “I’m Free” being used for Chase credit card ads. I was wandering the web, trying to make sure it wasn’t true, as some blog poster said, that the Chase commercial featured a cover of the song by the Soup Dragons. Wikipedia says it’s the Stones, which may or may not be true, but put the info like this: “In 2007, it was also used as a jingle to the Chase Freedom credit card advertisement.” I think it should say, without using a passive-voice construction that obscures the real issue, “In 2007, the Stones sold the song to be used in a credit-card commercial.” *

Gee, maybe I should make my case on the Wikipedia discussion board!

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was this:

* The band’s former manager, Allan B. Klein, has effective control of most of the Rolling Stones’s early recordings; I assume, but don’t know for sure, that to use a song in a commercial, publishing rights (which is to say the songwriters’) need to be obtained as well. Will research and report back.

The WSJ ($) has a story about venture capital groups that are supposedly going to be backing heritage artists who want to get back into the limelight:

Past-their-prime rock bands are used to being ignored by record labels and mocked by the music press. But, in Britain, they’ve found a new groupie: venture capital.

A boutique London investment bank, Ingenious Media PLC, is financing comeback albums. Last month, it signed UB40, a reggae band that had a No. 1 hit in 1988 with the song “Red Red Wine.” Other artists working on CDs for Ingenious include veteran rocker Peter Gabriel, and the techno punk band the Prodigy.

The firm, which specializes in media and entertainment deals, pays for the acts’ music production, marketing and CD distribution. Its partners came up with the idea to start two funds to back faded groups three years ago. It has raised $79 million.

The story says the group will spend between $400,000 and $2 million per album. The high-end figure strikes me as implausible. There are apparently some arcane British tax reasons that make these funds more beneficial than they appear, and in the end this is probably a tax move, not a musical one. The story ends with this:

Dave Goldberg, a music entrepreneur at Benchmark Capital, a U.S. venture-capital investor, says it’s too early to say if Ingenious’s approach will take off in the U.S. “But we are going to see more and more of these different ways of creating financing for bands,” he says.

Ingenious seems to be putting its money where its mouth is, but this is a pipe dream. The companies involved have no distribution expertise and will be at the mercy of whoever does distribute it, who will not do any work to help the funds market their products. Press will be minimal, because the group won’t have any experience with publicity. The story focuses on UB40, which is said to be putting together an album of social and political issues. That will definitely not be the comeback the story says the funds are focusing on. After losing money on a couple of these, if the funds are really in the business of making money and not being a tax write-off, they will inevitably traffic in bands with some sort of hook to regain an audience, and I’ll bet you my prized LP copy of Ktel’s “Believe in Music” it will involve “greatest hits live!” or covers-laden albums used to fuel interest in tours, where bands can make actual money and the venture funds, unless they’re taking a piece of the bands’ entire earnings as part of the deal, won’t.

And despite what the story says, new albums by heritage acts are almost never mocked by the music press. Negative reviews of any sort are almost absent in most mainstream outlets (I’m leaving aside newer outlets like Pitchfork), much less about sacrosanct acts like McCartney or Springsteen. The simple truth is that people don’t actually want to listen to new material by older artists, simply because it’s not very good. Springsteen’s “The Rising,” in sheer tonnage probably the most written-about album of the decade, sold only two million copies and was basically not played on the radio. (Get ready for an onslaught of coverage about how Springsteen’s new album—why, his first work with the E Street Band in, I don’t know, 36 months!—is a “return to top form” or somesuch.) The irony here is that I think people don’t want such music, or the credulous coverage of it. I’d love to read a good denunciation of Springsteen or, god love her, Patti Smith. Think about how long the magazine “Tracks” lasted; the magazine, which over its evanescent tenure was designed to tap into a supposed hunger amongst aging yuppies for good adult music, was almost painful to read as the editors and writers bent over backward to say positive, inoffensive things about the succession of harmless, avuncular heritage artists they stuck on the cover.

Accordingly, the Journal story trots out yet again an approving mention of another overcovered heritage act:

After a 40-year relationship with EMI’s Capitol Records, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney announced in March he would join Starbucks Corp.’s label, Hear Music. Mr. McCartney released an album through 10,000 Starbucks coffee stores in June. The release sold 500,000 copies by early August according to Nielsen Soundscan.

As I’ve mentioned before, this meager revenue stream can not be depended on; if McCartney releases another album through Starbucks next year, it will sell much less, unless they opt for a hits or oldies package.

The WSJ has some behind-the-scenes detail (r.r) on the Live Nation decision::

The situation threatens to create an acrimonious war over who will sell tickets for a big portion of the U.S. live-entertainment industry. A memo circulated within IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ticketmaster, which controls the ticket inventory to nearly all major concert and sporting events in the U.S., said the ticketing company no longer expects to renew its agreements to sell seats for events at buildings owned by Live Nation, its largest client. Events at venues owned by Live Nation and its House of Blues subsidiary generated 17% of Ticketmaster’s roughly $1 billion revenue last year.

Talks between the two sides have grown acrimonious during the past year and a half, according to people close to the situation. Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino has threatened to start his own ticketing operation rather than renew with Ticketmaster.

The story also mentions another revenue stream at stake:

Beyond the financial stakes, though, is another crucial asset: Control of the relationship with fans. One of the most valuable assets Ticketmaster has long controlled is detailed data on music fans’ spending habits, along with direct-email access to buyers.

Via Slate’s kausfiles blog I noticed the claim in bold below, from journalist Maureen Orth on the Britannica Blog site:

Today we are all one besotted planet feeling the connection of celebrity. In the decade since Diana’s death we have seen the celebrity industrial complex spread globally like the fallout from a dirty bomb. Celebrity dish that travels the 24 hour news cycle on the internet and on cable TV as well as in print—not to mention celebrity maintenance—is a huge business worth billions of dollars. Minor pop stars now trail entourages of fifteen and twenty, too many to fit into network green rooms. By 2003, I counted more white limousines for the memorial service of the previously unknown murdered and pregnant Laci Peterson in the small town of Modesto, California, than Elvis Presley had at his funeral in Memphis[,] which I covered in my early days as a writer for Newsweek. (Elvis’s death in 1977 rated two paragraphs in People Magazine.) Today there are red carpets for the opening of a McDonald’s. People routinely are willing to humiliate themselves in front of millions for the chance to appear on a reality TV show.

Orth is a really good reporter, though I don’t agree with the hand-wringing here. But is that claim about Presley true? At a time when there was a lot less media around I remember enormous coverage of his death. I could be wrong, but I wonder a) if she is remembering an issue that came out immediately after Presley’s death, in which the news came on deadline and the editors had time only for a mention, with full coverage coming the following issue, or b) whether People, still a relatively new magazine at the time, just blew a story that was big news everywhere else. As the excerpt above says, though, Orth was on the story at the time, so she may be right.

I’m interested because Presley has been overcovered and excessively lionized ever since his death. My theory as to why that is is based on a vortex of, if you will forgive this crude formulation, hipster and yahoo sensibilities, in which the affection for Presley maintained in the hearts of a relatively few unquestioning fans is magnified by a hipster population that finds the adoration of an artist with such a widely varying output sort of funny. The hipsters adopt the star with a highly ironicized affection. Serious critics, too, venerate Presley’s sociological importance, which helps. This all buttresses the feelings of the Presley fan base, who don’t get the irony, which is considered to be even funnier by the hipsters, and so on and so forth. It’s a hall of mirrors.

Variety is reporting the amazing news that Live Nation is dumping Ticketmaster. This doesn’t mean all that much for consumers—it just means that Live Nation is just going to be fleecing its customers with an in-house staff, rather than just taking a cut from the company they’ve outsourced the activity to. But it is a hit for Ticketmaster—perhaps as much as 20 percent of its business, according to Variety’s Phil Gallo:

Talks between Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, have broken down, leaving the door open for Live Nation to develop its own ticketing biz.

The loss of Live Nation, which also owns House of Blues, would be a devastating blow to Barry Diller’s Ticketmaster, the top event ticketing company in the world. Live Nation events represented 15%-20% of Ticketmaster’s U.S. business in 2006, generating about $100 million in service-charge fees for Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster’s contract with Live Nation runs through the end of 2008, its House of Blues deal through 2009.

The ticket-selling business is as rancid as it comes. You’re being asked to compensate a business for the cost of doing business with you. In the pre-digital age, the logistics involved (co-ordinating the orders, mailing out the tickets with a bare minimum of screw-ups) meant that it made sense for different venues in a particular area, from stadiums to Sea Worlds, to make use of a central system, and for whatever reason the costs of it was passed along separately to consumers.

But as technology has evolved, there is less and less a need for it. In response, Ticketmaster has gone the extra mile to jack up the fees any way possible, as anyone who has bought a ticket to just about anything recently can attest. It gets away with it because of the distinctive economics of live events. Most of the people who want to see a show (or a touring Broadway musical, or a baseball game) really want to see it. A few extra dollars doesn’t matter. (Indeed, a lot of extra dollars often don’t matter, as scalpers know.)

Enter Ticketmaster, which discovered early on that consumer resistance to higher ticket fees was accordingly soft. The company’s genius was to realize that the only thing that could hurt it would be to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, which is why it institutionalized a way of doing business that in exchange for exclusive contracts kicked back some of the ticket fees to promoters, venues, and even bands. (Back in the heyday of the Pearl Jam/Ticketmaster set-to, Billboard quoted Aerosmith’s manager saying he’d gone to the company trying to get the fees reduced for an upcoming tour. He said that a Ticketmaster official had told him [I’m paraphrasing], “Hey, how about we raise the fee, and we’ll split it with you?”)

(It is, by the way, a fair point to note that there’s nothing illegal here or, arguably, belowboard. Folks know what the charges are, they don’t have to buy a ticket if they don’t want to, and what difference does it make if the ticket is priced $119 dollars flat or $100 with an extra $19 in fees tacked on? My response is a) It’s lying; b) if it makes no difference then they can do it with a flat price; c) it distorts the economics of the industry; d) it creates a monopoly business that controls access to a commodity in a way that doesn’t foster customer service; and e) the financial deals are all secret.)

This illustrates how consumers got screwed under the original way the business got set up. If a basketball arena, say, itself had to pay an outside service to handle its ticket-delivery service for it, it would try to keep the fees down as much as possible. But when it has a cozy long-term deal with Ticketmaster in which it gets a cut of the proceeds, it wants the fees *raised*. The result is the way things are today—millions of sports, music and theater fans metaphorically having their pockets picked in an institutionalized way as they walk through the venue doors.

Anyway, having been watching Ticketmaster perfect this art of legally mugging its patrons, Live Nation (which is the spun-off Clear Channel concert-promotion arm, and no stranger to shaking down customers itself) is doing the sensible thing of extracting itself from its agreements so it can do the fleecing all by itself.

In other words, the original justification for all those “service,” “convenience,” “mailing” and whatever-else fees was that the venues had to outsource it because of the difficult logistics of selling tickets. Now, in an era in which there are essentially zero logistical issues—indeed, in the age of the paperless ticket—Live Nation can pioneer some new revenue streams: “cell-phone delivery fees,” or perhaps “ticket-taker scanning fees,” all part of the elegant art of charging customers for being customers.

I got a new car stereo a few months ago, a sleek-looking Alpine with some cool lights and the neat device of a cord that runs from the back of the unit into the glove compartment, to which one can hook up an iPod. The big selling points: a) You can operate the iPod from the front of the stereo, and b) you can see the title and artist readout on the unit as well.

The former works in adequate, if limited, fashion. As for the latter, what interests me about it is how, to see the artist or song title, you have to press a little button to the right of the readout, which cycles through the information about the song that’s playing. The amazing thing is that the cycle encompasses some eight or ten elements, most of which are strange numbers or gnomic messages like “LABEL” or “ALBUM” or “NO SUPPORT.” Of these, only three are useful to you the consumer: the song name, the artist name, and the album name. The rest is all gobbledygook or numbers, of interest to the stereo but not the owner f the stereo.

The contrast between that and what I would call the Google or Apple aesthetic is pretty extreme. I understand it’s a small thing; when I’m in the car I just put the thing on shuffle and skip the songs I don’t want to hear. But once in a while I want to check what it is I’m listening to, and then I sit there, in traffic, marveling that I have to hit a little button a half-dozen or more times just to find out what artist is playing.

Can you imagine Steve Jobs testing out a new Apple car stereo that did that? “What are these numbers?” he’d ask the designer.

“Well, when the stereo reads the iPod, it assigns each song a number, based on the directory the mp3 is in, its position in the hierarchy of that directory, and its…”

Jobs would then probably reach over and smack the designer, sharply, upside the head before explaining to him or her that they were selling car stereos to humans who just wanted to know the name of the song they were listening to, not the computer file’s position in the directory hierarchy.

Anyway, I was thinking about this in reading about the newest challenger to the iTunes Store, put together by RealNetworks, which owns Rhapsody, and MTV. There’s a NYT report here, the WSJ’s here (r.r.). Essentially, MTV is buying a piece of Rhapsody for a chunk of change (its unclear how much) and a commitment to flacking it unmercifully on the air. (There’s an iPhone challenge, too: Verizon phones will be able to play music from the service. )

This will be a fun, Zune-like business debacle to watch. MTV viewers will be subjected to endless prattle on the network (and, specifically, on the VMA’s in September) about the fabulous new “Rhapsody America” service. Anyone who tries to explain the advantages of this oddly named product will quickly get bogged own in explaining what a subscription service is; how you can buy certain songs under certain circumstances, which won’t play on an iPod but will play on Verizon™ phones; and how there are lots and lots of songs available, except for the ones that aren’t.

The subscription gambit isn’t worthless—there are those whose lifestyle or interest in music it suits, though I don’t know why they don’t just use Pandora—but it’s hard to see how this will be anything but a niche product for unsophisticated consumers who both a) have never seen an iPod ad and b) make consumer spending decisions based on advice from John Norris. I’m not saying they don’t exist, just that it’s not going to be an iPod killer.

The connection between this and my oddly featured Alpine car stereo is that I now look at the damn thing not as a suave addition to my car but more as something of an annoyance. It’s got a radio, of course, but there’s nothing on the radio I want to hear outside of NPR, which I’d just as soon podcast. I barely play CDs any more, too, and when I do have a disc in there it tends to be an mp3 disc.

In essence, I had to buy the thing in order to connect the iPod up to my car’s sound system, and basically I’ve discovered that the people who designed it didn’t take much time to examine how folks would actually use it. I’m quite sure I’m never going to buy such a product again, because it just seems to have been conceived and designed under a paradigm that is plainly out of date. Anyone who wants to compete with the iPod or the iTunes Store needs to come up with a device or a service that is even more lethally useful. You can tell from its inception that Rhapsody America won’t be it.

Google says on its official blog that it made a mistake in the way it shut down its Google Video service:

We’re giving a full refund — as a credit card refund — to everyone who ever bought a video. We’ll need you to make sure we have your most recent credit card information, but once we know where to send the money, you’ll get it.

(Via Wired News, whose story is here.) The issue is that, online, you can buy something that you don’t actually possess or, as is the case here, buy something that can be used only through a proprietary program that can be, as was the case here, unilaterally shut down. Other companies won’t be as straightforward as Google, notwithstanding the glitch. On the other hand, a generation has now grown up buying all sorts of things for their cell phones, from ringtones to games, will disappear the same way when they change services or in some cases even phones.

Fans of newspeak will note, however the hed on the Google blog item: “An update on Google Video feedback.” It reminded me of this recent quote, on Romenesko, from the publisher of the Chicago Tribune when the paper shrank the size of its newsprint:

“This minor change in our page dimensions will allow the newspaper to more effectively serve our customers with our award-winning journalism and an enhanced advertising environment.”

Both turns of phrase seem applicable in a variety of situations. When Michael Vick goes in to plead guilty to dogfighting today, he can say, “You’re honor, I have an update.” And the next time I rob a bank, I’m going to say. “I’m here to more effectively serve you.”

The NYT reports:

As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children. So far all such efforts have failed.

Citing the Constitution’s protection of free speech, federal judges have rejected attempts to regulate video games in eight cities and states since 2001. The judge in a ninth place, Oklahoma, has temporarily blocked a law pending a final decision. No such laws have been upheld.

Seth Schiesel says that while the courts let states strictly regulate regarding kids and porn, there’s no basis for regulating violence.

It’s an interesting story, but it never answers the question of why sexual issues are different from violent ones. Consider this graf, from an opinion by Richard Posner, from the seventh circuit, in Chicago:

“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

Change the word “violence” to “sexuality” and few would quibble that the result makes just as much sense. So what is the basis for the distinction the courts are making?