Two Bruces, Sanford and Brown wrote a piece in the Saturday 16 May WaPo opining that “It is unrealistic to demand new business models from the press without giving it the legal tools to succeed.“

The world changes. We’ve got this thing called the Internet. It makes wide distribution of information from person-to-person and point-to-point, mind-numbingly easy. If you have a business model which depends on distribution of information or media being difficult or limited, you need to come up with a better business model.

If you don’t want people to easily search/crawl your intellectual property, do not put it online. It is that simple. If you want to hide it behind a subscription-only service, as the Wall Street Journal and others have done, you have that option. The tradeoff will be that fewer people will find your IP and talk about it and share it with others. You have to make that choice.

Newspapers are not suffering because Google makes their content easier to find. According to the Newspaper Association of America (via WSJ.com), newspaper circulation peaked in 1984, ten years before a public internet; fifteen years before blogs really gained traction. Moreover, Craigslist or eBay are typically blamed for eliminating the presumably once-lucrative classifieds from papers’ revenue streams, but that has everything to do with adaptation to the technological landscape and nothing to do with copyright law.

The Bruces offer several legal remedies; all of them bad:

Limit the content a search engine can scrape, spider or read from a site

Bad for at least two reasons:

1. There is already a remedy: take your content offline. Easy. Painless. No lawyers. End of story.
2. How do you know ahead of time what a search engine (or its clients, among them a large and growing proportion of your readers) is interested in? Ten years on, it may not be the lede that’s interesting but the source quoted near the bottom of the article. Search engines make it easy for people to find you. Why would you want to make that difficult?

Protect against poaching “hot” news stories, i.e. giving someone the exclusive right to a chunk of information so they can profit from it

Plagiarism is already illegal and that’s not what this is about. It’s about granting what amounts to a patent on a certain piece of information. How do you define that piece of information? Who sets the time limits? Can I patent information about myself or my company that might be embarrassing in order to prevent people from disseminating it legally? Expression of ideas and information is protected under copyright, but the information itself is not. If you don’t want other people to share that information, don’t share it yourself.

Eliminate ownership restrictions (and later:) Grant an antitrust exemption for media companies

Great, how has that worked out for you so far? Readership up? Record sales up? Quality up? I have not read or heard a reasonable argument yet that having even fewer voices on the media landscape will improve any of these things, and the Bruces don’t even try here.

Encourage media through tax incentives

Sure, whatever. This is certainly the least disagreeable suggestion in the article. But is that the problem? There’s not enough tax incentives out there for large media operations to go and get the story?

Of course, I’ve read Clay Shirky’s article on the media revolution we’re experiencing right now. Nobody really knows how this is all going to shake out. I suspect it’s going to go something like this:

• We’ll get a handful of national news providers. The distinction between network television networks and newspapers will blur because everything is online and the same content is consumed in a variety of different ways. NYTimes will compete more directly with MSNBC or CNN.
• These national providers will make money through a variety of means, combining subscriptions for premium content or membership (community), advertising, and sponsorship.
• Local and regional providers, the ones whose lunch is really being eaten by craigslist on one side (revenue), and bloggers on the other (attention), need to figure out what they’re doing. The successful ones are going to gravitate to an advertising and aggregation model. They will hire or syndicate beat bloggers (I’m all for ditching that word, considering its baggage) who concentrate on specific issues and whose income is driven by readership.
• Something like an artist/management/agent relationship will develop with certain writers. Small “issue” blogs will get income from advertising and donations, while engaging in business relationships that enhance their profile and provide services like art, editing and publicity. This is already happening with blog properties like Huffington Post, Gawker, BoingBoing and many other successful blogs.

Flat tire meant I had to walk; normally I’d never go down Bryant. The image is a link to more photos.

“You are!”

So everyone is just issued VHTs as a matter of course? Best. band. evar!!1!

The Standard 18 Head has a really simple look. Black vinyl covering, smoother and thicker than the Tolex on my Fenders. Simple piping outlining the front control panel and wood grain logo plate. It felt really nice to the touch. It’s a full-sized head, hefty but not unmanageably heavy. I did have to move some stuff around to find a place to set it down. The rehearsal space is starting to look like the floor of Real Guitars.

I hooked it up to a Avatar G112 Cube with a single 12″ Vintage 30. Can’t say enough nice things about that cab, btw — really complete response — clear highs, full mids, strong bass.

Like the 18w Marshall to whom it owes its inspiration, the Standard 18 has two separate channels: a master volume/gain-controlled channel with bass, mid, and treble eqs, and a simpler volume/tone-controlled channel with hi- and lo- inputs. Most of the night I was playing through this first channel, and only for a couple of songs did a switch to the second, simpler channel.

I started in the first channel with everything set at 12:00. I play a Tele with lower-output Duncan single coils. At this neutral setting, the guitar was plenty loud enough to hang with drums, bass, organ, bari sax, trumpet, and a wailing singer. The sound was very full and warm, a decent percussive attack and nice sustain. I like things a dirtier and sharper, and that’s when I started futzing with the knobs.

Pushing the gain knob up added some hair to the sound. Going all the way to the right gave it a fairly agressive tone. Not metal chunka-chunka, but still ripping and tight. I backed that off a bit (it’s a soul band after all) and played with the other knobs. I ended up settling for several songs with bass at 10:00, mid at 1:00, treble at 2:00, gain at 2:00, master at 1:00. Plenty loud, warmth and girth at the bottom end and plenty of snap and chime at the top. Most of the time I was playing with the guitar volume between half and 3/4. A couple of times I kicked in the RC Boost, but it was mostly unnecessary. Would have been great for some ballsy hard rock.

The Standard 18 reminds me a lot of a reissue JTM 45 I used to have. Overall, a very warm sound, but nice attack and snap. Individual notes come through very clearly. It’s not at all a muddy or overly middy sound, but there’s a solidity to the response that is extremely reassuring. Makes me want to play simple lines, because every single note rings so powerfully.

I hope the head’s waiting for me again next time practice rolls around. I’d like to play some more with the second channel, and try out a guitar with high-gain humbuckers, just to get a sense of the range. Justin’s organ sounded great too, though my ears were pretty much pinned on my own guitar sound, so I don’t know how he’d characterize the differences.

OrangeAD30TC (guess what amp he plays) reviewed the VHT Standard 12 and Standard 18 in an article a few months ago on The Gear Page. A few of his words about the Standard 18: “With a tele it owned”. That was me, playing Justin’s Tele at the VHT workshop in Brisbane. It sounded pretty durn good with OrangeAD30TC’s solidbody Taylor, too. He does much better job descibing some of the tone nuances. VHT has some sound clips on their website, but it would be nice to hear a few more from other players.

Lord, in the memory of the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow can be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right. Let all those who will do justice and love mercy say amen. Say amen. And amen.

Not very long ago at all Big Bill Broonzy sang:

Arbitron figures for 11/13/2008 to 12/10/2008 (scroll down to KDLD):

Given that data, it’s not hard to understand. Indie 103.1 is way down there under the 50% bar. Corridos does better on terrestrial radio than young adult “indie” music. What’s the target demo? 18-35 college and post-college yuppies and hipsters who already are quite familiar with the shift of popular music from radio to MTV to Napster to Gnutella to iPod to iTunes to MySpace to YouTube, to Last.fm, Pandora, MOG, etc.

Now they’re going to a streaming format online much like other radio stations with strong core audiences/weak mass market appeal have done. => KNAC

Other blogs covering this:

• the-w.com: Indie 103.1 is off the air
• stereogum.com: R.I.P. Indie 103.1
• lataco.com: Indie 103.1 Is Done

A recent ebay auction failed to sell the guitar (apparently; at least on ebay) at the asking price of $2999. That’s where the pics come from.

Epiphone Professional guitar and amplifier

Epiphone Professional amplifier

Epiphone Professional guitar (detail)