12.54
Camp Caravan, MA.
A bright, cold day…
Theme meeting at 08.30, then personal meetings, and the final presentation based on the lecture notes, in various stages & drafts, of Discipline & The Act Of Music.
Departure scheduled for immediately after lunch.
15.31 Red Carpet Club, Boston Logan Airport.
A delivery to the airport by George Bennett, with interesting & informative conversation along the way. This past month at Camp Caravan has flown by, as if it were a weekend. A significant opening to the future is underway.
18.54 Red Carpet Club, Gate 7, C Concourse, Washington Dulles Airport.
The Peter Jenner interview Sid mentions…
For readers who’ve never heard of the black boxes, what are they?
Any money that comes in through collective payment and you don’t know who it belongs to for any reason - or you can’t pay it to them because you don’t know where they are - goes into what’s called the black box.
Which everyone in the collection societies insists doesn’t exist. You ask Fran [Richard, ASCAP] about the black box and he will give you the most fantastic bullshit. He’ll say "We don’t have a black box". Of course he has a black box. With the best will in the world you cannot distribute all the money accurately.
In a blanket license system, there’ll be huge black boxes, and we’ll have to learn to hold the money for a long time. People will learn to register, then we can work out how to deal with the black box fairly - rather than giving it to people who know it’s there. That’s what’s happened in the past, really.
We don’t talk much about it - so no one know who’s got it. And the people who get it don’t say much about it - it’s not top of their conversation at music conferences. They don’t come in and say "we cleaned up on the black box". What they will say, is "our market share was fantastic." That’s because it’s divided up by market share. It’s non-attributable income and it doesn’t have go to the artist - it goes straight to the bottom line.
This is one of the current scams that equivalates to practices in the publishing industry that attracted attention in the 1970s and, eventually, were changed. Simply, this stinks. It survives because it has not yet attracted much commentary. Good for Peter Jenner.
20.51 Camp Carvan to Dulles airport is somewhat of a culture shock. One small example: I have been able to detect almost no sense of personal-presence-while-in-motion.
Now, to close down & head for gate C1.
"Define the aim simply, clearly, briefly, positively"
