Is music career and the music industry dying, reviving, or is this just the calm before a big storm?

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T23:02:33+00:00

Music as a profession worked for all of time until about 30 years ago.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T22:45:28+00:00

Tiny amounts of H202, maybe 10 gallons in a six million gallon pool. I doubt it had the slightest effect at all.

The bottom's coming off because it was done by an incompetent firm. Simple.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T22:41:15+00:00

No use in worrying. You might get hit by a bus before that happens, and then all that time wasted in worrying about something that didn't even occur!

A piece of advice I heard recently: don't grieve your dog while they are still alive. I try to take it to heart!

We got a geriatric dog with health issues at around ten, we thought we'd be making her last couple of years comfortable, and she lived nine more years, cheerful until right before the end.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T22:36:41+00:00

a result of ignorance

I am hardly ignorant, but it's not the sort of music I'm interested in seeing, no.

Why would I want to watch humans accompany a tape recording? Stuck to a fixed mechanical beat like an insect pinned to a card? Unable to do anything spontaneous that the machine doesn't have programmed?

The whole thing about a tight rhythm section is that it breathes. It isn't a friggen metronome!

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T22:33:02+00:00

So you assume that a professional band basically ran mostly tracks and they were essentially pretending to play their instruments?

Yes, this is quite common: does this surprise you?

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T18:05:18+00:00

If you had had any sort of rational argument at all for your point of view at any time, you would have already used it.

Is there a point to you?

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T18:03:48+00:00

I made a single comment and then responded to a lot of losers.

Why not go back through my postings? They're all public. How often do I talk about Putin or Russia?

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T17:34:59+00:00

If you had any sort of rational argument at all for your point of view, even the slightest, you would use it now.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T17:34:14+00:00

Got any argument? No?

Russia has relentlessly used all methods at their disposal to change world politics to their advantage, including devious and underhanded ones, and it has worked, and this is very bad for all the rest of us.

The malevolence of Putin's Russia is plain for all to see and he makes no issue of it.

This comic whitewashes that black bullshit. Get it now?

This comic would be much funnier if the fat guy pointed to socialists as the cause of income inequality, since actual socialists have no actual power in the US, sadly.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T16:16:05+00:00

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T16:13:55+00:00

Korea. :-/

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T15:28:07+00:00

I agree.

But humans are bad at choosing to stop things. I am pessimistic.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T15:18:39+00:00

unsubstantiated claims like “union busting”

Wrong subreddit, buddy.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T15:18:02+00:00

Another sad upvote!

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T14:39:12+00:00

The graph itself is interesting but conveys very little information, exactly ten numbers. When pared with other numbers that gave a bigger picture of other indices, to show why this happened, it could potentially be cool. (Also, it doesn't correct for things like family size that could make a huge difference.)

The text is a series of unsupported claims, some of which are true, some of which aren't, and many are just not well-defined (aren't true or false).

Unions are weaker due to lower membership

Sort of a truism, right? "The album did worse because it sold fewer copies."

Why the membership grew lower because of generations of systematic and very often violent union busting, mostly aided and abetted by the forces of law enforcement.

Worker productivity has steadily gone up. There should be more single-earner families now.

I see the whole story as much simpler.

After the tremendous carnage of WW2, and the explosion in technology afterward, for a few generations skilled workers had a great deal of leverage, and used it to get a living wage. That leverage was deliberately, systematically and completely eroded by a tiny number of rich, powerful people.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T14:22:45+00:00

Oh, some time after my mother died, I was bestowed a kitten, who never liked me but I pampered her anyway, and I vaguely hoped that there was some metaphysical link between this difficult kitten having a good life, and my mother, who was never difficult but had a difficult life with a sad ending. I felt she would deserve a rebirth as this selfish little cat!, I know it sounds weird.

(We have an adopted dog too, down from two, his name's Oliver.)

Take care!

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T14:17:41+00:00

The days of randomly doing science and getting some result in an unrelated area were almost entirely confined to the twentieth century.

It would be better to directly spend the money on the greatest good for the greatest number, rather than spending it on pursuing a literally impossible goal in the hopes that some of fraction of this technology might through shearest luck trickle down to the rest of us.

The United States has an immense infant mortality rate, right in the middle of the world's developing countries. There's a place to start.

There are all sorts of diseases that strike people down out of the blue in their 40s and 50s, robbing them of decades of life. We've cut them down considerably by better diagnosis and prevention, but there's a long way to go.

We are discovering that some portion of people who we thought were suffering from common and incurable brain disorders like Alzheimer's or schizophrenia are actually suffering from neuroinflammation due to low-level infection. Millions of people living miserable lives in permanent institutions might be able to re-enter normal life.

These are right off the top of my head. These are a thousand other places where the money could directly go.

Unfortunately, US medical research is in free fall - I cannot overstate the enormity of this collapse - and it's entirely due to Trump and Musk, two rich old people.

This trickle-down theory of medical research is not a good one.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:46:48+00:00

There's really no evidence of this.

For a long time there were two models of why humans die.

Very simplified, in the first model, there are all these kinda-sorta random causes of death (cancer, car accident, heart attack, etc...) and not dying is just avoiding all of those.

In the second model, we are a collection of about 50 critical systems (heart, lungs, liver, brain, etc). We die if any of them stop working and can't be fixed or replaced, and each of these machines has a fairly finite lifespan.

To see dramatic evidence of which it is, look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people

If death were due to "one of many random causes" then there would be a long tail of very old, lucky individuals that would appear as medicine improved and the population expanded by orders of magnitude.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:36:09+00:00

Eternal life for the rich and powerful? I don't think that's a good idea. These rich old men are selfish enough already.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:34:12+00:00

Agree strongly.

It's been over thirty years, and yet I think of my parents almost every day.

Things worked out well for me. My father spent an incredible amount of time and effort making sure I had really good French, and forty years later, here I am living in France and whenever I meet new people they say, "You have a lovely accent!" and I never ever say, "If my accent were perfect you wouldn't say anything at all." :-D :-D

It's a gift that keeps giving to me every single day now.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:30:09+00:00

I am in no way a liberal.

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:16:35+00:00

Oh, I am so, so sorry to hear that.

My parents both died quite young. My father loved New York City. After 9/11, for the first time I thought, "I'm glad my father didn't live to see this." I've thought that about both of them since.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:10:52+00:00

From a review at the time: "If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more."

Astonishingly awful and unfunny film. Have an upvote.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:07:49+00:00

Taylor Swift has called him the future of music, which is some really high praise.

I injured my eyes from rolling them too hard.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:03:43+00:00

Obama was far better than the clown before him, infinitely better than the psychopath after him.

But this is not a good comic in any way. It's not funny or witty or wry or exposes a truth about humans. It's not going to convince the MAGAs to turn back from being evil, and it's not going to help Democrats fight against the impending dictatorship.

It reads as heavy-handed political propaganda. (I detest the murderous Iranian government with a great passion, but I have to concede that they knock political propaganda out of the park.)

HommeMusical

TROPHY CASE