Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 466 Editor's Choice: 25
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The problem with the NCAA's popularity
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have to agree with David and NCA (although I'm sure we should leave the poor animals out of it). Stop writing a 5 paragraph (or worse a 1 sentence) diatribe about how a certain aspect of a sport needs to change to fit your needs. It doesn't. It's pretty much perfect as it is. Hence, its popularity!
Who says free throws are boring? At the end of the game? With everything on the line? Sounds pretty tension-filled and exciting to me! Maybe if some of these kids were to practice, I don't know, say... their basketball skills, they would be able to MAKE A FREE THROW? It's called "free" for a reason. Maybe this is what Shaq has wrought - just add another reason to the pile of why I hate him - to be a basketball player today only requires height.
With the advent of all these NCAA pools and the rise of the event's popularity, there are the inevitable newbies who just don't "get it" but think they're instant experts who, if given the reins, really improve the sport. Really? 2nd most popular tournament in America and YOU can improve on it?
Why does there need to be non-stop action in order for you to be interested? Soccer's pretty non-stop but I find it deadly boring.
This reminds me of King's column after the SuperBowl; 2 or 3 people came to message board to wonder how racist NFL fans are for "booing" the Bears Muhsin Muhammad. It's that idiotic. And yes, girly too.
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Its the business MODEL, not the biz itself
[Read the article: Music industry slain by Internet: YouTube clip at 11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is what the media giants hath wrought upon themselves. Used to be, people got into the music biz for this virtually unheard of reason: love of music. Money and girls were the perks, but not the reason for making it your life's passion.
Used to be, the most successful labels barely broke even. If the tech bubble burst of the late 90s signaled anything, it was that you really shouldn't judge your business model by mid-90s success. That decade was a fluke.
People these days aren't stupid and the transparency into the workings of the music biz that the internet provides has done more to chip away at sales than any online music downloading. David Geffen needs to be awash in billions of dollars so that I can pay $17 for a CD that should, at worst, cost me $10? Especially since that's what you pay for the music on iTunes? Well its Geffen (and his ilk) who might need to be the ones recalibrating their needs now.
What I see as the future of commercial music is reversion to smaller, homegrown labels: sometimes the artists themselves, sometimes a loose conglomeration of like-minded artists and fans. The media giants will have a place in distribution and retail outlets (I can't badmouth places like Virgin, I like their stores too much) but they're going to have to accept a much smaller profit margin and percentage of the proceeds because artist-run labels aren't going to accept the fraction of a percent that they were getting under the big guys if they're the ones doing all the footwork.
For the record (no pun intended), I'm an aging genXer who can't fathom owning my music in a digital-only format. To me, buying and owning music is an experience: from the bin digging (my wife won't go to music shops with me anymore), to the CD art and inserts (nothing smells quite as good as a just-opened CD), to actually owning something physical (that can be covered in full by my homeowners insurance). The magic of the internet has also enabled me to never pay full price for a CD ever again.
I rip them myself so I get to decide the quality of the rip. My MP3 "backup" isn't a 128-rip burned to a CD that if ripped back into iTunes will be somewhere in the quality range of a severely beaten 8 track - and I won't lose my entire 1700 CD collection to a virus or file corruption. And have you ever try to sell a downloaded MP3 at a used record store? Make sure you bring a digital recorder so we can upload the peels of laughter to YouTube.