From the wire, Fender Musical Instruments shelves its IPO:
Fender Musical Instruments announced Friday that it would be withdrawing its planned initial public offering (IPO) based on current market conditions.
“Current market conditions and concerns about economic conditions in Europe do not support completing an initial public offering at what we believe to be an appropriate valuation at this time,” said Larry E. Thomas, Fender’s Chief Executive Officer, in a statement …
After going public, the company was hoping to have roughly 26.4 million shares outstanding. This would have valued Fender at about $395 million, but that all goes out of the window now.
By gross tonnage, most of Fender Musical Instruments’ guitars and amplifiers are made in China and Mexico. Its US manufacturing is essentially an artisan and snob business, priced for the high end for music professionals, people on label contracts and people who perhaps played when they were young, but then went into lawyering or banking and want a piece to impress people.
However, guitar players — young to old — are not, on average, a wealthy bunch. And the lousy economy has hit musicians hard. There aren’t any deep pocketed men on the staff at Guitar Center, walking the showroom floors nationwide.
So the idea that everyone who owns a Fender-branded guitar or amplifier would buy stock to have a piece of the company is laughable. Guitar players aren’t part of the investing class, not even as hobbyists.
Which would largely leave Fender stock to those who buy its artisan custom shop goods. Yet Fender is also very definitely not Harley-Davidson, the iconic US motorcycle manufacturer.
With its off-shored manufacturing hitched to the low and middle ends of the market, those segments where consumers were the most blasted by the economic collapse and subsequent loss of jobs and dollars, Fender Musical Instruments did what it had to.
The BBC delivered a piece today which discussed Google as an enabler of piracy, a giant company with no “moral viewpoint” on the activity although it loudly professes the support of copyright.
I suspect that many of you reading this will come down on Google’s side. After all the music industry is hugely powerful, and has been ripping off consumers for years, right? Who are [UK the record industry] to take the moral high ground?
In the US and the UK the major labels are not nearly what they once were. They are not all powerful and their ability to develop and break artists has been irrevocably crippled by the destruction of much of the revenue they used to be able to make on the sale CDs, vinyl and tapes. This is partially reflected in that there is very little actual artist development. It’s one album, and if it doesn’t spawn a hit, the career is over.
But don’t forget that Google now earns about three times as much in the UK as the entire music industry. And if you think the call for action against the firm comes exclusively from bloated record industry executives who deserve no sympathy, listen to Alastair Nicholson.
He has been running the UK hip-hop label Son Records for more than a decade, battling to keep afloat. Visit his office, and you’ll find no flunkies delivering flowers or a boardroom decorated with rock memorabilia – just one man in an attic flat.
Exactly.
I put it to him that it wasn’t Google’s fault if the web was awash with free music and that was what people were searching out.
“You’re right,” he said. “There’s any number of people distributing music for free, I’m not trying to lay that at Google’s door.” So how would he describe Google’s stance, I asked. He thought for a bit, and then said: “There’s a lack of a moral viewpoint.”
The article goes on to point out what’s obvious to many who make, or try to make, popular music. The idea of all music being free, and that one must never pay for it because you are supporting the Man (down with the record labels!), has become the refuge of idiots. What the attitude has done is sweep away all opportunity for small labels to make any kind of money selling music. The only agencies to retain it are the old record companies which can still mount advertising budgets and promotional spends to lift acts above the noise and protect some potential for earnings.
“But the result of their actions is that the only future for a small music label is to cozy up to a corporate giant,” reads the BBC piece.
We now have a generation of young people who, just like me at their age, love music. But they’ve come into a world where the expectation is that it must be free. And it has made a cosmic difference. It is now not hard to find artists in their mid-to-late thirties who will routinely say that they would have never make it in the business, or last long enough to get a lucky break, if they had to do it all again today.
All thanks to the creative destruction process and mercilessly enforced freetardism.
In the Google-mediated world of winner-takes-all search and recommendation the above video was momentarily shoved into the “suggestions” that one got after viewing “Mean Future.”
It has 19 million views and is by f(x) a South Korean dance pop act wildly popular in Japan, China and its native country. It’s also the epitome of mega-corporate factory-manufactured no-expense-spared pretty-puppets-on-strings focus-group-vetted trash.
Why was it shoe-horned into my space? Who knows precisely. But it is part of the Culture of Lickspittle and has something to do with a kind of graft-by-algorithm Google properties impose on users. With Google, the door never swings both ways.
You get to piggyback the mega-popular even though your contribution — in terms of an audience would be infinitesimal. And that’s because when you add all the infinitesimals worldwide they eventually turn into a significant number.
However, the mega-popular, somehow, through the magic of Google recommendation, never never get chosen to piggyback you.
You get your own digital slum with high walls, so nobody else can see in.
Hank Williams, Jr. has put his new album of mostly Tea Party-themed I-Hate-the-President music, Old School New Rules, on YouTube. You may not be able to get through it. But I listened for you.
Readers may or may not remember Hank lost one of his big money gigs last year, getting tossed as the opening theme to Monday Night Football, for comparing the President to Hitler. Country music did not rally to his cause.
And it won’t this time. Because while the genre and fans won’t tolerate the Dixie Chicks, and even went out of their way to ruin them, they also won’t publicly indulge anything like him.
Darryl Worley found it out with Keep the Change, an anti-Obama single he peddled to the Tea Party, hoping grass roots interest would force country music radio and television to play it. (If Worley made a penny of business value for every play on the fan-made video for it, he’s grossed about 2300 dollars. Boosted to a dime per play it’s still a sub-poverty wage for one office worker with a family. So while the numbers superficially looked like support from the standpoint of a major label artist who had previously had a hit single, they meant nothing.)
The best Darryl Worley could manage was an appearance on Huckabee. His record, promised after the release of the “Keep the Change” single never materialized. Instead, his company went out of business.
Like with Worley, Hank’s dilemma is that country music is emotionally embalmed. (He has also stupidly put his old anti-Obama tune with the exact same title, “Keep the Change,” on the new LP. It smells strongly of desperation.)
It’s classic rock refugee music for white people desperate to hold onto the delusion that if they’re just good enough, family-loving, God worshiping, hard workers, everything will turn out right in the end.
And what strikes fear in them is the wisp of any idea that this isn’t the way things are, that the country they think they live in hasn’t been the way they thought for a long time. Reality, looming over everyone like an unstoppable slow motion avalanche, threatens everything they believe in.
The music must therefore remain cheesy comfort.
Hank Williams Jr. is cheesy but not a comfort. And if there are songs that blame the President for everything, tunes that vow vengeance at the voting booth — well, the audience might find it agreeable privately but they won’t buy it and country music radio won’t play it. All the buxom young cut-off wearing girls on the summer tour circuit will find the mood harshed by Hank’s clumsy song to the small businessman, “Who’s Lookin’ Out for Number One.”
Counry music fans just don’t, don’t, don’t want trouble.
And Hank’s music is angry and a bit psychologically troubling but also not that great, expertly played by ringers and sung in two ways, either as a smooth ham or a mild boor tilting at the government.
In other words, if you want to have a genuine shit fit maybe you should really have one, instead of a big Nashville-session-man-and-buddies-middle-of-the-road imitation of it.
“I want to dedicate this song to every working man and woman in this country and everyone trying to run a business constantly punished, taxed and regulated by the federal government,” declares Hank Jr on the previously mentioned small businessman’s anthem.
“Our glorious leader just got back from China and Japan where he gave away our jobs, put us down and sold out our plans,” he sings. “We don’t need to be givin’ all that money away to other folks.”
It just doesn’t work as catchy music.
The first tune, “Takin’ Back the Country,” features his dead dad, autotuned. One presumes a few people in the studio thought this a bad idea but declined to say anything on the matter.
Hank Williams, Jr would desperately love Cow Turd Blues, from his new album, to be a Tea Party anthem.
How the future really turned out. Not quite what Brad Paisley’s big hit single, Welcome to the Future, advertised. Well, it wasn’t his fault. He got the iPhone bit right.
I’d give it a B, B+ for the four of ’em, all in the cloud on YouTube. No iTunes used in the playing of this music! (After a few listens, a solid B, no higher.)
How to mix getting old and looking cool, a trick Ted Nugent desperately needs to learn..
Mr. Tevlin, the Indiana student, said his exhaustive search for meaningful summer employment was so futile that he took a job cleaning toilets and septic tanks. “I think we’re in pretty deep trouble, and the future, as far as jobs, is not looking good at all.”
In 2009 Craig Miller of Lebanon, PA, confronted fake Democrat Senator Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting. It made great television and went nationwide, a GOP rally point for virulent opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to rework the health care system.
Miller was incoherent, then and in later television appearances. He couldn’t express, even in a basic way, the specific nature of his gripes other than to rage over alleged violation of the Constitution. However, his anger was very real. Three years on, it’s still visceral. It wilted and ultimately destroyed a sick Arlen Specter who was unprepared for it. What Specter got that day, he had coming. Craig Miller, and everyone else, deserved so much better than him.
The outburst was emblematic of the lack of Democratic leadership and its choices of wan uninspiring ruling class pols so used to being surrounded by sycophants and legal bribe-masters they can’t engage with people outside Washington in any way. After having been given the keys to power at a time so fraught in American history, they decided being empty unresponsive suits was most prudent.
I wrote the melody, a very hard rock funk thing (in the Seventies it would have been heavy metal), called it Hey Craig Man! and realized it was impossible to write any lyrical narrative. The only thing that worked was non sequiturs and balderdash about heevahavas, nudists, poozle, on your floor, outside your door, plus Pennsylvania Dutch-isms. There was nothing you could take away from the event except failure.
I stuck it on the web as an MP3.
Yesterday, with the upholding of Obamacare, I remastered it and added Tea Party video.
Readers will note it’s still nonsensical. There is no other way to describe what went on and what still goes on. Craig Miller may have never appeared at a political rally/townhall meeting again but tens of thousands like him continue to do so.
(For the rock music types, I was imitating an effect from something old called the Seamoon Funk Machine.)
Reader Mikey D secured a copy of Thomas Franks’ “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right” for DD blog to review and it arrived yesterday. I again thank him profusely!
It describes a stupefying chain of events in American history. With the world economy leveled by Wall Street misdeeds, the time was ripe for a popular uprising to rival that of the coming of the New Deal.
That didn’t happen. Instead, against all reason and common sense, the opposite. The popular uprising, in the guise of the Tea Party, instead blamed the US government and all of civilized democratic society, coming to accept a twisted conspiratorial story which blamed the economic collapse on secret liberal plots that inflated government for the express purpose of interfering with, and then destroying, pure capitalism.
It was as if at least half the country suddenly decided, bizarrely, that their favorite characters in the tale of Robin Hood were the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne.
It marked signal failure by the Democratic Party, a total inability to tell and sell a moral story on the true nature of what happened, for reasons ranging from alliances with the wealthy class that had caused the disaster and inability and unwillingness to communicate that it stood for anything populist. From the nobodies to President Obama, the party engaged in what amounted to political malfeasance toward its base.
The outrage at what became derisively known as Obamacare was part of this.
I’ll share a complete review of “Pity the Billionaire” in the days to come.
“Rock Of Ages” and Cruise failed to hit the high box office notes, taking in an estimated $15 million from 3,470 locations for the No. 3 spot.
The young males that were seen as the key to broader success for the film didn’t turn out. The audience, which gave the film a B CinemaScore, was 62 percent female, and 74 percent over 25 years of age.
Adam Shankman directed the film based on the Broadway musical, but it couldn’t match his earlier success with another film musical, 2007’s “Hairspray” … The film’s production budget was around $70 million.
“We’re not gonna take it/No we ain’t gonna take it!” — the kids vote with their feet.
Wait for the appropriate scene at 4:22. Or just skip to it. Big Balls & the Great White Idiot, one of the greatest band names of all time.
