GARussell

Happy Birthday Alexander!

I read that because he had been stiffed/not paid by club owners, Groove kept a pistol in his organ bench. Maybe that had something to do with it.

It's been a long time since I've seen a late night show, but I gave up when it seemed like every joke of every monologue of Leno and Letterman amounted to sneering at somebody. "Did you see what he said today? Boy, is he stupid!"

It says that the money will come from Lala's ability to upload songs already in the customer's CD collection, so that (cloud computing here) the collection can then be listened to from any computer, any browser. The author says that Apple is keen to beat Amazon to the punch regarding music and cloud computing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011901581.html

Robert B. Parker, the author of the Spenser mysteries, has died. A few years before the television series I got into him and read the first 10 or so novels of the series. I found that each one was not quite as good as the one before. Still, I have fond memories. I once read a funny thing about him. Although he dedicated each of his books to his wife, she lived in a separate apartment in their home with its own entrance. http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/

I saw Richard Pryor as the warm up to Herbie Hancock about 1970 at The Cellar Door. A friend of mine worked there, and he told me that Pryor was upset that he had to come on before the band. He felt that he was the bigger star. Every one of Pryor's jokes made people uncomfortable. That's not my idea of a good comedian. I want to laugh, not feel uncomfortable. In this case, Pryor told mostly racial jokes. Half offended the white half of the audience, and half offended the black half. My favorites are Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman and Bob Newhart. I got for my birthday a 2-CD set of Newhart's most famous routines. I'm slowly working my way through it, listening to one at a time. Every one has been great so far, but his style is nearly fifty years old, and it is a little bit like watching a TV rerun too many times. PS - Speaking of teams, I saw Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on Broadway in 1973. They were great! I also always enjoyed Bob & Ray, who also took their act to Broadway. (I only got to see them on TV, but I have read one of their books as well.)

I've just set up the converter box. The picture is fantastic! All channels look equally good, like on cable TV. I'm getting 13 channels. For some reason the box did not pick up the Spanish language channel, which I never watch but which I usually receive quite well. There is a process to add channels which the box did not automatically pick up, but I'll wait till another day to play around with it. Unfortunately, I'm still not getting PBS, which is on the western side of the metro area, and I'm on the eastern side. I may try to add that.

I don't understand your point, catesta. What did happen to CBS/Infinity Radio after Stern left? Haven't the millions of people who have signed on after Stern joined Sirius paid for his contract? Didn't XM and Sirius agree to never merge when they received permission to use satellites originally?

Here's the LA Times' report regarding teenagers' failure to buy CDs in 2007: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-musi...;vote36101458=1 More teenagers ignoring CDs, report says George Frey / Bloomberg News Joe Allred browses through a rack of CDs below a display of iPods at the BYU Bookstore in Provo, Utah. Apple Inc.’s iTunes music store jumped ahead of Best Buy as the No. 2 U.S. music seller as consumers switch from CDs to digital downloads. 48% of teenagers bought no CDs at all in 2007, up from 38% in 2006. Music downloads continue to grow, though, with iTunes leading the way. By Michelle Quinn and Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers February 27, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO -- Going to the mall to buy music may no longer be a rite of passage for adolescents. For the first time last year, nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38% of teens shunned such purchases, according to a new report released Tuesday. Your Vote What's the primary way you buy your music? 23.1% CD 28.9% Digital download 33.2% I get them free from file-sharing 14.8% 8-track 7333 total responses The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam. In the last year, Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, which sells only digital downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc. That could be hopeful news for the music industry, which has been scrambling in recent years to replace its rapidly disappearing CD sales with music sold online. The number of CDs sold in the U.S. fell 19% in 2007 from the previous year while sales of digital songs jumped 45%, Nielsen SoundScan said. The number of people buying music legally from online music stores jumped 21% to 29 million last year from 24 million in 2006, according to the study by NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y. NPD declined to release figures on individual retailers' sales or their market shares, so it is impossible to know how close iTunes sales are to Wal-Mart's. The NPD market ranking of music retailers is based on a study of the music habits of Americans 13 and older over the last week. The report, which involved 5,000 people who answered questions online, highlighted a generational split. The increase in legal online sales was driven by people 36 to 50, the report said, giving the music industry an opportunity to target these customers by tapping into its older catalogs. That's not to say iTunes is not popular with the younger set. Mallory Portillo, 24, an executive assistant in Santa Monica, said she hadn't bought a CD in five years, but typically spent more than $100 a month buying music online. She will turn to illegal music sharing sites only if she can't find new releases or more obscure music on iTunes, she said. Buying online saves her the step of having to load a CD onto her laptop so that she can then transfer the files to her iPod. Her most recent purchase came two days ago, when she spent $19.99 on iTunes for Michael Jackson's 25th anniversary edition of "Thriller." "Hopefully it doesn't come back to haunt me one day that my 'Thriller' CD is on my computer and therefore not a collector's item," she said. The increase in online spending didn't offset the revenue lost from the drop in CD sales and from illegal downloading. Last year, about 1 million consumers stopped buying CDs, according to NPD. There are several ways for consumers to expand a digital music collection. They can buy music at online stores such as iTunes and Amazon.com's MP3 store. They also can convert their CD collection into a digital format. What concerns the music industry is illegal Internet file-sharing on websites where people pick up a digital song or album that others have uploaded. They can also do what is known as peer-to-peer file sharing, when people download music while temporarily opening up their computers to others to pick up music. The music industry says people who obtain music free online are breaking the law. Rachel Rottman, 14, says she hasn't bought a CD in a year. The Santa Monica High School freshman says she downloads five or six songs a day, using paid services such as iTunes and social networking site MySpace, where bands post songs for free download. Rachel said she had about 2,600 songs stored on her computer. Before getting a computer in the seventh grade, she always bought CDs. But now it's too much trouble, she said. "You have to go to the store and then you have to pay -- I don't know how much, $12, I'm guessing? -- then you have to put it on your computer," Rachel said. "When you download it, it's right there." Hunter Conrad, an eighth-grader at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says she downloads about 80% of her music from iTunes, "but when it's an artist I really like, I'll buy the original CD." Out of her group of friends, she's "one of the few" who still buy CDs, she said. Most of her buddies download for the convenience, to save money and to get only the songs they like. "Nobody really wants the other songs [on an album]," Hunter, 14, said. "They just want the hits." In the last year, consumers paid for 42% of the music they obtained, the report said. That was down from 48% in 2006 and more than 50% in 2005. "The trend is continuing but it will flatten because there are people who will always want the physical," said Ted Cohen, managing partner at TAG Strategic, a digital media advisory firm. Over the last year, the music industry has pushed back. Some companies now permit online music stores to sell songs without copyright protections in hopes of making it easier for consumers to move digital music to different computers and devices, and thus remove the temptation to download it illegally. Some music companies have thrown support behind Amazon's MP3 store, which competes with iTunes. The music industry has also sued fans to stop them from downloading and sharing music without paying for it. The legal efforts may have had an effect. The report said that the portion of survey respondents who shared music on sites that facilitate illegal downloads was 19% in 2007, the same as 2006. But those who do it are doing it more. Some said they got more than 3,000 songs a year this way. Two years ago, teenagers accounted for 15% of CD sales. In 2007, the figure was 10%. The digital music world has yet to completely capture the attentions of Isaac Kahn and his friend Charlie Williams, both 14. They buy music online but prefer to go to the Amoeba store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and thumb through the CDs. "I like to look at CDs and see if there's anything else I might want to buy," Isaac said. Charlie, who recently bought a device to transform his father's 300 records into digital files, said many teens download music illegally because they are on computers. But he doesn't have a computer. And besides, he said, "I'm a musician myself; I prefer to just buy it."

I doubt it. It was still owned by the guys who the Chipmunks were named after. Transamerica's acquisition is probably the changeover time. From the consumer's point of view, here in the US Transamerica's acquisition didn't change anything. You started the thread, so I guess you get to define what a major is! But as a shopper in record stores, I would call Liberty a major, just as I would call Capitol a major before its acquisition by EMI.

TD, I don't have a problem with your suggestion, but I wonder why I should be the first to do this. We have three illustrious jazz critics posting regularly here - Chris Albertson, Larry Kart and Allen Lowe. To my knowledge, none has ever mentioned that an album he was discussing was a promo copy or was paid for. garthsj used to be a jazz disc jockey, and he has mentioned that he used to receive a great many promos. As far as I know, he's never mentioned whether an album he liked was a promo or paid for either. I'll be happy to play by the same rules as everyone else. I am troubled by the suggestion that I would buffalo my friends here for the sake of getting free CDs.

Tommy Flanagan and Roy Haynes are two guys that every album I have that they are on is great!

Chris, I bet that you are spoiled in New York with the selection of radio stations you have there. Here in Raleigh there is not one radio station worth listening to. If any go out of business, they deserve to. For what it is worth, my experience has been this: I have too many trees nearby my home, so I cannot listen to Sirius at home, only in the car. In the car, I listen to stations which are not available on local radio: Canadian Football League, EWTN, the audio of CNN and Fox News Channel, old-time radio dramas and the one jazz channel called Pure Jazz. Before I got Sirius, I never listened to local radio in the car - only CDs and (sometimes) distant AM stations late at night. By the way, here we have two sports channels on the AM dial, one of which will undoubtedly carry the Super Bowl. Both turn their wattage down at sunset, and I can't pick them up after dark. The Super Bowl will have a 6:00 pm kickoff.

It's a much older tune of hers; I think it's originally on Dinner Music. Nate, I don't have that one. I do have a couple of hers from twenty years ago, and maybe it is on one of those. I'll have to see if I can dig them up. I was thinking that it is on a Kenny Wheeler album I have, but it's not. It's on the tip of my tongue!

Happy Birthday jmjk! Hope you got some good music today!