S01E58: A Gratuitous Display of Violence Against the Microphone
Tarot: https://tarotx.net/tarot-card-meanings/marseilles/as-depee.html
Freaks of Hazard: Consider a financial contribution to the show!
S.E. w/ $10.00 “Most excellent Witchy episode”
C.B. w/ $26.66
Sir Candinavian w/ $50.00
Fletcher w/ $5.55
Tjunta w/ $10.00
Coldacid w/ Show Art Above
Julian Assange
Matt Lee - https://twitter.com/APDiploWriter?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Spat with Net Price https://nypost.com/2021/07/08/ap-reporter-spars-with-state-department-over-afghanistan/
West Exec -
https://www.westexec.com/
Michele - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mich%C3%A8le_Flournoy
Sergio https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergio-aguirre-ba5862132
Nitin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitinkchadda
AP maverick and State Department Press Corp MVP Matt Lee pressed Net Price of the State Department if they are still spending time and resources on trying to extradite Assange from the UK, get him into the US, so they can punish him for exposing American war crimes, among other things.
Lee asks why US Foreign policy is so hellbent on supporting free speech and labelling censorship as oppressive in other countries, but at home commit to a policy which would destroy Assange for being a journalist participating in those very free speech ideals.
Assange Clip 1
Matt and Ned go back and forth. Ned deflects.
US State Department wishes to put up a strong image of promoting free speech.
Assange Clip 2
Nobody is allowed to have a determinative opinion, just doing my job sorry.
Assange Clip 3
Assange’s publishings helped lead to the Arab Spring. The UAE United Arab Emirates funded and staged many of those coups, social and military actions. To manage their image, and make sure we still fly on their airline and buy their oil, they and their affiliates got to work with American firm West Exec.
Co-Founded by Tony Blinken, current Secretary of State and former deputy head under Obama.
Michèle Flournoy, co-founder, Hollywood princess, Clinton rat.
Sergio Aguirre - Former VP of International Affairs at The Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)
Nitin Chadda - Senior Middle East Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, even though he can’t be older than 40
A bunch of others. Go down the rabbit hole.
COVID-19 Concert Cancellation Tracker: Gauging How Long The Event Shutdown Will Last
The Mechanics of Touring: How the Live Music Industry Works
AEG Concerts Will Require Proof of Vaccination
“At the end of the day, we will be on the right side of history,” says Jay Marciano, CEO of AEG Presents
Manages Coachella, Firefly Music Fest, Day N Vegas, and New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, New York’s Webster Hall and Brooklyn Steel, and Los Angeles’ Roxy and El Rey Theatre.
“Open ended” evolving with “science”.
Jay Marciano, COO of AEG and Chairman and CEO, AEG Presents, said “Just a few weeks ago, we were optimistic about where our business, and country, were heading,” he said. “The Delta variant, combined with vaccine hesitancy, is pushing us in the wrong direction again. We realize that some people might look at this as a dramatic step, but it’s the right one. We also are aware that there might be some initial pushback, but I’m confident and hopeful that, at the end of the day, we will be on the right side of history and doing what’s best for artists, fans, and live event workers.” He added that the hope is that the “pro-active stance encourages people to do the right thing and get vaccinated.”
Shawn Trell, COO and General Counsel for AEG Presents, added that some states’ regulations may override AEG’s mandate — and some artists may not agree with it, potentially causing them to pull out of tour dates. “But we know that using our platform to take a strong position on vaccinations can make an impact,” he said. The message we want to send is simple and clear: the only way to be as safe as possible is to require everyone to be vaccinated. And we’re confident that others who haven’t been ready to make this full commitment yet will follow our lead.”
https://www.livenation.com/venue-sitemap
https://www.livenation.com/artist-sitemap
Oct. 4th comes mando cones of ice cream that patrons must show up with to attend a concert under the banner of Live Nation. Patrons can also show their d.n.a is clean with a negative.
A mandate where permitted by law.
“Vaccines are going to be your ticket back to shows, and as of October 4th we will be following the model we developed for Lollapalooza and requiring this for artists, fans and employees at Live Nation venues and festivals everywhere possible in the US,” Live Nation president and CEO Michael Rapino said in a statement Friday.
Includes all the crew, band, talent, vendors I’d assume? Patrons naturally.
Live Nation will require vaccines or negative Covid tests from artists, customers
Employees will have to be vaccinated and will not get a pass with a negative test result, Live Nation said.
"Beyond October 4th, all of our employees will also need to be vaccinated in order to visit one of our events, venues, or offices," the company said.
Live Nation last week reported "second-quarter earnings that saw revenue climb to $575.9 million, up 677 percent from the same period last year when large gatherings were limited due to the rampant spread of coronavirus," CNBC reported.
Was Lollapalooza Worth the Covid Risk?
Lollapalooza, which drew an estimated 385,000 people total to Chicago’s Grant Park from July 29th through August 1st, can be seen as a test case for the industry. Every fan who entered the festival grounds was required to show either proof of vaccination or a negative test from the past 72 hours, and organizers have said that about 90 percent of attendees were vaccinated.
On August 12th, Dr. Allison Arwady, Chicago’s Public Health Commissioner, announced that a total of 203 cases of Covid tied to Lollapalooza have been identified — a rate of about 4 known cases per 10,000 vaccinated attendees, and 16 known cases per 10,000 unvaccinated attendees — and reported no known Covid hospitalizations or deaths connected to the festival.
“I honestly can’t think of a worse outdoor environment when it comes to spreading Covid than something like Lollapalooza,” says Dr. Mercedes Carnethon, Vice Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University. “It’s a large number of mostly-maskless people packed into a fairly compact space over four days. They’re singing, drinking, and talking loudly to each over the music. All of that propels respiratory droplets and spreads the disease.”
Many attendees have reported seeing scalpers outside the park brazenly selling fake vaccine cards. “I paid $60 to a scalper to walk me in with a wristband,” says David, a fan who tested positive for Covid days after the festival ended. “When we got near, he was like, ‘Hey, man, if you don’t have one… ‘ And he pulled out of his pocket about 10 falsified vaccination cards. He was offering that as an additional service to get inside.”
“They didn’t look at my card at all,” he says. “I could have showed them a Pokemon card.”
“One thing that seems to distinguish Delta from earlier variants is that the viral loads are higher, and they’re higher earlier on in the course of illness,” she says. “Someone might test negative before leaving home and then contract the illness at any point during their journey to the festival. And by the time they show up, whether or not they had notable symptoms, they could be generating pretty high levels of virus that could infect other people who are singing and drinking next to them.”
“It’s prolonging the pandemic to bring people together from around the country at events of this scale and scope,” she says. “That said, I don’t fault the organizers. At the time the plans were made, the situation looked very different. By the time the festival came around, it was too late to cancel.”
“Obviously I didn’t have to go, but all my friends wanted to go. I felt that peer pressure not to cancel. In hindsight, that was irresponsible of me. And this has definitely been a wake-up call for me. I’m going to have my guard up more now. People need to realize that getting vaccinated doesn’t make you invincible. It just doesn’t.”
LIVE NATION COMPANIES NOW MANAGE OVER 500 ARTISTS WORLDWIDE
LN manages well over 500 artists at this point.
LN is like an umbrella chain Walmart touring company: In the US, these include Roc Nation Management, 24 Artist Management, Blueprint Artist Management, Spalding Entertainment, LMG Management, Mick Artists Management, Three Six Zero Group, Vector Management, Career Artist Management and Philymack Management
Live Nation’s total revenues in 2016 stood at a record $8.35bn, up 17% at constant currency – with an overall operating income of $194.9m.
Op-Ed: Everyone’s worst fears about the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger have come true
In 2009, The Government Man approved of the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
In 2008, the two companies held more than 80% of the market share.
LN cover nearly all aspects, from production to management, to merch, to venues, to promotion.
Service fees, processing fees, facility fees, promoting fees: Americans know all about these add-ons, hidden until just before they click to buy those Taylor Swift tickets. Live Nation refers to these charges as an “extension of the ticket price,” an Orwellian construct if there ever were one.
In 2009, when tickets went on sale for a series of Bruce Springsteen concerts, the company displayed a “No Tickets Found” message on its website, steering customers to its affiliate in the secondary market, TicketsNow, where tickets were offered at much higher prices.
The company has sway over nearly every facet of the live-event business: recording, record sales, licensing, talent management, venue ownership, ticketing services and even concessions.
Where Does Live Nation Have Room To Grow?
Shares of Live Nation hit an all-time high Friday after the company revealed that its overall revenue for 2018 was up 11%, reaching a record $10.8 billion. Concert attendance increased by 8%, to 93 million. Executives told investors to expect similar growth in 2019.
One of the only blemishes in the concert promoter’s ledger for 2018 is the $15 million cost of mitigating a data breach that affected 40,000 British and international customers.
On the bright side, the company reported that mobile ticket sales were up 35% from 2017, driven in part by a 40% increase in installations of the Live Nation and Ticketmaster mobile apps.
The online marketplace converges with live events on Ticketmaster Presence, a platform for venue access control and fan engagement that debuted in 2017. Presence is designed to help venues prevent ticket fraud and analyze audience data, and also allows them to share event information in direct messages to ticket holders.
Live Nation deployed Presence at over 200 venues by the end of 2018, including every NFL stadium. It expects to bring the platform to 500 venues by the end of this year.
Vaccination It’s just like Napster.
This article is a doozy, growing the nads to compare the ice cream cone as the canary in the coal mine. Concert are the one most irresistible things people love to fawn over.
…So Napster was facilitated by two things, high speed connections and the small size of music files. It was only the young and savvy who had high speed connections, at their colleges, broadband wasn’t even available in most homes. And MP3s were only a megabyte a minute. So…you could download them quickly. And there was a technological breakthrough, Napster itself, using a new technology, peer to peer, i.e. P2P, and the Luddites, the institutions, the elders, at first ignored it, then questioned why anyone would need it and then tried to shut it down, unsuccessfully.
It continues on stating how the future is impossible to stop. That you should be in front of the public providing them with services like Spotify. Also, it states that Spotify was the “legal” answer of chossing “P2P” (i.e. instant downloadable access) over a service like iTunes, where you pay per piece.
Jesus, this writing style: Of course even at this late date you’ve got anti-Spotify people, although almost all of them are baby boomers, behind the times. They’re laden with disinformation, believing you have to have signal to hear your music, which is patently untrue, you can sync thousands of songs to your device. Or they talk about the songs that are unavailable. And that is true, there are some cracks in the firmament. Then again, investigate the building you’re now occupying, if you can’t find imperfections, you’re blind. Nothing is perfect. It’s all about good enough. Which gets better. And then kills the old paradigm. That’s straight out of Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” not that you’d expect a Luddite to read it.
To continue that thought: So right now people want to go to shows. They were gone during lockdown and are back up today. But there’s this issue of Covid-19 transmission. And the truth is you can’t have unvaxxed, unmasked shows, it’s a recipe for disaster. So what you’ve got is two sets of people, the advanced and the behind, and like I said above, you always want to bet on the advanced, the future.
Somehow those vaxxed and in the know are literally sucking information 24/7 (not a joke!) and they are not afraid of the coming changes. The vaxxed in this scenario and those with Limewire and alternatively the unvaxxed we’re the ones too afraid to download a buggy virus ridden file. “Never mind the Luddites not having broadband connections and not knowing how to use any software other than AOL. Download a new program to their computer, figure out how to use it with no instructions? Kids were used to this from video games, oldsters were still afraid of their devices, never mind not knowing how they worked or how to fix them.”
“The future and the past only coexist for a very brief window. P2P killed CDs and Spotify killed the iTunes Store. So the concert business opened and everybody could get in and then for a few shows you needed either a vax card or a negative test and now you need a vax card or a negative test at most shows and soon only a vax card will suffice.”
The bombastic nature of which they speak, oh man: “You didn’t need to download Napster. You didn’t need to buy an iPod. But ultimately there was a mania, everybody wanted to be involved. Never underestimate the desire of the public to be hip, to be included. So, once we make each and every concert/show vax only, people will start getting vaccinated.”
All industries will follow the music industry. Pied Piper much?
“Music is the carrot. People employ their own sticks. It’s not about being nice to the unvaxxed, figuring out how to talk to them, rather you ignore them completely, like the students using Napster at the turn of the century. They didn’t have time to waste on those who didn’t get it.
The future’s so bright you’ve got to wear shades, assuming you’re talking about the future and ignoring the past.
https://crooksandliars.com/2021/08/rocker-sebastian-bach-thank-god-vaccines
If piece of equipment requires more than one person to lift, each person shall wear a mask and remain distanced to the best of their ability when lifting the load together.
All tools, equipment, touch points on heavy equipment and touch points on high touch equipment such as motor control pickles and power distributions shall be disinfected before and after use.
Disinfection protocols from the manufacturers must be followed for light boards, sound boards and call desk. When not in use, these items should be covered.
Each crew member is assigned their own tools, equipment and defined workspace as much as possible. Sharing of items is minimized or eliminated. Staff may be required to bring/use their own tools and equipment as opposed to common equipment, to limit touching common items.
After tools are disinfected, they should be returned to the work box, which shall be closed between performances and overnight.
All shared equipment, microphones and tools must be disinfected and securely stored after each use.
Disposable gloves, and masks shall be provided for stagehands that arrive without them for load in, show calls, and load out.
Protective barriers such as plexiglass or curtains may be installed around the audio mixer and light board operator if safe physical distancing protocols are not feasible. The mixer and operator should wear face masks during a performance
Take Me There (instrumental) by Silence Is Sexy