It's going to be really interesting to see if Mark Stevens Robert X. Cringely is right about this.

I read something today that tells an awful lot about the record industry, and it's not a pretty picture.

In case you haven't read about this elsewhere, be sure to file your claim if you purchased a CD, tape, or record at retail between the dates of Jan. 1, 1995 and Dec. 22, 2000.

I read on Slashdot this morning that Phish is selling soundboard recordings of its live concerts online, in unrestricted format.

I've been poking around at songfacts.com. For music junkies like me who want to know absolutely everything about their favorite songs, this site's a fix. They've got something to say about the majority of the songs U2 and Peter Gabriel ever recorded. It was interesting to find out what Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood" was really about.

Aw, poow widdle awe-aye-ay-ay! Poow widdle bay-bee!

Busy day, accomplishing nothing. I spent a good deal of time fighting an iMac DV. A Umax Astra 3450 scanner we have works fine on PCs, but hook it up to the iMac and it acts like it has mechanical problems. So it goes. Download the newest drivers and all the Apple updates, still nothing. Time to call Umax on Monday I guess.

A productive weekend. I'm writing this well in advance because I fully expect to have no time available the next couple of days. So I'll talk about my weekend.

Dave's not here. Well, sort of. Dave here. For a minute. Di's taking the weekend off. I sent her a bunch of material that she'll work in next week. I just spent a lovely day cleaning my apartment, reading a few chapters out of the book of Matthew, and catching up with friends. My ex-bandmate Will Matherly (if we ever were a band, I don't know) called early this evening looking for lyrics. I gave him some of my old lyrics (a pop/punk number reminiscent of The Cars and a dreary, gothy tune that was trying to sound like Joy Division or The Cure but ended up sounding nothing like either), then I started rattling off some lyrics I've been carrying around for two years but never finished properly. I told him I'd fix some dinner, finish them as I ate, then call him back in a couple of hours. The result was a hard-driving punky number called "Not Much Like You" using a really uncreative straight-A rhyme scheme (the exception being a brief "But Wait!" interjection). For some reason, my specialty seems to be breakup songs.

Courtney Love is right... I'm the last to bring this up, but last month Love said what every other musician is thinking. Every other sane one at least. Wanna know why Aimee Mann started her own label? Well, let's see. She releases a record, on a major, the world yawns. It happened four times straight, from 1986 to 1996. The labels aren't willing to play the payola game for her. She releases a record on her own label, and look at that... She's #33 on Amazon.com. And for the first time since she first picked up a bass guitar 20 years ago and started a band, she's making money making music.