Who do you trust? Greedy rock stars & a nosy government

It’s kind of a difficult toss-up but I’d have to give the edge to the U.S. government for being more nervy than your run of the mill arena rock star.

Anyone who hates civil rights will be thrilled to learn that the U.S. attorney general (the same soulful dude who said that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to America) has now decided that in the name of tracking pedophiles, we should all give up the right to Net privacy: Gonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law. Nice overkill, eh? As sickening as pedophilia is, don’t you think Alberto could have found a better way to try to track people than to open the gateways to investigate EVERYONE or ANYONE online? Maybe this is just an excuse to satisfy his lust to observe all of our online activities. Guess he knows a lot more about deviance than he lets on.

And then there’s the ever lovable arena rock stars who are now taking a page from the record companies in finding new ways to blame consumers for their problems. Seems that their latest yowler is that consumers and not they themselves are the ones to blame for high ticket prices: Winners take all in rockonomics. The ‘logic’ here is that if all those mean, bad, evil illegal downloaders weren’t stealing money out of their pockets, they wouldn’t have to charge so much for tickets. A couple of problems with that argument:

– Most acts make their money on the road and not through record sales

– How exactly do they calculate ticket prices based on assumed lost income from album sales?

– Wasn’t the last argument made for high ticket sales “that’s what the market will bear” or “well, (ARTIST X) does it so why shouldn’t I?”

– Are we to assume that if the illegal downloaders were all foiled and jailed, then ticket prices would be reduced?

– What about the people that don’t download songs illegally? Should they get discount seating to concerts now?

And so on… See how ridiculous this is? Now all I’m wondering is what else can these over-pampered stars blame their fans for. Maybe they can write all of us off as dependents on their taxes. Maybe they could just do a huge class action suit against everyone who didn’t buy their albums. How about also blaming us when they put out a terrible record and it bombs? The possibilities are endless. Someone call their agents!