• by John Gaffney , January 21, 2003

I Wanna Be Sedated: Big day for anti-piracy action yesterday, none of it logical. RIAA president Hilary Rosen proposed that ISPs should be responsible for music sharing sites and should be charged a fee for allowing users to get to them. Brilliant. Non-enforceable. And Microsoft announced that it has developed anti-piracy software. Great. Should boost its stock price a buck or two. When is the record industry going to understand that its piracy problem is as much about its product and the marketing of that product as it is about technology? It was my understanding that advancing your product and creating excitement around it (marketing) is an offensive game. If I’m having sales and marketing problems, I was always taught to look at it as an internal problem. If most any record company looks deep, it will find that its major acts tend to sound the same. It will also find that its sales and marketing have become stale. Yes, videos have come a long way toward building awareness. But outside of Sony’s efforts for the recent Springsteen and James Taylor records, I dare anybody to show me a brilliant marketing effort from a major record label. I have one word for the powers that be in the record business: advertise. Build images. Build new guitar heroes. New princesses. Hey, while you’re at it, throw a new talent like John Mayer up the pop charts. Might work a whole lot better than playing whack-a-mole with your best promotional effort so far, which is file sharing.

The Age Of Aquarius: I’ve heard a lot of talk about the 80s comeback in culture and advertising. You know, the Hulkster, disco, Alf. I say pop culture is headed for the 60s. We have a peace movement. We’re still recovering from a cataclysmic event. We don’t trust anybody with money. We don’t trust the government. We don’t trust big corporations. Wake up the flower children and rev up the old Beetle. Time to groove.

Bad Pun Of The Week Vol II: This week's Super Bowl is Chuckie (TB coach Jon Gruden) meets the Jerryatrics (Oakland receiver Jerry Rice.). Courtesy of Derek Leedy of Mediasmith.