Reply #70: That's the real, secret story behind the story here, Lydia. [View All]

[RandomKoolzip]

My wife hoped to work as a writer for TV and movies and went to the right schools in preparation for this career. All of a sudden, around 1999, overnight the networks decided to jettison most of their writers and instead go directly to reality TV (The huge hype-push behind "Survivor's" first season was a completely self-generated phenomenon; I remember being astounded at seeing "Survivor" updates on the goddamn six o' clock news)

The corporations decided that real, human writers churning out creative stories were not cost-effective, so they started pushing the reality shit.

The sam thing happened in music. I was born and raised into a family of musicainas and leanred how to play a variety of instruments at an early age in preparation for a career in music. All of sudden, right around the same time, the industry decide that musicians were not cost-effective and instead started using advanced software like ProTools to make the music they would promote.

Using real rock musicians in a rock band is not an effective way to recoup a record company's profits, since human musicians need rehearsal time, new equipment, possibly drugs and baby-sitting, studio time for retakes, teams of roadies and equipment guys working full time, a retinue of handlers, etc. This is why there's been such a massive push on the part of the record companies to promote hip hop and the other non-played musics: you can reasonably make a platinum-selling hip hop or dance-pop album for less than 20,000 bucks, while a rock album might cost six times that, and the investment might not be covered by the sales.

These developments have put an entire generation of musicians out of work. And the reality TV shows have done the same for the "creative" workers behind the scenes. I wish people would realize the human costs involved in such "good dumb fun."