IDIOT OF THE WEEK: GENE SIMMONS (AGAIN)

(Okay, so he’s at it again.  Gene Simmons may make some good points in his latest barrage against music fans, because yes the environment is nowhere near what it was 40 years ago when this fossil was making his records, but like any other time in history – shit changes man.  Yes, the advent of pay-streaming sites like Spotify make it hard for the small record shop to stay alive, but get over it.  Technology changes everything.  If people end up hating having access to all of the records they want without having to own them, then the market will dictate what happens next.  For now, people are loving it.  Yes, it sucks for my pals who own record shops, but big grocery stores killed the local butcher shops and markets way back when, and the world didn’t whine about that when it happened.  Folks like Gene Simmons are not stupid, and they make their money by gouging people at the concert hall, either with their $300 ticket prices or their $100 t-shirts and $5 bottles of water.  And Gene, the record companies are fucking idiots too – the comeback of vinyl sales is saving their asses, but instead of embracing the fan, they take advantage and raise the fucking prices.  Now, if you want a new release on vinyl, you pay almost $30 for it when the iTunes album is $9.99 and streaming services are cheaper than that.  So, when the economy is in the shitter, but you still want to listen to music, it’s very hard to justify buying that piece of vinyl – even when you fucking love the stuff as much as I do.  So, Gene, no, the record companies aren’t the fucking saviors here, they’re still the greedy fucks they’ve always been.  Except now, they’re also as fucking stupid as you are, because they will kill the last thing that is saving their industry.  Fans of music need to be economically sound with their purchases.  Not everyone can spend like an art collector.  Yes, file sharing sucks and something should be done about it, but file-streaming may be the way of the future.  Get used to it.  Better yet, just fuck off and quit – you haven’t made a good record in 20 years.  Here’s an article from ultimateclassicrock.com that spells out how Gene Simmons is (yet again) our Fucking Idiot of the Week. – FATS)

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In 1977, Nick Lowe recorded a song called, “I Love My Label,” an ironic dig at those who “never talk behind my back and they’re always playing my new tracks when I come along.” Gene Simmons, on the other hand, wasn’t being sarcastic when he praised them in a recent interview.
Speaking to Planet Rock in advance of their set at last week’s Download Festival, he said record companies “gave bands money that they never had to pay back — ever! If the band failed and the records were a complete disaster, the advance money was all theirs. What other business would give you that? If you go to a bank and they give you a million dollars, and your business goes under, they don’t care it failed; they want their money back.”
He continued by calling labels “a gift from heaven. Yeah, they’re greedy, they’re this… but they wanna make money just like you do. But they gave you money — millions! And if it wasn’t for record companies, there’d be no Sex Pistols, there’d be no punk, there’d be no nothing. There would be punk, but it would be in a small club. It would never become huge.”

So who does Simmons feel is responsible for the decline of the music industry? “I blame the fans. Because the fans have decided en masse — in other words, the masses have decided — that they should get free music, download, fileshare […] You’re killing the next Elvis [Presley] and the Beatles and the next Kiss and the next whoever, because you have to give your music away for free […] It’s disappointing, because they would prefer not to support a new band […] It affects the next great band, who won’t have a chance. Why? Because the talent isn’t out there? It sure is. The fans killed it. They killed the infrastructure.”
He said that Kiss are exempt from the current model because “we’ve been around a long time and we make a good living.”

GENE SIMMONS – THE FANS KILLED THE RECORD INDUSTRY