Booking Events
at Senior Living and Elder Care Facilities May 31, 2022
Like
most bandleaders, I lower my band's rates for senior living residences,
veterans homes, and facilities for rehabilitation, memory care, and
assisted living.
A few years ago, my drummer and I were asked to play for an Oktoberfest
party for the residents at an elder healthcare facility in Milwaukee.
While we played, however, I noticed that only a handful of residents
were ever around. All of the people milling about were younger and
dressed casual.
It turned out that we were not primarily playing for the residents — we
were playing for corporate executives and staff. It was their party,
although residents were invited. In essence, we were playing for a
corporate event, but were inadvertently bamboozled into charging our
discounted rate.
What triggered my memory of this situation is that we were recently
hired by a senior living facility to play for one of their bi-monthly
socials "for the residents." As I would normally do, I offered a
discounted rate. A couple weeks before the event, I discovered the
facility was advertising this event to the public. It turns out this
was not just another social for the residents — it was also a
promotional event for the facility.
I don't blame the facility for bamboozling us because they did not know
I was offering them a discounted rate, but by inadvertently
misrepresenting the nature of the event to me, they managed to book my
band for a price less than what I would have charged any other venue
for a public event.
The purpose of this article is to educate both elder living/healthcare
facilities and bandleaders about the importance of communicating the
true nature of an event.
Bands typically have three different rate tiers depending on the type
of event: discounted/charitable, public, and private/corporate. If a
band is playing for the residents and their families, they'll charge a
discounted rate. If they are playing for the general public, they'll
charge a public rate. If they are playing for the facility itself (such
as for a corporate staff holiday party) they'll charge a private rate.
If you are a senior living or elder care facility hiring a band for a
function, be specific about whom the event is for.
If you are a band hired to play "for the residents" of a senior living
or elder healthcare facility, make absolutely certain you are playing
for the residents before you offer your discounted rate. I will be
adding a clause to my contract mentioning the discounted rate, the
reasoning behind the discount, and asserting my right to void the
discount if the nature of the event was miscommunicated or
misrepresented during the hiring process.
New Single
Released! May 5, 2023
"New"
Photo of Kittling
April 8, 2023
Last week, I gathered all
my video clips of Kittling (1992-2009) and Snickers (2009-2021) and
compiled them into two seamless videos. It's something I had been
meaning to do for a long time because all the clips are fragmented
across 30 years of various video formats — VHS, AVI, MOV, and MP4.
Above is a still photo
taken from a VHS clip of Kittling when she was two years old.
Bad Drivers
Caught On (My) Camera April 2, 2023
The
internet is full of video recordings
of stupid drivers. I find those videos rather entertaining, so I
thought I'd put together my own, short video of three close calls that
I caught on my dash cam. Enjoy!
Europe's
Murderous Volksmusik Gangs April 1, 2023
Veronique
Schweigler, Switzerland's 2019 Cheese Princess, proudly brandishes her
Alpenthuggen gang affiliation
It started as a bar fight
between two musicians. Today, it's Central Europe's deadliest gang
rivalry.
In 2014, at a tavern in the quaint Austrian village of
Schädenheijer, a disagreement over the authenticity of the
region's folk music erupted between two musicians — a local button box
player from the valley, and an Alphorn player from the mountain
settlement of Wuenzerdorf. As the argument escalated and more tavern
patrons became involved, a rift developed between the valley locals
and
the moutain visitors. It is not
known who threw the first beer, but within seconds, the tavern became a
violent and bloody battleground between the two sides. This event is
known today as
the Schädenheijer
Brawl.
Over two dozen people were injured in the melee. One musician, clarinet
player Saška Zloblak, died after being struck in the head by a ceramic
beer stein.
Two days later, in the nearby mountain town of Kleßergnitt,
trumpet player Florijan Mlačnik, who was not involved in the
Schädenheijer
Brawl, was gunned down
inside his barn while milking his cow. A handwritten note assumed to
have been left by the
killer said Maščevanje za
Saška! — Revenge for Saška!
Word of the revenge murder spread quickly throughout the Alps,
echoing from
mountain to mountain and sparking increased violence between the two
growing factions. By the end of the year, ten more musicians, two
radio deejays, and a tavern owner had been slain.
Today, folk musicians and fans throughout south-central Europe are
divided
into two warring factions: the Alpenthuggen
and the Tirolerbluuds,
commonly referred to as the A-Ts and T-Bs. The A-Ts control the
mountainous high country, while the T-Bs control the riverways and
valleys.
Since the Schädenheijer
Brawl, more
than 130 members of both gangs have been killed by their rivals.
Statistically, some of the most remote, picturesque regions of
Switzerland, Austria,
and Slovenia are now the deadliest places to live on the
continent.
Schonnäu-Konigsleiter,
Austria — the murder capital of Europe
In an early attempt to
escape the violence, people from the valleys fled to the mountains
while people from mountains fled to the valleys. It didn't work as
they all crossed paths in the foothills and ended up fighting anyway.
"What's making things
extra complicated," said Slovenia's Director General of Police, Andrea
Valesko, "is that the T-B's gang sign is the same as waving hello. I
mean, who's the Einstein who came up with that? It's affecting our
tourism
industry. Imagine innocently waving to a passing goat herder while
visiting Switzerland and getting your head blown off. That actually
happened last year."
"Wait... maybe don't
print that last part," Valesko added.
The
gang rivalry has changed the way many people in south-central Europe
live. Gun and ammunition
sales in and around the Alps have increased 800% over the last five
years. As soon as children are old enough to churn butter, they are
sent to the local armory for weapons training. One out of every four
haystacks conceals
a machine gun nest. Residents have installed metal bars on the doors
and
windows of their chalets. Cows are not allowed to graze outside past
their 7pm curfew.
In the wake of the
increased gang rivalry, some residents have
diversified to meet the needs of their fellow gang affiliates. Franc
Horvat, 62, an accordion teacher from Odjušova,
Slovenia, became a certified firearms instructor. He offers his
students accordion lessons followed by semi-automatic weapons and
hand-to-hand combat training.
"We need to raise our
children on authentic folk music. Real
music. Not that dang blasted crap the A-Ts play," exclaimed Horvat
while flashing the Tirolerbluuds gang sign. "And we need to train these
kids to kill the A-Ts so we can finally live in peace."
Anja
(14) with her accordion/firearms instructor, Franc Horvat
Goodwill
Now Nation's #1 Polka Music Retailer
April 1, 2023
It wasn't that long ago
polka albums were flying off the shelves of retailers like Rod's Music
and T.K Frank's Polka Records. It was the heyday of polka album sales
when vendors competed for table space and online shops
updated their websites.
Many retailers have since
folded, but one has picked up where they left off: Goodwill. Ask any
polka enthusiast where they buy their music, and they'll all mention
Goodwill. It may sound prestigious to have a nationwide store handling
the bulk of
the country's polka album sales, however, it comes with a catch.
"When
I heard Goodwill was such a big retailer of polka music, I stopped in
with a box of my band's CDs and asked what they were paying,"
said Wisconsin musician Emil "Skip" Dallman of the Dallman Dutchmen.
"The kid
behind the counter just looked at me
funny and handed me a donation slip."
$0.00.
That's the current wholesale album price Goodwill is paying to polka
bands.
"The
distribution has been excellent, though," added Dallman. "We were able
to get our albums in every Goodwill store between Cedarburg and
Kenosha,
and it only cost us about seventy bucks in gas."
Julie Andrews
Burns to Death; Mollie B in Custody April 1, 2023
The Brentwood,
California residence of Dame Julie Andrews engulfed in
flames
The world's most renown
musical songstress, Julie Andrews, 87, was tragically killed yesterday
after allegedly being set on fire by polka star Mollie Busta,
known professionally as "Mollie B". Surveillance video obtained
by police shows Busta entering Andrews' residence in Brentwood, CA on
the
evening of March 31. She confronted Andrews, doused her with
gasoline, threw a lit match on
her, and fled the residence.
Busta was identified in
the video by a polka fan working in the Brentwood police department.
She was spotted and
arrested in Santa Monica later that evening. Busta is being held
without
bail at the Los Angeles Celebrity Detention Spa & Resort pending
charges.
"At this time, we are
trying to come up with the appropriate charges, but new information
discovered during our investigation is making this rather difficult,"
said Los Angeles County Sheriff, Timothy Guerrero.
The new information is a
text message on a mobile phone which Busta voluntarily gave to
authorities. The text is part of a conversation with musician Tom
Brusky of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the conversation, Busta
and Brusky appear to be discussing the vocal style in which Busta
should sing one of Brusky's music productions. Guerrero is
particularly focused on what is believed to be an auto-corrected typo:
"In this particular
instance," explained Guerrero, "it's highly unlikely we will
pursue homicide charges. Or arson charges for that matter. It's kind of
obvious
Tom Brusky's instruction to Mollie was to emulate Julie Andrews, not
immolate her. It's just a very sad, tragic misunderstanding caused by a
phone app."
We reached out to Los
Angeles District Attorney Christine Walker to ask whether or not she
intends to go easy on Mollie's charges based on the auto-corrected
typo. Walker replied
via text:
—
Yes, these
kinds of thongs harpoon all the time. We'll mosh likely be charring Ms.
Buster with 3rd Decree Négligée Engenderment for failure
to recognize the auto-corrected typo. That's a Class E misdemeanor
perishable by up to a maxivan fine of $150 and 40 hours of
commune tea servants. —
Although the death of
Julie Andrews exemplifies the potential danger of auto-corrected
texting, the
most horrific auto-corrected typo on record occured shortly before
Christmas in 2015, when the children at Sunnyview Day Care in
Pocatello, Idaho were taken to the local community center to
have their pictures taken with Satan.
Aiden Laravee, 4, thought he was going to the Pocatello Community
Center to see Santa.
Artificial Intelligence and Music March 31, 2022
AI has
infiltrated the music industry, but it is not welcome in my studio
My
last article was motivated by all the buzz regarding the uncharted
waters of copyrighting artificially-created material. Artificial
intelligence, commonly abbreviated AI, is a very hot topic in music
forums lately.
Chances
are you don't know how much AI has infiltrated your life over just the
past two years. More and more of the content you're seeing and hearing
every day — music, art, films, photos, advertising, articles — is being
artificially created.
The
benefits to AI creation are speed and cost. They days of laboring over
writing music and lyrics, commissioning artists and photographers, and
hiring journalists to create fillers for newspapers are numbered. More
and more people in these industries are embracing AI to speed up their
workflow and cut labor expenses.
AI
has already infested the music industry to the point that none of us
can be certain if the music we're hearing behind a TV commercial was
created entirely by a human, created by a human with the aid of AI
software, or
created entirely by AI software. AI-generated pop songs have already
been playing on the radio for several years. Library music tracks – the
generic, cookie-cutter instrumentals you often hear behind videos – are
being churned out by AI-assisted producers.
None
of this really affects me because music is both an art and an industry,
and I am an artist. Just like robots replaced assembly line
workers in the auto industry, over the next ten years, AI will replace
many of the musicians who currently make a living producing music for
clients, such TV/radio producers and video game developers. I'm not
involved in that section of the industry. In the
coming years, those clients will begin employing AI software to
generate the music they need because AI doesn't ask for contracts,
licensing fees, or royalties. It will put a lot of industry musicians
out of work, but AI will never prevent artists from creating.
The
one thing that bothers me about AI is that it's being used as a crutch
by creatively-challenged musicians to "create" new songs. The world has
always been filled with musicians, and music production was
traditionally a rather expensive endeavor reserved for only those who
took it seriously. Over the past twenty years, however, the drop in the
cost of computer technology paved the way for all the world's
fame-starved teenagers to create laptop-based music production studios
in their bedrooms. With no musical training whatsoever, these bedroom
producers can download and splice together pre-fabricated beats and
call themselves music producers. AI is advancing this phenomena by
creating not just music for them, but lyrics as well.
Music
AI, just like pre-fabbed beats and loops, will never be welcome in my
studio because I take pride in calling myself a songwriter. I work the
old-school way — I compose music with a piano and write lyrics with a
pen and paper, aided by nothing more than a thesaurus. I use the latest
virtual instrument synth and sample technology as tools to produce
music, but you can rest assured my original songs and arrangements are,
and will always be, products of the neurons firing in my frontal
cortex... the way music's been created since the beginning of time.
A Common
Misunderstanding About Copyrights March 30, 2022
One
of my favorite pastimes is watching Live
on Patrol, a YouTube channel run by the Ramsey County
Sheriff's Office in St. Paul, Minnesota. They livestream themselves on
patrol several times a week. I believe they are the only law
enforcement department currently livestreaming, but for the past five
years, a police officer from a small Midwestern city also livestreamed
his patrols. One of his hallmarks was singing, albeit terribly, while
patrolling. He'd crank up his iPod over his car's stereo system and
croon away as if no one were listening.
Everyone
got a kick out of his vocally-challenged livestreams, except he kept on
running into problems with Facebook shutting his streams down for
violating song copyrights. After a while, he got smart and contacted
the bands whose music he wanted to play. He'd get their permission to
play their music, and use that permission to successfully appeal
Facebook's actions and get his deleted videos reinstated.
But
there was something he did that annoyed me much more than his singing:
When he ranted about Facebook pulling down his videos, he would tell
his audience that it was okay for them to play copyrighted music over
the internet as long as they weren't making money from it.
This
is a very common misconception about copyrights. A copyright violation
is not determined by whether or not money changes hands. A copyright is
purely about distribution. It's literally the right to make a copy of something. When you
distribute someone else's copyrighted material without their
permission, even if you're not making any money from the distribution,
you're still potentially harming the copyright holder.
Here's
a simplified analogy to explain this harm:
Let's
say you're a photographer and you've just set up a kiosk to sell copies
of your photographs. Then someone else sets up a kiosk right next to
yours, fills it with unauthorized photocopies of your photographs, and
instead
of charging for them, gives them away for free. So now you're going to
lose an entire day's worth of kiosk sales because the person next to
you is giving away all your photos for free.
Even
though they're not making any money, should they be allowed to tank
your sales like that? Of course not. And that's why copyrights exist.
Song
copyrights work the same way as the photo copyrights above. When you
play someone else's copyrighted song on your podcast or social media
page without permission or licensing, you are assuming control over the
distribution of that song. Instead of fans getting the song through
authorized channels which pay the artist/publisher royalties, they can
now get the song from you for free and the artist/publisher gets
nothing. That doesn't seem right, does it?
Another
common and often related misconception about copyrights is that any
non-profitable
distribution of copyrighted material, like the kind mentioned above, is
protected under the Fair Use doctrine. In a nut
shell, the Fair Use doctrine upholds the distribution of copyrighted
material, but only under a few specific conditions. For example, if a
news network does a news segment about a song, Fair Use upholds
their right to broadcast a snippet of that song in their segment. If a
music university professor discusses a particular song during a
lecture, Fair Use upholds his right to play portions of that song for
his students. If a parodist pokes fun at a song by creating a lyrically
funny version of it, Fair Use may uphold his right to share that
version.
Generally
speaking, as long as the distributor's commentary or criticism is
focused specifically on the song itself (e.g. dissection of the chord
structure, discussion of the song's history) and it's very clear they are not using the
song for any other purpose or agenda (e.g. background music for a
personal video, promotion of themselves or other products) their
distribution is
more likely to be upheld by Fair Use. But Fair Use is not a guaranteed
shield of protection against a lawsuit. It's merely a legal defense
that may be used in the event of a lawsuit.
Questions
like these come up every now and then in the internet forums to which I
belong. I find these business-oriented topics to be much more
fascinating than the usual, "What's the best reverb plugin?" [a
question typically followed by 200 responses... all of them different.]
I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but as a recording
musician, I have to educate myself about these topics. Hopefully the
knowledge I learn can help you in some way.
At
some point later this year, I will revisit the copyright topic, but the
focus will be on DMCA takedowns and online platforms utilizing Content
ID and automated copyright strikes.