I feel like a fucking idiot.
You see I was supposed to meet Tony in the lobby at eight. To go out with a bunch of people for pizza. Now I've been going to the shrink for YEARS to learn how to be late. You see nobody in L.A. gets ANYWHERE on time. So, I saunter down around 8:03 and find...no one.
But it's worse. I DON'T HAVE A U.K. CELL PHONE!
I'm a Verizon customer. I switched two years ago. God, I can now finally USE my cell phone. I don't constantly lose the signal.
But Verizon employs CDMA, a technology that rules in the U.S., but is essentially nonexistent elsewhere. Just about everybody else uses GSM. Oh, don't gloat you Cingular users, it's a DIFFERENT PART of the spectrum from YOUR GSM phone. Then again, if you've got a quad band Cingular or T-Mobile phone, you can talk over here, using your same number. But the calls are over a dollar a minute. Not enough of a deal to get me to switch for my limited foreign travel schedule. Oh yes, I can get a Verizon phone with GSM capability, but it costs nearly $500, so fuck that.
My nutritionist was going to lend me HER GSM phone. That she bought when she went to Australia, to talk to her fiancee. But someone else she promised it to first turned out to be leaving before I got back, so no go. She told me she paid $70 for the phone, but all I needed was a card.
I thought I could live without it. God, I'm living in the nineties. The U.K. is the cell future. People depend on them, they supersede landlines. And everybody's e-mailing me their mobile number (they call them "mobiles" here, say "cell phone" and they look at you funny), and I've got no way of contacting them. But, wandering around the lobby I run into this guy Martin Heath. A true renegade. I'm paying half attention as we speak in the bar, looking for Tony and Yvette over my shoulder. And then, feeling I'm being rude, I confess. Turns out HE'S going to the pizza dinner too, but it's been shifted to TEN! And I'm completely out of the loop. If only I could call TONY!
Martin said I should just go get a free phone.
A FREE PHONE??
Yup, the phones are FREE! You just pay for the time.
Turns out the phones come with a SIM card, that represents your number. And, you buy a phone card with time. You can constantly replenish it. And, if you buy a new phone, because you want to, because technology keeps changing, you just take your SIM card/number WITH YOU!
Unfortunately, we're in England, not California, and the mobile stores are not open on Sunday, but...
Meanwhile, things heated up after my last missive. Tony was interviewing Tommy Silverman. Who spewed a lot of indie shit, GOOD shit, but then talked about how we needed to educate the consumer, and charge MORE for music. HUH?
Then it was upstairs to hear Tony interview Ted Cohen. Oh, Ted waxed rhapsodic about his days at Warners and Philips, showed off his Nokia video phone and ROKR, and then the floor was opened to questions. Whereupon Scott from the Orchard asked Ted when EMI was going to license P2P. Oh, they struggled over the meaning of P2P for a minute or two, finally Scott emphasized he meant REAL P2P, and then Ted said it could never happen because of the PUBLISHING! You had to pay the eight plus cents per track.
Whereupon I blew a gasket. You see Martin Bandier, head of EMI PUBLISHING, is the dude who won't go to a percentage rate, allowing licensed P2P to work.
And then all hell broke loose. I was going at Ted, Ted was going at me and then Tommy Silverman jumped up to argue with my premise, that the future was more music for more people at a cheaper aliquot price per track.
And then Steve Gottlieb couldn't hold back. His panel was next, but he had to jump in.
And then, without missing a beat, like a network afraid to air a commercial between sitcoms, Steve took the dais and started in.
Turns out Steve's on my team. He thinks what killed the business was the refusal to license Napster, the ORIGINAL Napster. But he's got this wrongheaded notion that the solution is to put speed bumps in the way of BURNING!
But you should have heard him lambaste Steve Jobs and Apple. Saying he refused to make a deal. That it was a bad economic model. Which is what I HAD said. But what makes this FASCINATING is that iTunes is the SPONSOR OF THE CONFERENCE! I don't think Denzyl Feigelson, the Apple liaison, was taking it too well. He even disappeared for a minute there.
The hijinks continue tomorrow. With the same players. Only this time I get to take the stage.
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