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To me, this story is not just the story of a ten year revenge plot, it's really the story of all conspiracies. You know we live in this world of conspiracy theories (I happen to live in Austin, the hometown of Alex Jones) but few actual conspiracies. But any student of history knows that the world often pivots on something a few people cooked up in secret. So to me, this book was a chance to tell that larger story. The fact that Thiel was willing to go on the record and explain his process was, in my view as an author, an unprecedented chance to lay out how power really works in a way that few have been able to before. It's ironic, Gawker's informal motto was that they showed "How Things Work"--the story behind the story. But in this case, they missed what was actually happening. So did everyone in the media. What I tried to do here was step back, take judgment out of the picture, and show what went down and why. I think the book captures that, but ultimately that will be for the readers to decide.
I remember reading a story in "Trust Me, I'm Lying; Confessions of a Media Manipulator" where the agent of an author wasn't getting any good marketing coverage for his client's new book, so the agent starting pulling the "angry consumer" shtick, calling/writing into different media outlets (bloggers, radio, etc..), pretending to be pissed off about the book. No one had heard of it, but eventually some of them started writing about how insulting & disgusting it was, just based on the agent's complaint.
It worked. No publicity is bad publicity.
edit: Since people are seeing this, you should read this book. The guy (former American Apparel advertising exec) did this tell-all book because he saw the media's standards dropping and his industry's tricks starting to be used in things like politics. It will destroy your confidence in ever believing anything you read on the internet, reddit definitely included. Good for honing your bullshit detector.
edit 2: I am not affiliated in any way with this book. You are not being manipulated ��
There's no question that that comment, made in a deposition in late 2013, turned out to be catastrophic to Gawker three years later when the case was put in front of a juror. The chapter that I tell that story in in the book is about why you need to both know yourself and your enemy (borrowing from the concept by Sun Tzu). Gawker both had no idea the enemy they'd made in Thiel, had no real understand of how committed Hogan would be and worse, they did not understand how they might come off in court. The result was that they did and said things that came back to haunt them when their fate rested in the hands of some ordinary people in Florida.
I started out with very strong opinions (I'd written about Gawker in my first book, Trust Me I'm Lying and also in my Observer column). I'd also been attacked by Gawker several times and the subject of some preposterously inaccurate stories. So I actually went into the book with a bit of a bias, but I found myself considerably softened talking to Nick, talking to A.J, reading what many of the writers wrote in their eulogies of the site. What I tried to do in the book ultimately was remove judgement as much as possible and just show what happened. I think that's a more important lesson.
Whether Gawker deserved what happened to it doesn't change what actually happened and to me that's where there is something to learn. How did Thiel do this? What were his motivations? How did no one suspect it as it was happening? Why was Gawker unable to fend him off? How did Gawker actually work as a company? What were its motivations for publishing the story? Why has the coverage since been so slanted in their favor since losing? Those were the questions I tried to answer.
As much as I wanna say this guy is a douchebag/idiot and karma will come back around... that’s not how the internet works. We’re all giving him free press right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285
Stan Lee was the first editor that credited the penciler, colorist, inker as well as the letterer and writer on the cover. He insisted on that. u/myqhunt gets a lot of his facts wrong.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-Untold-Sean-Howe/dp/0061992119
If anyone wants to delve into the crediting and creative side: http://comicsalliance.com/stan-lee-legacy-jack-kirby-steve-ditko-marvel-history/
Edit: looking at myqhunt other replies makes it worse. They're not only wrong on their facts, they are willfully and negligently wrong.
Hiring an experienced manager seems like the right move. Aside from that, anyone in the biz should read this:
All You Need to Know About the Music Business: 10th Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501122185/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_034Q77JFYTJ4NN3AMZ3H
You should read Trust me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It brilliantly digs into the media ecosystem and explains exactly why you are right.
Spoiler: media went through this in the early 1900s when newspapers were sold individually. Subscriptions to papers is what Bred modern journalism as a virtuous pursuit like we understand it.
not really, this is really more of a contract guidance thing for different types of deals, such as labels, publishers, merch, live shows etc. most people in the biz agree that it's incredibly important to understand all of these things. look at the chapter titles to see what's inside https://www.amazon.com/Need-Know-About-Music-Business/dp/1501122185/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0/136-9916319-3929358?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1501122185&pd_rd_r=09d51abe-1a60-4255-a3c0-c4380e1ebaed&pd_rd_w=QKuBP&pd_rd_wg=XzSZ1&pf_rd_p=5cfcf...
>I wonder whether online work changed things because there are few occasions for people to have conversations that socialize them into the ethical expectations of the profession.
Journalism didn't have ethical expectations a hundred years ago, because every story was sold on 'hot sheets', cheap 2-page papers sold by newsies. The most sensational headlines made the most money and there was zero accountability.
Then for 50+ years, journalists became dependent on monthly newspaper subscriptions and reputation and audience trust became paramount. Suddenly, ethics were necessary to do the job.
Now, news is all click-driven and we're back to zero accountability. Trust Me, I'm Lying is a great book about our current era of news and how it can be manipulated.
Here is a section from the book that addresses this in part.
>To the modern mind, this reticent gay identity seems like an anachronism, but when you do the math, you quickly realize how different the world was in 2007. The Democrat who would be elected president in less than a year’s time was still five years away from announcing his support for same-sex marriage. The woman who opposed him in the primary would take an additional year to come around. The year 2007 was also much closer to the burst of the dot-com bubble than it is to the present day. Facebook’s IPO was five years in the future and most of the astonishing success of this class of start-ups from Twitter to Netflix still lay ahead.
>While Thiel was not no one in late 2007 when the story broke, Peter Thiel was not then Peter Thiel. He was not the person he would be at the end of this story, the idiosyncratic lion of Silicon Valley venture capital or controversial political power broker. Thiel was more like all the other technology investors most people have never heard of. Do the names Max Levchin or Roelof Botha sound familiar to the average person? They were Thiel’s partners in PayPal. Or the name Jim Breyer? He put a million dollars in Facebook less than a year after Thiel put in his half million. What about Maurice Werdegar, who put in money with Thiel in that famous seed round? Few have even heard of these people, let alone cared whom they slept with. They are, as far as popular culture is concerned, as Thiel was then, barely notable. And he was, above all, a quiet, private person.
>When one considers Thiel’s burning ambitions against this backdrop, and the potential for this Valleywag story to be the first thing to broadly define him outside the Valley, one might better understand Thiel’s reaction to Owen Thomas’s small, unexceptional story and the flippant headline that went with it.
Peter Thiel conspired against Gawker Media. An actual conspiracy that almost no one knew about.
Nick Denton didn't even know Thiel was targeting him under months after he'd be destroyed financially.
Ryan Holiday wrote a book about it:
Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735217645/
You act like conspiracies can't be real...
The 1996 Telecommunications Act wasn't the beginning, not even close. Benjamin H. Bagdikian wrote a book in 1983 called The Media Monopoly, in which he warned that mergers and deregulation had caused 90% of US media to be controlled by 50 companies. Critics called him an alarmist. By 2011, 90% of US media was controlled by just 6 companies.
You are right. And it doesn't apply only to TV, but other media as well.
There's an excellent book about the subject: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/
“I am, to put it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the internet to do it.”
Stossel's a straight shooter. Until the madia mob dissolved the investigatory program with him and Diane Sawyer. Course, she was sleeping with the boss.
It's all written about in "Media Monopoly "1980's by Ben Bagdikian, of Pentagon papers rep. That predicted the Madia current mess.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Monopoly-Completely-Chapters/dp/0807061875
This is all incorrect.
You own the Copyright as soon as you write the song down or record it.
Uploading a track to a service like SoundCloud does nothing to protect your copyright as this is not admissible evidence in a U.S. Court. Same with the old school "mail yourself a copy" trick.
Registering a Copyright takes about 10 minutes at Copyright.gov.
Copyright registration has value to you because it is the ONLY way you can prove ownership if someone steals your song.
Most labels do not accept unsolicited materials specifically so they cannot be sued for copyright infringement. If someone at a label did steal a song a Cease and Desist letter sent to their Business Affairs Dept. with proof of your Copyright registration will shut them down pretty quickly.
If you'd like to learn more about protecting both your songs and your audio recordings (there are 2 Copyrights in music) you might read Don Passman's book.
Source: I own a label and a publishing company.
The craft books have been covered well, though I would also add The Art of Film Music by George Burt.
That being said, one of the most important books you can possibly read to prepare yourself is the most up to date version of Passman's All You Need To Know About The Music Business.
Film music is equally craft and business. If you're not prepared you will fail.
For anyone interested in the technical history of how we got here, The Idea Factory (Amazon Smile link) is a really fascinating read. It details the major players within Bell Labs (the research division, not business or development) from the 30s up until the 90s/today. While I'm sure the antitrust suit was beneficial for the average person, by the end of the book I was really rooting for Bell Labs to keep the guaranteed funding ensured by the monopoly.
The people who worked in this lab were responsible for the vacuum tube, transistor, solar panel, laser, satellites, cellular phones... the research for all of those breakthroughs was done in a single lab, funded by the monopoly. A huge part of why the modern world as we know it today exists is because of the monopoly that was dismantled in the 80s.
- u/portagenaybur covered this one well enough.
- If you don't own it, don't use it. That's the best way to CYA.
Ownership rights can be a bit crazy, so unless you know what you're doing or have written permission from the owner of the work, just stay away.
3) Not exactly, many times you are actually buying a license to use the clip, which they would retain the complete rights to. Unless the deal/contract specifically states that you own all of the rights, you still need to be careful.
I highly recommend everyone who is serious about making a living in the industry read this book.
It will help make these kinds of issues a lot more clear for you.
Edit: My formatting has gone wild, I apologize for the wonkiness.
Waaay better than Ari's book is "All You Need To Know About The Music Business" by Don Passman. Widely regarded as music industry bible
My friend wrote this book, he was American Apparel's Marketing Director and basically their entire PR while Dov was in charge. Some of the better chapters were on managing your reputation in today's world and against the Internet.
But to be honest it sounds like shitty work. Here's his last interview where he basically says his life was putting out all these fires he never started and it stressed him out to the point ruining himself.
There's an awesome book called Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday which talks about these sort of shenanigans people do to generate cheap publicity for themselves or whatever product or idea they're trying to perpetuate. One example is "trading up", where people will seed shit on small blogs in a clickbaity way that maybe gets linked to a small news site, then to Reddit, then to Buzzfeed/etc, then to the national news. It works really well apparently.
The book is fucking great; I haven't finished reading it yet myself but I highly recommend it to all redditors, especially if you're reading this here in /r/news. Most of the shit we see was probably influenced by someone doing the kinds of things Ryan writes about.
I agree with you. I know this subreddit (and myself included) have a preference for center-left politics, but it's starting to become a hate platform against every party except NDP. I wouldn't be suprised if the NDP actually pays someone to win over /r/canada, and OP's 3 days old account doesn't help.
Or maybe that's just my spidey sense being overstimulated. I read this book recently which talks about media manipulation and I've become very cautious of social platforms now.
Not trying to be a dick. I'm just an old, bitter man. You have a better attitude than me but touring is the ONLY way you make money. In the artistic sense of music, touring is whatever, but if you're trying to sign contracts and make money aka be a part of the music business you need to play live shows and bring people out. Record labels are businesses first and foremost. There is a difference between making art and selling art. If you want to join a collective of creatives that support each other, that's a different story.
I'd recommend this book to give you a better idea of what it takes to exist in the music industry space beyond releasing random projects. Selling music is an art in itself.
https://www.amazon.com/Need-Know-About-Music-Business/dp/1501122185
Ben Bagdikian called it back in the 80's and was either ignored or trashed in the mainstream media. Everything he predicted has come true, and worse.
As many times as you can and read Donald Passman’s book on Music Business. It is the best tool any artist, producer, music business person, or anyone involved in the music industry can ever have in his or her arsenal. It is like a Bible that will guide you through stuff like this. Trust me. And email and tell him that his student Jonah recommended him to you and that you need his help with such and such and please make sure to make your email extremely formal. I hope that helps.
How do you know a Republican is lying? Their mouth is moving.
I can't even remember the last time I heard a notable Conservative figure say something that was actually true or factually correct.
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator was published in 2013 and perfectly describes the GOP playbook for spreading misinformation.
Republicans have made lying so much their strategy that I don't know they even know how to tell the truth anymore.
So much for the 9th Commandment...
>"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" (Exodus 20:16)
Read this book:
All You Need to Know About the Music Business: Tenth Edition, by Donald S. Passman