Pool payola
Oh, this is fitting. Schmuck by the pool trying to impress a gal and ends up costing his company million$.
A Sony Music promo exec unknowingly sparked Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s major payola investigation when he started hitting on a woman at a poolside bar at a Miami hotel last year. The exec bragged about some of the excesses in his line of business, according to chatter in music industry circles. The executive must have felt pretty good, as the attentive woman probably hung on his every word. He must have thought he was spinning a Gold Record.
But not so fast. It turns out the woman who was the object of his affection worked in Spitzer’s office.
August 3rd, 2005 at 11:49 am
Don’t get me talkin’ ’bout Sony and their music section!…. I’m glad they got nailed!….. Here’s the reason: Sony bought out Columbia pictures and have been releasing the Columbia library of movies and TV shows on DVD…. The problem is they have replaced any music of which they don’t own the copyrights to generic or music that they won’t have to pay royalties on….. Example: The TV show “Tour of Duty”, a drama series that was on for three years about the Vietnam war, was filled almost constantly with music in the background from the time period depicted, all performed by the original artists, including the main title theme of “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones…. The DVD’s have a generic main theme and instrutmental imitations that hint at Hendrix, The Kinks, and other artists….. The only “real” song I heard on the DVD’s was “Wooly Bully” and they used it a lot more than once (I guess they actually owned the rights to that one!)…… As another example: They also dropped the original version of “Love and Marriage” from “Married with Children” and replaced it with a generic instrutmental verision that is similar but really sub-par…
Their stance on all of this is that the music is unimportant, that the soryline is what counts…. Well, my stance is quite different….. I don’t like spending money on DVD’s that have been altered and I think the music is very important….. Now if this was Paramount or a movie studio that only made movies, I would have no recourse but to buy the DVD’s if I wanted them and just “Bite the Bullet” about the alterations……. But since it’s Sony, I did buy the DVD’s, since I wanted them, BUT, I have the option to NOT buy any Sony hardware!……
I hereby ask everyone out there to join me in boycotting Sony by not purchasing any of their hardware until they change their views on what consumers want to see and hear…..
“BITE ME, SONY!…..
August 3rd, 2005 at 11:54 am
I had no idea they do that with their music/DVDs. Unfortunately I’m a big fan of Sony hardware — I’ve always found it to be of very high quality and requiring low maintenance. I own two Sony TVs (including a new HDTV this year), a Sony VCR, a Sony Tivo and a Sony PlayStation2. Damn, I really hate it when old shows get altered, too.
August 3rd, 2005 at 12:37 pm
I too find Sony’s hardware among the most intuitive to use. Of course, they certainly aren’t perfect, but Sony products tend to shine in the sea of available crap. It’s too bad the content side of the business is so misguided.
August 5th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Yeah, I have to admit almost all of my hardware, including my computer, is Sony, but, I will be considering different brands when it comes time to replace any of my existing hardware…..
Weird, I think Sony has ESP…… I received a catalog from them today with all their latest, neatest, newest hardware……. Help me, it’s hard to resist!……
August 6th, 2005 at 7:05 am
Apparently Sony has some real winners in their music section…. Here’s another little tidbit I found:
In 1991, the Sony Corporation decided to give a lifetime achievement award to ragtime piano player Eubie Blake….. The company invited the musician to the ceremony, with the exec in charge of the affair predicting it would be “an uplifting experience.”.. It would have been amazingly uplifting since Blake had been dead for eight years by then!…….
Love those execs……