Get Out Of Your Garage

from the Playboy Blog, 7/31/08

If you want to make it big as a musician these days, selling CDs isn’t going to cut it. Much like our shopping, dating, social interaction, and (ahem) media, the music industry is now dominated by, and reliant upon, the internet. But for music, this may not be a bad thing.

Enter GigMaven.com, a brand new website that connects under-the-radar musicians with performance venues. The process is simple: the venue posts open dates in their calendar, interested bands apply, the venue filters through the information compiled on the bands’ pages to find the perfect fit, and the best band gets the gig. The simple online process removes snail-mailing sample CDs, days of phone tag, and scrambling to find last-minute acts from the process, leaving each party more time to do what it does best: play music and sell us beer.

Change Some Can Believe In?

From the Playboy Blog, July 3, 2008

As a longtime Obama fan, I’ve been preparing for the excruciating anxiety of poll-watching in the months leading up to November’s election. What I wasn’t prepared for was the pain of seeing Obama bend to conservative interests as he attempts to woo independents and moderate Republicans. When I read yesterday’s New York Times headline, “Obama Wants To Expand Role of Religious Groups,” my liberal conscience wanted to reach for an ice pack.

But wait. As it turns out, the Times headline—in fact, the entire article—was misleading. It implied throughout that Obama simply plans to continue and expand President Bush’s White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives (WHOFBI). Barely allowed in a criminal 5-4 Supreme Court decision, the WHOFBI directs federal money to help faith-based—and only faith-based—charities apply for federal grant money, giving religious groups an automatic advantage over secular ones. Obama’s plan, the President’s Council for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, actually rights Bush’s wrongs. It opens funds to secular community groups as well as religious ones and requires rigorous monitoring to ensure that federally funded charities do not proselytize or discriminate when they hire staff.

Why didn’t the Times mention this radical difference, which makes Obama’s policy, unlike Bush’s, constitutional?