45 Million Is Looking for Somebody

The is the Coté Bar - the other side is the coté bistro.

Home-Made Music CDs Might be Piracy

Paris:- Sunday, 31. January 1999:- Next Tuesday, somebody is going the become 45,277,015 francs poorer if they don't take their winning Loto ticket to where it needs to be cashed in. This is the equivalent of just under eight million dollars at stake here.

On Tuesday, 2. December 1998, someone walked into Le Diablotin bar on Montmartre and paid 32 francs for a Loto ticket with the numbers 15, 21, 24, 26, 38 and 40 on it. As it was purchased on a Tuesday, the loto machine probably spit out the ping-pong balls with these numbers on the day after.

The organization that runs the Loto doesn't like big winners not to show up because it is kind of demoralizing to those who play regularly without winning a button. So they have put out a 'winner wanted' appeal, and similar efforts has worked twice in the past.

In both cases, the winners had gone on vacations, unaware of their good fortune. 'Good fortune' is what I call coming back from holidays to learn that I've become a millionaire; but so far this has eluded me.

Meanwhile, this mystery is driving the owners of Le Diablotin crazy. Everybody who comes in wants to know if the winner has showed up yet. Somebody else won 30 million on the Loto at this bar, and the owner wants to break his 'record.'

If the winner doesn't show up with a good ticket within 60 days - in this case, about to expire - the win gets tossed back into the pot. France's biggest Loto jackpot was for 150 million francs; won on 20. March 1997, by a grandmother in Asnières just outside Paris.

I don't know if anybody remembers the introduction of the digital-audio cassette tape recorder. When they came out, the music industry set up such a howl about pirate copying, that the recorder manufacturers had to put in some device to stop the machines from recording - which sort of made them useless for anything other than listening to very expensive pre-recorded DAT tapes. Sales did not boom.

The recordable CD has taken some time to get here, but now they are available at consumer electronics' prices. One-time recordable blank CDs cost about a dollar, so guess what's happening.

Right! All the kids who cannot afford the horribly inflated retail prices of audio CDs, are getting together to buy CD-recorders and the latest hit audio CDs, and are multiplying them like rabbits and selling them to their friends for peanuts.

While the recording industry has had its head in a sand dune worrying about bad people pumping music through the Internet, the barn door has been left open to massive piracy. They say they are losing zillions.

It's about time. They've had a 25-year monopoly on inflated profits; which added up to a lot of money they did not bother reinvesting in new talent. Look at all the re-issues they put out.

The music industry is about having a monopoly of control of the talent. To keep it, they killed DAT. Now recordable CDs are going to turn a monopoly situation into something like the Internet - where everybody and anybody can publish just about anything - for the cost of peanuts.

The recordable CD means that 'garage' bands will be able to produce themselves and manufacture their product. They'll sell by word-of-mouth; and if they talk up a 'hit' - then - logically the music industry will be given the job of worldwide distribution.

This will mean that the industry giants will be freed from the tedious business of finding talent and will be able to buy into titlesthat have already been tested in the real market. In this way a 'bad' thing will turn into a 'good' thing; and the listening public may even get some good, new music to hear.