Posted 4:40 PM by Gene

Three oddly complementary stories appeared today: the snobby Wall Street Journals ran an article that ticket prices for big sporting events and pop concerts have become unaffordable, confiscatory even, thanks to what con-SER-va-tives would glibly call the marketplace (i.e., scalpers on the Web). Its partner in press releases Barron's ran a typically huff-'n'-puff piece about the CES convention, whose unspoken premise is that the electronics biz is about to inflict us with gadget overload to end all gadget overloads. And the PAPER OF RE-CORD ran this story about how some people are getting mad because the cable conspiracy and cell phone providers are piling on all sorts of glop many don't use primarily to keep their shareholders happy.

It's odd that the purview of the no-talent and the nostalgia act should command such an outlandish premium, but we'll chalk that up to boomer geezers and the fans' historic lack of taste. But the problem with the rest of show-biz these days is there's more to see and less worth seeing. Indeed so little is worth seeing why not just price it all at zero since so much will have precisely that audience? This is a perfect analog of blogging, where millions of monomaniacs congeal into a high-decibel silence. No, the idea that content should be free does not seem so hallucinatory as it used to. How long the techies and the content mafia can keep us paying for it is another matter.