Posts by Finn Higgins
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But when it does happen that you hear a bit again, a punter might want to think, "Ok, I've heard these gags before, but... do they still work? Is the comic making them sound fresh? Am I finding some other part of it funny this time? Have world events put the gag in a new light? Can I get some pleasure out of admiring their skill of delivery?"
I think that's an unreasonable thing to ask in a comedy environment, to be honest. You can expect that other comics will do it, but a general characteristic of humour is that if you intellectualise the process of experiencing it then it gets unfunny real quick. You can't explain a joke, and all that.
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Ads in the latest in Investigate
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So he does sell lots of high value advertising targeted at wealthy individuals. Mind you, it's quite possible that some of his advertisers support him for non-commercial reasons.
Fascinating. Thanks for that - I had intended checking when I was in town yesterday, but instead got sidetracked.
With that lot he's certainly not going to be poor - assuming they're selling pages at a decent price, rather than bargain-basement. As a magazine it always looks better to get the advertisers in, even if you do them all a "special half-price deal" against your theoretical rate card - nobody wants to be the only advertiser.
Ridley has a point though - why on earth would a bunch of those think that alignment with Wishart is good for their brand? Holiday homes and ownaship.co.nz is one thing, but Dilmah? Epson? Cambridge Audio? Thai Airlines? Do they actually know what they're advertising next to?
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how much does it cost to print 8k copies. obviously there isn't anything spent on research, but PIs can't come cheap, even ones like Idour, and he must have other overheads.
Last time I checked - which was in 2004 - the printing cost for a print run of 15k magazines ranged between around $22k and $35k depending on page count, paper weight and binding options. It's probably a fair bit more now.
Other overheads:
* Printing costs for unsold copies. Selling out regularly isn't good for business, as it takes your magazine off the shelves in your retail outlets, so magazines deliberately print more than they expect to sell by a certain margin.
* Distribution costs. Either direct mailing to subscribers (this would be a mailhouse filmwrap & label job, plus Volumepost costs from NZ post) or paying a distribution company to put the things on trucks to heaps of locations around the country. The former works out cheaper per issue, which is why you get a discount if you subscribe. Even with the discount, a subscription is still worth more than the corresponding number of retail sales because of distribution costs.
* Database maintenance. Keeping a subscriber database up to date requires admin staff to do so. If this isn't done to a required standard (including postcodes, for a start) then you either have to pay your mailhouse to clean up your data or NZ Post hit you with higher mailing rates.
* Designers. Even if a design and general flatplan is already established each month it's still a non-trivial amount of work for a designer to do a magazine, and they charge decent money for it.
All up, a magazine on a circulation of 8k won't make significant money on sales to readers. Wishart's line about it being supported by its 52,000 readers is disingenuous, as few of those readers are actually paying anything for it. The only way you get support from readership numbers if via advertising, which is where you make your real profit from a magazine. But Wishart's whole editorial strategy is rather the opposite of the one you'd take if you were wanting to sell lots of advertising...
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Craig, rebutting allegations is engaging with somebody as a serious contributor to public discussion - just as suing them is. So the ideal would be just to ignore them, if you don't consider them credible. However, since the story has been picked up by the Herald and DomPost I don't think that there's much possibility of just refusing to respond to it.
The only reason this situation can arise is because Wishart has his own magazine - and which is, for better or worse, supported by parties other than the fairly small number of people who buy it. That's the nature of the magazine business.
So I don't think it's an unfair question to be asking. It's not exactly a conspiracy theory to claim that magazines are funded by people wanting to deliver pages of content to a particular demographic, it's the nature of the industry. Or did you think that it was just a coincidence that instrument magazines basically never print scathing reviews of new equipment?
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Craig, just going back to your point on the previous page... I don't think it's necessarily gutter politics to be asking questions about how Investigate is funded, I'd certainly be fascinated to know. I've worked on a magazine that, at the time I was working there, sold more copies each month than Investigate. So I have some kind of idea of what the economics of a magazine that size are. We're not necessarily talking huge dollar figures. Sales to customers will cover the printing costs, but if you want to talk about making decent profit then you're essentially talking about advertising - how many big, regular advertisers you can get, and at what rate each month.
For some reason I can't imagine Investigate has serious support from many of NZ's larger magazine advertisers, particularly the kind that normally advertise in current events titles. I could be surprised here, but somehow I doubt it. So where's the dosh coming from? Does anybody have a copy of the magazine? How much advertising actually runs in the thing each month? And who?
I'm going to have a look at the latest issue in town later today, but I would suspect that it's unlikely that there's much in advertising dollars to be found in brands who'll willingly align themselves with Wishart's view of reality.
So "Where's the money coming from" is a pretty valid question, all up. Unless there's some seriously screwy advertisers out there then I wouldn't be surprised to discover somebody was sinking some cash into the publication each month to make it economically viable.
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unless at the very start you have sound financial backing, contacts or otherwise you’ll just place yourself in another country, in exactly the same situation you would have been back home without any kind of support network at all, more than likely in a more hostile environment.
That's true - but on the other hand, considering how few bands in NZ get started as a full-time concern anyway... living away from home doesn't seem to defeat the myriad kiwis who ship out to London every year in getting work and staying alive. Having a band at the same time isn't a killer workload. My flatmate in Auckland was in four, and worked six days a week.
Obviously the question is a bit of a hypothetical though - not everybody is going to ship out, so there will always be bands locally. But the more tempting it is to leave for a committed and talented musician, the lower we'll have to expect the local levels of commitment and talent are going to be, no?
Getting back to the leaving thing... let's assume it takes a musician 4-10 years of sustained hard work to get somewhere visible in the NZ music industry. Is it really going to be harder to just start doing that elsewhere than to do it here, and then repeat many of the same challenges again later anyway? Support networks and familiar environments are good, but two years in a new place will give you that anyway to a degree. It's not a trivial thing to do, but playing music isn't a trivial thing to do either - and the people who're going to succeed internationally aren't going to be the ones who're easily flustered by a challenge.
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Reuters print the same thing in multiple newspapers, bands play the same songs, actors perform in the same plays for years on end. You deliver the best material you can, to ensure the audience has the best time. Does he cater to you who has seen him 3 times? And thus risk doing material that isn't that funny or does he perform his older stuff which he knows is hilarious, that's up to each comic.
But I'd suggest that comedy differs in an important way from the other forms you mention, in that few of the punters care about the quality of the delivery as much as they do about the immediacy of the joke. Once you've heard a joke more than once or twice then you know what's coming, and the release at the end of the joke is far less likely to result in a laugh. If it's good material people might smile a bit at being reminded of how funny it was the first time, but jokes don't get funnier the more you tell them.
Comics playing on material they "know to be hilarious"... it's only hilarious if the audience hasn't heard it all before.
While bands may repeat songs, songs frequently grow greater in the listener's ear with more familiarity with the details, and that familiarity can breed greater appreciation of a really amazing performance than somebody watching it cold would feel. So in other words, repeat listening gives some actual return. I don't think that's the case in comedy.
I went to see a recording of Goodness Gracious Me while I was in London, which was an interesting exercise in repetition of comedy material - the laugh tracks are real, from an audience. So either by design or by improvisation, each take was notably different on every single sketch that was recorded live in front of the audience. My assumption is that this was for the very obvious reason that if you keep repeating shit, the audience stops laughing... should be pretty obvious for a comic, no?
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Getting back - as per Graham's request - to the original topic, I've got a story to add too. Back when Garageland were the thing here, I left the country. Not much later I was living in Yorkshire, and spotted the very same band playing a venue in York.
Said venue was the same one some stoner mates of mine had managed to get a gig at the week before - on the basis of a demo tape of them strumming a guitar, singing out of tune and hitting an ashtray with a pencil. And no, it wasn't an inspired piece of minimalism, it really was as crap as it sounds.
The place had a pretty small capacity, and wasn't really any kind of regular touring venue for international acts - you'd get local bands and the occasional out-of-towner playing there. So seeing Garageland on the bill was a rather major surprise, especially considering advertising for their album had been all over the telly here before I left...
Graham's point that success in NZ doesn't seem to translate to entry anywhere above the ground floor elsewhere is a well-made one. I suppose the question it would drive me to ask would be this:
What advantage is there for a committed band in expending serious time and effort to succeed locally in NZ rather than just taking their ideas overseas to start with?
Not suggesting there are none, but I'm interested to see what the responses would be to the question.
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Good to hear. All credit to Finn, it's a brave man who argues music with you Mr Grigg. Kinda like arguing sherry vs port with the town drunk.
Brave or foolish, take yer pick!
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You miss the point Finn. With both those two you are confusing musicianship with ideas again. I don't like Kenny G at all but I'm happy to admit he can probably play..I don't know, I've not paid enough attention to him. I know Chris Botti can, but I don't think he's inspired.
Fair enough, and I'll happily agree that Nathan can play. I just really, really dislike what he plays so he's not an example that's likely to win my heart, so to speak.
As for Kenny G, I'll let another musician I've got no great love of (but who I will happily admit can play circles around me) speak for me, in the form of Pat Metheny. Even in jazz it's possible to sell vast qualitites of records without really having much going for you in the musicianship stakes.
I'll take your point about the form of my expression of discontent on the nose and say sorry - it wasn't my intent to slight, and having re-read the post it was certainly beyond what was called for.