It’s Tough Being a Rock Star

by on July 18, 2008 · 4 comments

Pity the poor musician:

The Times quotes, Herbie Flowers, who played bass on Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side and David Bowie’s Space Oddity: “The term of protection for performers has not kept up with life expectancy and it is high time it was changed. I played on a couple of very successful tracks, and it would be unfair for me to stop receiving income for these performances after 50 years — probably just at the time when I will need it the most.”

I wonder if he realizes that the vast majority of people “stop receiving income” from their jobs the moment they stop doing them. You can be sure, for example, that I won’t be continuing to pay my dry cleaner 50 years from now for the pants he cleaned last month.

Hat tip: Rob Hyndman

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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