News: Welcome back, Mike Portnoy!

The reason why they have to squeeze maximum money out of the tour is because that's the only time a musician can actually make money. Bands used to go on tours to advertise their music, now they make new music because that's new material to tour.

What "stand" should they have taken?

Back in the beginning of the file-sharing era, CDs cost a lot, a full downloadable album came a bit later and didn't cost much less and there was basically no legal way to meaningfully sample music you'd be buying, so people started torrenting and stopped buying CDs. People are completely fine paying 11 dollars a month today for legally streaming, including people who used to pirate, and somewhere in the early 00's that willingness should have been funneled into downloadable albums that cost a couple of dollars and a way to sample an entire album before buying - say, you have the right to listen to it once, then you have to download if you want to listen to it again. Yes, there's people who put those 11 dollars to use to listen to way, way more than 5-10 new albums per month, but those people are rare, mostly congregate on music forums, and buy 30-40 dollar vinyl to supplement their collection anyway

A band like Dream Theater has almost 1.5 mil monthly listeners, and I doubt they receive more money from Spotify now than they would receive if somewhere along the line the value of the mp3 hasn't been reduced to zero by labels and executives who did nothing while the internet was becoming a global marketplace of mp3s. Then Spotify came along and legalized this marketplace and the industry went along because at least they'd get some cents out of these files without value, when they should have stepped in a long time ago to prevent them from losing value in the first place.

NY is going to have 2 teams in the NHL and NBA CFs, and possibly playing Boston in both.
(Probably Florida in hockey though)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M_SqJfvfRY

Tank The Tech!

Yeah, he has some great info on his channel.