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Geddy Lee's "My Favorite Headache" website page expired two days ago - thoughts?


Bahamas
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I recently acquired a copy of My Favorite Headache (Thanks ytserush! And in mint condition).

On the back of the CD jacket is a website: www.myfavoriteheadache.com so I checked it out.

At the top of the page is "This domain name expired on 2022-12-22". There are still links to current bands and performances, it looks like a ticket community page of sorts.

The CD is an Atlantic Recording Corporation, A Time Warner Company, 2000.

 

But how interesting (to me) that a popular, established artist makes a solo album, chooses (?) a period of time to activate a promotional website - and it's 22 years with no renewal?

Is that perhaps a Time Warner thing? "It's by the decade! Choose how many you want, ok, add two years if that makes you geschlappy about it". Or an expiry date is arriving and the artist figures it's been long enough?

I would love to hear from forum artists more familiar with this business, or friends of Mr. Lee who could shed some light.

 

Thanks, Cheers and Safe Holidays to all :) 

 

(Edit: And I just realised that after many years of wanting to own and listen closely to the CD, it arrived on Thursday - the exact day the domain name expired! Might buy a lotto ticket tomorrow?)

Edited by Bahamas
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Usually the record label handles all this (their marketing arm), to keep things uniform across the several media outlets they have to manage for the album's sale.  Major artists rarely have any interest and/or involvement in the day to day operations of anything.

 

I'm sure the expiration being allowed is written in a contract somewhere.  The max you can renew a website domain name is 10 years, so it's likely there was an initial two years then 2 ten year renewals.  If the contract is done, it's possible Geddy could bring this in house but I fail to see why he would do that unless he was thinking about making another solo album.  At his age and time since last original music, I'd think the followup would have happened by now.

Edited by stoopid
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Geddy released a very good solo album when Rush appeared over and he was relatively young. I'm sure there would have been several follow-ups if Neil hadn't felt up to returning. The label was ready for it. I'm sure Geddy wasn't terribly involved. He wasn't going to work on solo material while Rush was active, I assume (although Alex did, so what do I know?). 

In any event, the label has no need to keep up a website for a single album from over 20 years ago.

Interesting coincidence, though. It's always disappointing to just barely miss out on something. 

Hope you liked the album, I thought several tracks were excellent. 

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7 minutes ago, stoopid said:

Wayback might have the website cached/saved.

Based on what I found (I'm not an expert at using this site), it looks like the website hadn't been maintained possibly going back as far as 2004/2005.  The later cached pages are blank or 'cannot be displayed'.  Also, when I went back far enough to actually see the cached site as it was, there's indications it was written with a lot of Flash content which was deprecated a couple years ago when HTML5 became the standard and Adobe formally abandoned Flash.

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20010401190444/http://www.myfavoriteheadache.com/

 

Someone was keeping the URL registered through 2022, but now I'm wondering if that was even the record company.  That domain name might have been abandoned a long time ago and some bot might have picked it up along the way to redirect people to an advertising page or worse, some malware trap.  The fact web.archive.org logs the site as vanishing in 2005 would hint that this was likely the case, and IMO makes more sense than the record company keeping it alive in a diminishing and unsecured state (Flash was known for having security vulnerabilities) for the trickle of copies still being sold after the first couples years of release.

Edited by stoopid
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On 12/24/2022 at 11:03 PM, 78jazz said:

I am surprised it still existed.

 

 

Not sure he's even aware of it at this point.

 

CD has been out of print for years. It was reissued by Wounded Bird (along with Victor and those are both likely out of print.) It was a Record Store Day vinyl exclusive release a few years back (maybe 5000 copies?) 

 

They are somewhat difficult to find these days though they maybe be a little pricey.

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Thanks, all. Some interesting points. Much appreciated!

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On 12/26/2022 at 6:56 AM, Mosher said:

Geddy released a very good solo album when Rush appeared over and he was relatively young. I'm sure there would have been several follow-ups if Neil hadn't felt up to returning. The label was ready for it. I'm sure Geddy wasn't terribly involved. He wasn't going to work on solo material while Rush was active, I assume (although Alex did, so what do I know?). 

In any event, the label has no need to keep up a website for a single album from over 20 years ago.

Interesting coincidence, though. It's always disappointing to just barely miss out on something. 

Hope you liked the album, I thought several tracks were excellent. 

See that I rarely listen to mine, anyone want to buy it?  lol  $100  !!!

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