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[QUOTE=RIDGERCR,Jun 4 2009, 05:32 AM] Amuse has got my full support and sometimes people ask me what the Amuse sticker means on my car. I simply tell them its one of the best aftermarket tuning companies in the world today and one of the few stickers I'd put on my car. "Support our Troops" is another as well and I feel the same way for them, I'm also one of them.
Being a huge fan of music in general (I do have genre preferences), I feel I can correlate some of the things that happen and have happened in the music industry over the coarse of the years to some of the issues Ben spoke of in his blog.
There is a very fine line when it comes to enjoying the "underground" quality of a band or artist, and also wanting to see them succeed financially, so they can continue to tour and make the music you and I have come to love.
When the point comes you're hearing them all over the air waves every time you turn around, it tends to take something away from them creatively. It suddenly becomes obvious that what used to be an original sound has suddenly turned into the same eardrum murdering nonsense coming out of every other mainstream act in town.
I would be willing to bet that drawing that proverbial line in the sand is much more difficult to make by musicians, or in our case Japanese tuners when the time arrives, than any of us could imagine. I guess in the end, we have to have faith that the man, or woman in charge will make the right decision.
You are definately right about that, often times because you don't realize where that line actually is until it is too late.
There is a fantastic article that was written in Fortune magazine, I think in 2005 (a new version came out a few years later, too) called "The Best Advice I Ever Got" -- one of the people got his advice from Peter Drucker, who is probably the best business consultant of our time. The guy was starting a consulting firm of his own that was going to change the way that people thought about business; Peter Drucker asked him one question -- do you want to build ideas, or build an organization?
He said that if you want to build ideas, you must not build an organization, b/c once you build an organization you have a beast to feed, which means two things: (1) you have to keep coming up with ideas to feed the beast, and (2) your influence will continue to decrease, even if you enjoy commercial success.
I don't know if that is what happened to Veilside, but the reasoning seems sound to me. Once you grow your company from producing, marketing, and selling an idea to producing, marketing, and selling "stuff", you lose personal influence as well as the ability to produce, market, and sell your original idea.
Originally Posted by zbrewha863,Jun 3 2009, 06:22 PM
One of the owners of Endless posted a good article a year or two ago about how they were considering pulling their office out of the USA. He was saying that the whole mainstream philosophy on tuning in the US is so different from that of Japan, and for the most part the US is more focused on looking cool and getting cheap parts than they are on actual function, that for true Japanese performance part companies to sell in the US on a mass scale would require them to go against their own busienss models (he used Tein as an example of a company who did just that).
For what it's worth, though, Endless/Zeal still has their US office open, I talked to them today .
We recently received an MCR exhaust that we ordered for a Z33 client a few weeks back. Since this exhaust was produced by Nippon Steel, the same fabricators of Amuse exhaust, I thought it was fit to post. Please tell me what you think. Our usual camera ran out of battery so we had to resort to a less qualified camera :driving:
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