Entertainment desk
< May 11	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Entertainment Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 12

Is this song out-of-tune or something?

Whenever I hear Paul McCartney's song Listen to What the Man Said, something sounds wrong to me, like it's out of tune or something. Is something wrong or am I imagining it? This has bugged me for years. None of McCartney's songs sounds wrong to me, only this song. Hopefully someone can explain what's happening here. You can find the song on YouTube here. It sounds wrong to me as soon as the song starts. Pealarther (talk) 10:10, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've listened to what the man sang, and it sounds okay to me. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:43, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

He's using kind of a "twangy" guitar, but it sounds OK to me, along with his voice. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:58, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wings switched to a new drummer. So, you may be hearing a different drummer's style. Also, they were worn out on the song because it simply didn't work no matter how many times they tried or how many overdubs they put on it. Then, they added the sax and suddenly they liked it. So, what you hear is a band sick of playing the same song over and over and it just doesn't get better. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 14:29, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The guitar playing the opening riff, I believe, is using a Phaser pedal on it, resulting in some spicy harmonic effects with the other instruments that you're probably perceiving as "out of tune". The tonal center of each note is still in tune, but the additional "frequency sweep" effect of the phaser pedal is probably what you're hearing as "out of tune". --Jayron 32 16:31, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Australian Football League solvency

How can the Melbourne-area clubs all continue operating? None of the major North American sports has more than two teams in any metropolitan area (unless I'm forgetting something), and I remember incidents such as the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Montreal Expos nearly going bankrupt, despite having local monopolies and playing locally popular sports. Obviously it dominates our sporting culture — although I'm a recent immigrant, everyone still is surprised when they find that I don't care about any particular team — but the raw numbers still must make it extremely difficult:

We have roughly 5,000,000 residents in the metropolitan area, per Melbourne#Demographics
The nine metropolitan clubs have a total of 326 players, per List of current AFL team squads
In other words, about one out of every 15,300 Melburnians is a professional footballer.
Some smaller US markets have comparable people-to-player ratios, e.g. the 90 players listed at Green Bay Packers#Current roster play in areas of 1,208,229 residents (per Brown County, Wisconsin#Demographics and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin#Demographics), i.e. one player per 13,400 residents
However, ticket prices here are far cheaper than US football tickets, with nothing higher than A$27 versus the average NFL ticket costing over US$110, per [1] and [2], even if you ignore the difference in the values of the currencies

How can the clubs pay their salaries? Nyttend (talk) 20:35, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Revenue from advertising by sponsors (cars, fast food, liquor, gambling ...). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:31, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But that happens in North America too. And there's also more potential for continent-wide advertising there, with no Barassi line equivalent. How many people outside Victoria care about the Melbourne clubs? I have the impression that it's less common for people to move interstate here than it is in the US. Very different from, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers, who accidentally built a nationwide fan base by winning multiple championships at a time when the local economy was so bad that local residents were moving all across the US to find work. Nyttend (talk) 22:52, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

TV rights are another major source of income. Yes, obviously that happens in the USA too, but the Australian Football League has obviously hit upon a mix that works for its geographic structure. And there are fans of the Melbourne based clubs elsewhere. Plenty of Collingwood fans will always be seen at interstate matches. The allegiances were built before the creation of the interstate clubs. HiLo48 (talk) 23:06, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I had no idea that much of anyone outside Victoria cared about the VFL before it expanded — I figured they expanded basically because they wanted to create an interstate fan base, not because they had an interstate fan base already. I supposed that just about everyone interstate who cared about the AFL would barrack for clubs in their state (whether current or future), not one of the ones here. And I'd expected that the only significant support for interstate teams were the Melburnians who supported teams who'd moved elsewhere, e.g. all the South Melbourne supporters who attended last year's Grand Final. Thanks a lot for the explanations! Nyttend (talk) 23:13, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of points: the New York City area has three NHL teams (counting the New Jersey Devils), for a total of nine teams in the four traditional North American sports, and another two in Major League Soccer, all of which are quite popular. But you can compare the AFL to something like Argentina's top football league, where almost all the clubs are based in the Buenos Aires area. As long as each club has enough of a fan base to fill its stadium, it can work, if expenses are kept reasonable. Finally, teams relocating from one city to another used to be common in North American sports, whereas bankruptcies were extremely rare; franchise transfers have become less frequent since the 1990s because revenues have grown tremendously. Any relocations that occur nowadays are usually the result of under-capitalized ownership (the Montreal Expos situation you mentioned) - or overly greedy ownership (e.g. the Los Angeles Chargers). Xuxl (talk) 16:58, 13 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A better analogy for the Melbourne-area AFL teams is the London-area Premier League teams. There's currently 7 Premier League teams in Greater London, and if you include the Championship (which could be promoted in any given year) there's two more, another in League One, and three more in League Two. That's 13 London teams in the top 4 tiers of English Football. Most are doing quite fine, lots of them have broad international appeal. --Jayron 32 11:57, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]