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Here's an idea:
How about putting up a website with all the bands that are signed up to RIAA affiliated labels (and non signed bands, obviously)?
We then need to find out how to send money to those artists without the labels receiving any.

Then, if you like a band, and have (or want to) download some of their art, you can contribute as much as you feel is fair, for them to continue providing you with entertainment.
The website doesn't need to host any copyrighted work, if you dont know how to get that anyway, you have no business on slashdot.

According to Courtney Love, http://www.jdray.com/Daviews/courtney.html
the bands will end up making more money this way anyway.

Unfortunately, you're wrong. Copyright law in the US does not say that what you write is yours. More often than not, what you write belongs to the publisher. That's why you see musicians complaining bitterly that "the band owns none of its work" (quoted directly from that article).

You have to go to Europe in order to find countries where the copyright laws stipulate that copyrights always belong to the artist. I urge you to take a long hard look at the implications of a society such as the US where copyrights in practice do not belong to the artists.

One interesting side note: the Constitution of the United States says that

The MP3 debate is near and dear to my heart and I've given it a lot of thought. So here is my 25 cents (inflation):

CD prices are not, as such, artificially inflated to an outrageous degree. However, they are IMO spending their money inefficiently.

A LOT of the money they collect for a CD has already been spent in marketing.

If we're going to point our fingers at them and say that they're bad people, we should do it because they're ramming (successfully) horrid music down people's throats.

If you listen to the music put out these days, you'd find that almost all of the songs from a given artist sound exactly alike. *cough* metalliwhiner *cough* or any of the other popular bands.

The reasoning behind this is simple: when mary-muffins goes to buy the latest CD, she is less than happy if all the music doesn't sound as good as the 1 or 2 tracks splattered across pay-for-playdio. (I don't like getting a CD for a single song and have the rest of the CD suck either.)

Mary-muffins would know good music if it hit her in the face, she is just never allowed to hear it. The current RIAA members are the gatekeepers. Remember (anyone?) mp3.com? I do.

I found over a dozen bands that never appear on the splaterworks. Small, little bands with unique sounds and really interesting songs.

CNET bought them and for some odd reason, destroyed the entire music catalog and the service. It no longer exists.

Song (as well as movie) piracy exists for a single reason, and it has little to do with money above a certain age: ease.

If I can download a song or 6, in mp3 or better, at an acceptable bitrate in which I can hear the songs before hand (lower bit rate is acceptable for that of course), and if it is as easy as getting songs from bittorrent or whatever (click and go), then I'd buy.

Otherwise, if I can get superior service, packaging, delivery, and ease of use for free... why wouldn't I?

(Spare me the legal or moral argument. I consider the RIAA to be far more reprehensible than someone infringing on their copyrights. I consider them to have sleazed their way into many of the copyrights they own in the first place. I cite http://www.jdray.com/Daviews/courtney.html/ as Courtney Love's take on the music industry and http://negativland.com/albini.html/ as Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana's "In Utero".)

Knowing that the music industry spends a LOT of money on promotion, and that live events and selling goodies (like t-shirts and whatnot) make the bands more money and promote at the same time (assuming people want to see them, unlike the ditzy shizz (those idiotic morons that maligned their country and alienated their entire clientele then wondered what the hell happened)), the music industry simply needs to change tactics.

They would earn (tons) of money, get to keep themselves as the gatekeepers, and take less risk in promotion if they followed this plan:

1. create a web portal and transfer their existing catalog of artists onto it. DRM free.
2. create a small cafeteria plan of offerings ($x for y songs per month, $x per song, and so forth). Create a merchandising link to sell the band's material goodies as well.
3. create a system for preview, band info, perhaps even music videos (streaming, if not download) to promote some hype.
4. DO NOT promote the artists via the normal very expensive channels. Do not pay radio stations to play the artists. Do not spend loads of cash to merchandise them.
5. As an effect of 4, the _patrons_ would then decide to which music to listen. Word of mouth, especially among the teen to college crowd, is the most effective advertising vehicle. You can't buy advertising as good as word of mouth.
6. Use intelligent linking with the bands. "You like x band? You'd probably like y band too. Click here to see."
7. Stick in advertise

Hey, I suppose I should provide the link, shouldn't I?

http://www.jdray.com/Daviews/courtney.html

That is the point that must be driven into the heads of the don't know/don't care people. The various industries that benefit from the long copyrights are very good at invoking the welfare of the artists, the actual creators of IP, even though most artists can't live off the royalties. Live performance is the only way to make a living for most of those who can make a living off their creations. All the money gets eaten up by the starmaking machinery behind the popular song, film, and book.

If you didn't see Courtney Love does the Math in the Weird Al thread, please read it. it is a rather intelligent rant from the artist POV.

A shallow understanding of copyright law would make it seem that artists and their fans would be on opposite sides of this issue. But, except for a few who have retired on their royalty checks and no longer need to create or perform, that isn't the case. It is fans and artists vs the distribution industry. As soon as everyone understands that it is artists who should get paid for creating and while the distributors should get paid for distributing, and royalties should only be an incentive to artists as originally intended, then maybe our culture will belong to us and not locked up in private hands. Once an artist goes public with his work, then it is no longer private property. The copyright is simply a reward for contributing to the public forum. Wasn't that the original intent of the US short copyright?

Musicians will continue to "get the shaft" as long as they rely on majors.

One of the best references on the subject: Courtney Love Does The Math.

No it's not and it's only part of the problem. The current system does not pay artists. Exclusive franchises never pay anyone but themselves and they are entirely clueless. People have been making, sharing and profiting from music long before mass production and insane copyright laws. They will continue to do so. These guys figured out how to make plenty of money and let people share their music a long time ago. You make money doing things for people. The music industry does very little of that but keeps the rewards for itself. Copyright is only one of their tools. Creative Commons is trying to pull something useful from copyright laws. You can be sure they are on the RIAA hit list.

Only if they can sell it at a profit. Otherwise they'll just keep to their habit of grinding up their own artists for profit.

Doing the Math:

Average payout: $2/CD
12 Songs * $0.12 = 1.44

RIAA: $11/CD - $2.50 (Artist+Publication) = $8.50/CD (Same source as above)
12 Songs * ($0.64-$0.12) = $6.24/CD

BUT, for iTunes distribution, they don't have to pay Shipping & Recieving personnel, warehouses, purchasing managers... All those are replaced with 1-2 accountants per download company. Obviously I didn't figure in marketing and such, but I would assume costs would be similar for online and physical distribution.

It takes more work these days for me to find an artist that I like but, when I do, it's a great discovery.

And how has the fact that good music has been ubiquitous and now a scarcity wrt to you hearing about it affected your CD buying frequency? I'll tell you how it affected mine: It dropped to zero.

In fact, being forced to "hunt" for music has allowed me to discover a ton of artists and genres that I would not otherwise be exposed to.

I guess we fundamentally differ here. I don't like being forced into anything, especially not by an incestuous oligopoly of corporations that:

• Suppress independent music and oppress their own artists
• Repeatedly lobbies for self-serving legislation at the expense of both public and artists.
• Repeatedly abuse their oligopoly for price-fixing, i.e. ripping the customer off.
• etc. ad nauseam

save me the lecture on how it's not stealing

Exactly. It's not. Only simple minds who can't deal with the complexities of copyright would call it thus, so they can understand. Well that, and people who want to deceive.

You're stealing.

I'm certainly not. I'm not even P2Ping music any more.

You're taking something for nothing that would otherwise be sold. If you could not steal it, you would buy it.

Wrong, very wrong. That's true in some cases. In other cases, music downloading causes people to buy more music due to P2P sampling. At the time that I was a heavy P2P user, I bought almost twice as many CDs per month than before, and that even though my previous No. 1 source for finding out about my kind of music (the German alternative music TV station "Viva 2") had been shut down for the sake of a more RIAA-friendly third mainstream channel. In last year's fall, the RIAA and others successfully lobbied to make file sharing of (most) music illegal in Germany (can't point out one time too often that it was legal before!). I stopped downloading music and haven't bought a single CD since then. A coincidence?

My hypothesis: There are at least three groups of P2P users:

• The casual user: Makes up the majority of P2P users. Downloads some songs, buys some CDs, doesn't buy others. The net effect of P2P on this user's CD consumption is negligible.
• The cadger: Uses P2P because it's free-as-in-beer and has 1000 excuses for not paying. P2P lets his CD consumption drop to zero. But then, most of these probably have always found a way to get free music. If it wasn't for P2P, they would just record songs from the radio, copy/lend it from friends and whatnot. They have never paid much for music and never will.
• The fan (I would say I belong to this group): P2P and other non-RIAA-controlled distribution channels have been a boon for them. They could conveniently find out about gazillions of non-mainstream bands and sample their music in (cf.) high quality. If they found bands whose music they really like, they would go out and buy their CDs because fans show devotion for their idols. You can't call yourself a fan if all you have are burnt CDs. The net CD consumption of this group would increase (sometimes even greatly) because of P2P.

Now what does this boil down to? Blaming the casual user is ridiculous. They have been average customers wrt sales, and they stay average customers. What about the cadgers? Aren't they stealing? Yes, it's definitely not right what they do.

Even though the RIAA and MPAA are claming that p2p sharing is killing their business, you never hear the adult industry complaining about p2p

The thing is though, that P2P (well, actually the internet in general) is killing their business.

Although not for the reasons one would suppose (ie. the ones that the ??AA is claiming.)

Before the internet, the entertainment cartels effectively controlled distribution of their works - which meant that if you want to enter the world they control, you had to play by their rules. And as you might guess, their rules aren't very fair.

Now that the internet is here, recording artists (in particular) can reach a global audience without having to sign their lives away, and the RIAA is scared shitless.

If all the fancy RIAA and MPAA business managers couldn't figure out something that Ron Jeremy did!

No, the business managers have realized it. That's why you're seeing such a concerted effort to shut it down. Not because it costs them money (all evidence points to the contrary - the revenues of the RIAA follow exactly the curve of Napster's popularity and usage, despite the RIAA publishing fewer titles) but because they know that the end of their control is near.

Here it is:
Courtney Love Does The Math