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Since you posted a lot of "facts" there, I'll just respond with this link which has some interesting information on where the money really goes.

JRM

get paid millions

You don't know very much about the music industry do you?

Please read this. It isn't the only source on this particular subject, but it is, i think, the best-written.

Mind if i rewrite your options?

A) make music, enjoy process
B) make music, enjoy process, self-promote and sell on internet and through community labels, make a very small amount of money and have there be one guy in australia who's heard of you
C) make music, enjoy process, sign with RIAA, ( get paid millions OR wind up hundreds of thousands in debt (SELECT SEMIRANDOMLY) ) and become famous.

I chose B. I'm liking it. I'm going to stick with it, thanks.

The only people whose ox is getting gored from "the culture of CD burning" are the Five Families of the Record Business and the RIAA. The artists already get it up the butt, with no vaseline and definitely no reach-around.

If Sheryl Crow and Elvis Costello want to see more return from their music, then they should go indie and set up a site where people can download their music legally for a fair price. Unfortunately it's not so easy to get out of a record contract...it really is like indentured servitude at the moment.

So yeah, let Hilary Rosen, Vivendi, Sony, AOL-TW/WEA, Bertlesmann and EMI weep in their beer all they want. I have no sympathy for those bastards.

I will continue to buy my music used because I don't want them to make money off my musical tastes. If I want to rip my own mix CDs from CDs I bought, then that's my own damn business. I don't do P2P...I am naturally paranoid about my network and am not into opening up holes in it lightly.

Until artists get the fair shake they deserve, I do not see my actions as hurting them. They are suffering enough as it is at the hands of the same people who cry buckets of crocodile tears about "the poor artists" in the media.

Except for one thing -- the record companies make the bands they've signed pay for all the parts of making an album out of any royalties they might collect. There's a decent breakdown of the math used, here, but getting signed to a recording contract has all the disadvantages of owning your own business, with all the disadvantages of being an employee. Unless you sell many million copies of an album, you'll never be profitable, and would probably have an easier time making ends meet working in a grocery store.

Actually I hear that concerts for most bands (save the large arena filling tours) are a break even business: most of it goes to promotion, the facility, and other costs. Much like the movie theater business.

But like you said most of the money is made in merchandise. That is why paying 20 bucks for a t-shirt from a band you really dig isn't a bad thing. Sure the shirt is shit, but most of the money is going into their pocket.

Of course musicians getting screwed over by the industry isn't anything new: Del the Funky Homosapien and Future Development, J-Live and the whole of his catalogue. Ask anyone in the underground of any scene who spent some time at a major.

Steve Albini (seminal musician [Big Black, Shelac] and producer [In Utero and a thousand other things]) wrote a GREAT article a couple years ago on the state of the industry.

Of course the GZA/Genius summed it up perfectly on "Protect Ya Neck": Who's your A&R?/A mountain climber who plays an electric guitar?

Artists gripes with the industry extend beyond genre class or race.

(A suggestion for aspiring groups: one nice thing Corrosion of Conformity did was, at their shows, you could buy their CD signed by all members of the band. The things sold like hot cakes and now I have their last two LPs signed... sweet)

We all assume we are being screwed when it comes to buying a CD for $16.95. Is this because we can buy a stack of 50 blank CD-R's for about the same price?

Besides the cost of the media there are other costs involved in making CD's. Recording studio time, editing, cover art, packaging costs, marketing costs, distribution costs, and I am sure the list goes on.

there are artists and lables out there speaking up against the RIAA for example Projekt Records founder Sam Rosenthal has said that Napster was one of the best marketing tools ever devised. Artists like Negativland have spoken out on freespeech censorship and copyright issues.
As an artist, my own bands are up on MP3.com fully downloadable and available for purchase if you are so inclined.
say what you will about MP3.com, i can still give away my music to people and you can still download it there.
It is becoming the realm of Indy lables and the old punk DIY ethic that is taking a stand against the RIAA and the recording industry. As an Artist and music lover, I am offended to see bills like This be presented. Support indy lables and bands by buying the cd from them directly - or go see their shows & buy a t-shirt. Most of the artists I know, made more money from their independently produced cds that they are selling than their major label counterparts. if you get bored check out my 2 projects The Winding path and Arriviste if you want to make a diffrence - support artists that are fighting to make a diffrence.
matt

Courtney Love may have been infringing on Steve Albini's intellectual property rights when she delivered that speech, and Salon is aiding and abetting! I'm kidding of course, and I'm glad that she managed to get this issue some attention and that Salon continues to provide that resource.

But please-- if you are going to read that minimal treatement of the issue-- consider also the Steve Albini version at Negativland's Intellectual Property Issues page. That page has many more essays by real artists that have been involved in a great deal of legal wrangling surrounding copyright and have been at it since the early 80's.

This was from a -prior case- regarding the RIAA and the sale of used cd's.

...and do you ever wonder where all that money goes?

The company is still footing the bill up front. If the record doesn't sell, the artist hasn't lost anything (and actually gained quite a bit).


Here's the obligitory link to Albini's "The Problem with Music". Read it.

In regards to cost of production, these costs are falling dramatically with the advent of high-quality, inexpensive, digital audio cards for pcs(no, I don't work for Aardvark, I'm just a very satisfied customer). I would guess that at least 50% of the "hit" records of the past ten years were digitally recorded using pro-tools, or even less expensive, gear. Cubase, cakewalk, or logic, a decent PC, and a good pro sound card are about the same cost as a decent guitar/amp setup. A good mic/mic-pre/mixer setup will cost another chunk of change, but not too much. There are numerous softsynths and effects packages out there for reasonable prices (or as warez, if you're ethically challenged). $500/hr studio fees for unproven, non-mega-star bands should disappear eventually.

I don't mean to disrespect any audio engineers out there, btw. A really top-notch production job is going to always be a valuable service, and anybody would rather record their master through a Neve board to 2" tape than through a Mackie to their hard drive, but these new methods of recording can, and do, yield impressive results on a budget. Most consumer grade stereo equipment is for shit, anyway, and if you're listening to compressed, lossy audio, then it hardly matters.

Time to post the obligatory Steve Albini reference. For perhaps the first honest view of the way the music industry does business ... check out this essay.

Peace,
(jfb)

How about starting a new campaign? I personally have been on this campaign for a while now due to the insanity that is known as the music industry

Campaign title: I choose piracy!!

I have been refusing to buy Major Label albums for years now, trouble is even most of the indies are being fuXored by the majors and the RIAA through distribution and legislation deals that are wrought in the favor of business and not art.

Later on as more facts came in, I began refusing to buy any albums/cds/tapes at all. The advent of p2p and all sorts of wonderful little corners where I find the music I want (usually hard to find) has made living the reality of no support to the industry at all pretty easy.

But what of the artists you say? Well, here's how I do it. I download like mad, but pay the artist directly. Here's an example:

Sonic Youth released a new album on Geffen, I download it as well as another Geffen SY album I was missing from my collection. As payment I goto sonic youths website, click the link for their own label SYR and purchase a copy of one of their own CD's directly from them. Later in the year, sonic youth rolls through town, I buy a t-shirt, a book of poetry and a canvas shopping bag from the stand outside the show- cos that stuff is theirs and they make the most profit from it.

Granted, if we were talking Creed here, the stuff for sale outside the show does not have the same level of intimacy that it does at a Sonic Youth gig. But, we are not talking about Creed. If for some strange reason I liked any of the output from that band, I would have no problem stealing a cd or two from them because everything about that band has been manufactured from start to finish. I don't get the guilt that drives me to the edge of the stage to hand the guys from Modest Mouse a 10 dollar bill, while telling them I downloaded their latest album off of the internet, so here's ten bucks. With Creed, you just simply can't do that, unless you win the "wow man, rockin" contest from the local Alternative market (read: radio station). The same contest that if you had any scruples would require a few showers to wash off all the dirty feelings you got from the payola scams going down left and right around you. The contest that would make you feel like you needed to be a woman so you could get your tits signed backstage by the lead singer. But wait.. I digress.

And why are we talking about Creed anyway? If you stop squinting Creed has nothing to do with alternative anything. We should be talking about Negativeland and the fact that they have made a career out of challenging the record industry about copyright issues. You should too.

Tell em all: "I choose Piracy!"

How about starting a new campaign? I personally have been on this campaign for a while now due to the insanity that is known as the music industry

Campaign title: I choose piracy!!

I have been refusing to buy Major Label albums for years now, trouble is even most of the indies are being fuXored by the majors and the RIAA through distribution and legislation deals that are wrought in the favor of business and not art.

Later on as more facts came in, I began refusing to buy any albums/cds/tapes at all. The advent of p2p and all sorts of wonderful little corners where I find the music I want (usually hard to find) has made living the reality of no support to the industry at all pretty easy.

But what of the artists you say? Well, here's how I do it. I download like mad, but pay the artist directly. Here's an example:

Sonic Youth released a new album on Geffen, I download it as well as another Geffen SY album I was missing from my collection. As payment I goto sonic youths website, click the link for their own label SYR and purchase a copy of one of their own CD's directly from them. Later in the year, sonic youth rolls through town, I buy a t-shirt, a book of poetry and a canvas shopping bag from the stand outside the show- cos that stuff is theirs and they make the most profit from it.

Granted, if we were talking Creed here, the stuff for sale outside the show does not have the same level of intimacy that it does at a Sonic Youth gig. But, we are not talking about Creed. If for some strange reason I liked any of the output from that band, I would have no problem stealing a cd or two from them because everything about that band has been manufactured from start to finish. I don't get the guilt that drives me to the edge of the stage to hand the guys from Modest Mouse a 10 dollar bill, while telling them I downloaded their latest album off of the internet, so here's ten bucks. With Creed, you just simply can't do that, unless you win the "wow man, rockin" contest from the local Alternative market (read: radio station). The same contest that if you had any scruples would require a few showers to wash off all the dirty feelings you got from the payola scams going down left and right around you. The contest that would make you feel like you needed to be a woman so you could get your tits signed backstage by the lead singer. But wait.. I digress.

And why are we talking about Creed anyway? If you stop squinting Creed has nothing to do with alternative anything. We should be talking about Negativeland and the fact that they have made a career out of challenging the record industry about copyright issues. You should too.

Tell em all: "I choose Piracy!"

Why do you people insist on posting the Salon link to Courtney's ripoff version of Steve Albini's article, which can be found (along with a lot of other great articles on the music industry and copyright at this page?

How 'bout just putting it out with no copyright and a statement to that effect. Some musicians do this, as do some authors and artists. Someone out there is gonna say that this would make it easy for propriety software companies to grab it up and use it without revealing their source code, and not adding to the community. So what? They already do this, GPL won't stop them. Also Lawrence Lessig has a good article in this month's Wired, (which I don't believe is online yet, sorry) about open sourcing closed source code. Well worth reading for you all that are interested in the subject.

http://www.mp3.com/news/222.html
http://www.musicalevolution.8k.com/albini.htm
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/albini .html
http://www.musicianassist.com/archive/article/ART/ a-1098-1.htm

And here is Steve Albini's version of the same thing, I've never figured out which one thought it up first, though. Given that Steve produced an album for Courtney's husband once, they may have well thought it up over beers or heroin.

Note to those who will say that I'm a dirty rotten no good pirate: I don't pirate music. I simply buy from indie labels. At least then, I'm sure that the artist gets most of my money.

I grew up on college radio (Rutgers and Princeton). Here is an article about my one of my favorite labels, Touch 'n Go Records. Current or past home of Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman, Jesus Lizard, Shellac), Butthole Surfers, Wedding Present and more. Apparently the Butthole Surfers tried to take over the distribution rights to their old albums (mmmm... Locust Abortion Technician) and the Touch n Go said "no way, I own the distro rights forever. that's how I make money." Made me think twice even about indie labels.

For a diatribe by "the greatest songwriter of all time"(tm) Steve Albini, visit Negativland's website.

In classic Big Black style, the liner notes for the Rapeman album "Two Nuns and a Pack Mule" contained descriptions of the songs instead of the lyrics. For "Steak and Black Onions", he wrote "We don't hate vegetarians. We just think they're funny."

All of this activity continues to show the passion of the consumer for music and the need for both legal protection and legitimate alternatives.

There are plenty of legitimate alternatives to RIAA-owned music. I agree, though, that consumers need legal protection...

My theory about the new internet - the new internet will be as wildly popular as new Coke.


You might be closer than you realize - New Coke probably served it's purpose well (possibly to cover up a planned formula change from expensive sugar, to sweeter corn syrup in the origional product; or as a means of attracting massive amounts of media attention as Negativland suggested on one of the tracks of Dispepsi).

Announcing a NEW! SHINY!! network with lots of NEW! SHINY!! content would catch the eye of the overstimulated, media saturated, passive good little consumer we are all supposed to be. Get AOL or MSN on board, running your special protocal, with maybe a lone proxy allowing communication with the oldnet (Old BAD! see how slow it is? Ohhhh! Shiny Link!!!) Simplify it, and make it gradually as passive of an experience as you can.

That's how you kill off the old net...

My theory about the new internet - the new internet will be as wildly popular as new Coke.


You might be closer than you realize - New Coke probably served it's purpose well (possibly to cover up a planned formula change from expensive sugar, to sweeter corn syrup in the origional product; or as a means of attracting massive amounts of media attention as Negativland suggested on one of the tracks of Dispepsi).

Announcing a NEW! SHINY!! network with lots of NEW! SHINY!! content would catch the eye of the overstimulated, media saturated, passive good little consumer we are all supposed to be. Get AOL or MSN on board, running your special protocal, with maybe a lone proxy allowing communication with the oldnet (Old BAD! see how slow it is? Ohhhh! Shiny Link!!!) Simplify it, and make it gradually as passive of an experience as you can.

That's how you kill off the old net...

This kind of reminds me of Squant.

Any new medium must offer something substantial for it to be adopted. In the case of CD's it was quality of music.

Not really. CDs didn't become widespread because people wanted a smaller, higher quality, more expensive alternative to vinyl. CDs won because record cmpanies shoved them down the throats of retailers. See this article.

Now, I aggree with others that these aren't meant to replace CDs. I expect that the same tactics described in the article linked above will be used to push people to DVD-audio. It's already gaining penetration with the players. They're probably just waiting 'til they have a good copy protection scheme.

The next wave in media will most likely be based not on size but on durability. This is the one area where all current forms of storage are severly lacking.

I seriously doubt that durability is a priority for the record companies. How do you continue to generate significant profit from the Grateful Dead if the medium is resistant to bongwater spills and being run over by a VW bus?

Where does the rest of that money go?

You might like to read Steve Albini's The Problem With Music.

Whenever the subjects of music, copyright and the recording industry come up, you should take the time to review Steve Albini's essay The Problem with Music . Please, read this before defending the major labels.

There's a wealth of other IP and copyright info on the Negativland (1,2)web-site.

Whenever the subjects of music, copyright and the recording industry come up, you should take the time to review Steve Albini's essay The Problem with Music . Please, read this before defending the major labels.

There's a wealth of other IP and copyright info on the Negativland (1,2)web-site.

You are right, CDs should really cost about 10 dollars, just like an LP album would have back in the day. Interestingly, enough, the artists are still paid their royalty fees based on the old 10 dollar album price, so you should be assured that only the record company is profiting. Read more at Negativland.

peas,
-Kabloona

OK, I'll admit that I am karma whorin' a bit, but I think that I wrote a fairly good essay and someone might even like reading it. I wrote this essay for my final project in an english class. While it is not comprehensive, even in my own knowledge, and certainly a small fraction of what is really evil about huge companies it was written to give people who just didn't understand what the big deal was about having large corporations in charge. I wrote it with the average person in mind (dumbed down and not at slashdot level). I do think that is a fairly good essay to show people to give them a solid idea of why you feel anger towards large corporations (if you do) without having to write an essay yourself or give a speech to every person you want to tell. I know that some things might not be entirely accurate but I did try to cover all angles, so don't come down too hard on the mistakes. Also, if you ever wanted to know just how much the big record companies screw artists out of money check out This link It is Steve Albini (producer of In Utero) talking about the manipulations of some recod companies. My point in this is that something like this WILL NOT help consumers, and is only used as a tool for further influence by large corporations. So anyway ...

Large Media Corporations are Abusing Their Power By: Simeon Bassett

The larger the corporation, the more collective influence they will have over their industry. There is a point in the rise of power of anything that can work as whole that the power becomes too great, and it is abused. It has happened in every society that has given power to a specific person or a group with similar motives. One example is the emperors of ancient China. One emperor, Quin Shihuangdi wanted himself to be remembered as the first emperor of China, and went on a crusade to erase anything from the past and to make China start over under his rule. He burned literature and destroyed libraries, reminiscent of the thought control portrayed in George Orwell's 1984. He originally wanted to have his personal army buried alive with him after his death to protect himself in the afterlife. This nightmarish example of tyranny seems to be almost cliché in history, but thought is not given seriously to the parallels of the present. The United States of America was founded so that people would have choices throughout their lives when dealing with their religious beliefs and any other elements that affect them. Branches of government were created to balance the power and create subtle conflict so that decisions are not made out of personal interest from a select few in power.

The biggest culprits of corporate over-control and consumer neglect are the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Sure, there are companies such as Microsoft, which is under scrutiny because of their monopolistic practices with their huge (90%) user base on desktop computers. Intel, which is out of hot water because of a recent rise of competition, took their time releasing incrementally faster microprocessors until they had someone to compete with (Advance Micro Devices). Cisco, who has a much-overlooked tendency to buy up competition before they turn into a threat, seems like the Microsoft of the networking world, but never seems to be under corporate pressure. All of these are examples of companies that have clearly abused their power in many instances, but they pale in comparison to the two giant alliances of media powers.

To quote Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when talking about digital movies: "Our attorneys believe we need to pursue this very cautiously. Industry wide compacts where you sit down and say, `This is what seven or eight companies are going to do' - that's very dangerous ground." To say that this is hypocritical is something of an understatement. Seven giant companies acting collectively is, for the most part, what the MPAA is. It is an organization made up of the following major film companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal Studios, Inc., and Warner Bros. Each one of these companies is a household name and together they make a massive monolith that has influence on almost everyone in the country. Unions of workers were created to give more power to the working class. A union of giants gives exponentially more power back to the titans of the corporate world. You can observe the control of the MPAA yourself by looking for their logo. Have you ever seen the symbol at the end of the credits of a movie with the oval shape, inner oval, and five dots in the middle? If you haven't, look for it and you'll find it - on almost every movie you see.

While I won't go into everything the MPAA has done that crosses the line between business tactics and monopolistic practices, and I won't debate whether or not Ronald Regan was right in cutting the separation of the movie industry and movie theatre chains, I will go into one recent, blatant, and insulting event that has taken place at the hands of the MPAA.

I say recent because the court decision in favor of the MPAA is still in the appeal process, blatant because hopefully it will be easy to see why this is such an extreme violation, and insulting because it flies in the face of the first amendment. A program written by Jon Johansen called DeCSS decrypts (unscrambles) the encoding that the MPAA has put onto all DVD movie discs (more on this later). He put the source code into the public domain, and not only was he attacked by the MPAA, but so were web sites that merely linked to places where the DeCSS source code could be acquired. Source code, which is text describing a program, can be read just as anything else can, and not jut by a computer. So why is it that it is not protected under free speech laws? The MPAA's answer would be that its primary purpose was the unauthorized copying of DVD discs. They maintained this stance throughout the trial even though they could not document one case of piracy due to the program. The intent as stated by the author and the users of the program was that they wanted to create their own DVD movie playing software so that they wouldn't be contained to using the software made by other companies, which is mostly sold commercially. It would enable them to watch the DVD movies they own on any computer they wanted to program for, not just ones sanctioned by the MPAA. This would actually increase the number of potential buyers of DVDs but the MPAA still came down hard. Even if the intent of the software was for copying DVD movies, it should still be considered free speech. If something can be sung in a song, or put on a t-shirt then clearly it can and should be treated as speech. In fact, both of these things were done, the song was taken down from mp3.com for "offensive lyrics" and the retailers of the t-shirts, copyleft.net, were given a subpoena by the MPAA. At least they're consistent.

Even if you overlook all of atrocious logic of the MPAA, the fact still remains that they sued and won their case against 2600 magazine for merely providing a link to the source code of the program. This is the equivalent of one person telling another where to buy gasoline and getting blamed because that person could potentially use it to harm someone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the judge presiding over the case, Judge Kaplan, is a former employee of the MPAA. How do they get away with all of this? Maybe it's the huge political involvement they have, from the parties thrown at Republican national conventions to the large amount of financial support for the Democratic Party.

This isn't an isolated problem either; the RIAA is just as bad or worse than the MPAA. They're recent bought with digital music distribution methods like Napster, have been much publicized by the media, but the sheer legal aggression that they have shown in their battle to maintain their current revenue stream without increasing their quality of service, has been passed over for the most part. To quote the RIAA website directly: "RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States." Ninety percent control is a lot. Especially when it covers the entire industry. Microsoft has about a ninety percent control over the operating systems of desktop computers (the program that keeps everything running) with Windows, but a parallel example would be if they controlled ninety percent of all the software commercially sold. To be fair, the RIAA is composed of many more companies than the MPAA. Any record label that meets their requirements can apply. This should make everything fine as long as being a part of the group doesn't require monopolistic practices like price control. But it does. They even have an acronym for it - MAP. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price scheme. It says that no company can advertise CD's for below a certain price. Shouldn't the FCC step in and do something about this? They are, and it's about time. Deals have been struck out of court so that companies that don't agree with advertising for a certain price, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City don't get angry. But now the FCC is finally stepping up and alleging that fixed pricing schemes have cost consumers $480 million.

This is a typical pattern for the RIAA; they seem to want both ends of every deal. Another example would be that they receive royalties from any blank CD sold. This is supposedly to compensate for anticipated piracy, but the cost is spread around to everyone who buys CD-R discs, whether they use the blank CD's to copy and resell music or not. If I as a musician want to make music and distribute it recorded on CD-R discs, then I am not only paying the company that made the disk, I am paying the RIAA, my major competitor, with every CD I create. You would think that they would be satisfied, but they have still created large-scale efforts against supposed music piracy. I guess the compensation isn't enough.

One such effort is the ongoing lawsuits against music distributors such as mp3.com and Napster. Napster has made no money at all from its efforts at the time of this writing and even though they distribute no music themselves, and the people that do distribute music do it with no money changing hands at any point, the RIAA still feels that they are a threat created through illegal means. Even more odd, is that Napster should technically be shielded by the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, which states that any distribution of music that is not being sold by any standard is legal. It was meant to facilitate the copying of music between friends and such, and at the same time, compensate the RIAA with royalties from the mediums of choice. Now that there is no medium, as with network file sharing, there are no royalties and the piece of legislation that the RIAA personally created, lobbied for, and oversaw through congress, is now Napster's suit (pun intended) of armor, and what the RIAA is fighting against.

Another battle being waged is over mp3.com. A service offered by mp3.com allowed people to listen to music they owned whenever they were at a computer connected to the Internet. This was seen as a violation of the RIAA's property and mp3.com was attacked in a lawsuit, which they lost, and which crippled the entire company. Now mp3.com must pay royalties on every song that is "owned" by the RIAA and that the service offers, which has forced them into charging fees for the users (the service was originally free). In the end people are paying more money to listen to songs they already own. Could all this tight control be that the RIAA is looking out for the interests of the artist? Not likely. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", stated in an essay that in a typical situation with a hot band the money is distributed as follows: Lawyer: $12,000, Agent: $7,500, Previous Label: $50,000, Studio: $52,000, Manager: 51,000, Producer: $90,000, Record Company: $710,000, Band member net income each: $4,031. That's a total of $976,531 that the band has made. It is unfortunate that each band member gets 00.41% of the money they create. Yes, less than half of a percent comes back to each band member.

The RIAA and MPAA do not care about the consumer, or the artists that are making them rich. They have used tactics and business practices that go far beyond the limits of capitalism. As I have alluded to, there is much more to the story and many more instances of the RIAA, MPAA, and many other large companies flexing their corporate muscle to gain an unfair advantage in their industry, and to ultimately exploit consumers.


Bibliography 1. Music retailers irked by CD discounting (2000). 5 Dec. 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/05/cds.re ut/index.html

2. Who we are (2000). href="http://www.riaa.com/About-Who.cfm

3. Cave, Damien. A hacker crackdown? (2000). 7 Aug. 2000 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/07/yoink _napster/index.html

4. Sabin, Rob. The Movie's Digital Future is in Sight and it Works (2000). 26 Nov. 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/arts/26SABI.html ?pagewanted=6

5. Albini, Steve. The Problem With Music. href="http://www.negativland.com/albini.html.

6. Gross, Robin D. Court Uphold Right to Digital Music (1999). 29 June. 1999 href="http://www.mp3.com/news/283.html?lang=eng

OK, I'll admit that I am karma whorin' a bit, but I think that I wrote a fairly good essay and someone might even like reading it. I wrote this essay for my final project in an english class. While it is not comprehensive, even in my own knowledge, and certainly a small fraction of what is really evil about huge companies it was written to give people who just didn't understand what the big deal was about having large corporations in charge. I wrote it with the average person in mind (dumbed down and not at slashdot level). I do think that is a fairly good essay to show people to give them a solid idea of why you feel anger towards large corporations (if you do) without having to write an essay yourself or give a speech to every person you want to tell. I know that some things might not be entirely accurate but I did try to cover all angles, so don't come down too hard on the mistakes. Also, if you ever wanted to know just how much the big record companies screw artists out of money check out This link It is Steve Albini (producer of In Utero) talking about the manipulations of some recod companies. My point in this is that something like this WILL NOT help consumers, and is only used as a tool for further influence by large corporations. So anyway ...

Large Media Corporations are Abusing Their Power By: Simeon Bassett

The larger the corporation, the more collective influence they will have over their industry. There is a point in the rise of power of anything that can work as whole that the power becomes too great, and it is abused. It has happened in every society that has given power to a specific person or a group with similar motives. One example is the emperors of ancient China. One emperor, Quin Shihuangdi wanted himself to be remembered as the first emperor of China, and went on a crusade to erase anything from the past and to make China start over under his rule. He burned literature and destroyed libraries, reminiscent of the thought control portrayed in George Orwell's 1984. He originally wanted to have his personal army buried alive with him after his death to protect himself in the afterlife. This nightmarish example of tyranny seems to be almost cliché in history, but thought is not given seriously to the parallels of the present. The United States of America was founded so that people would have choices throughout their lives when dealing with their religious beliefs and any other elements that affect them. Branches of government were created to balance the power and create subtle conflict so that decisions are not made out of personal interest from a select few in power.

The biggest culprits of corporate over-control and consumer neglect are the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Sure, there are companies such as Microsoft, which is under scrutiny because of their monopolistic practices with their huge (90%) user base on desktop computers. Intel, which is out of hot water because of a recent rise of competition, took their time releasing incrementally faster microprocessors until they had someone to compete with (Advance Micro Devices). Cisco, who has a much-overlooked tendency to buy up competition before they turn into a threat, seems like the Microsoft of the networking world, but never seems to be under corporate pressure. All of these are examples of companies that have clearly abused their power in many instances, but they pale in comparison to the two giant alliances of media powers.

To quote Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when talking about digital movies: "Our attorneys believe we need to pursue this very cautiously. Industry wide compacts where you sit down and say, `This is what seven or eight companies are going to do' - that's very dangerous ground." To say that this is hypocritical is something of an understatement. Seven giant companies acting collectively is, for the most part, what the MPAA is. It is an organization made up of the following major film companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal Studios, Inc., and Warner Bros. Each one of these companies is a household name and together they make a massive monolith that has influence on almost everyone in the country. Unions of workers were created to give more power to the working class. A union of giants gives exponentially more power back to the titans of the corporate world. You can observe the control of the MPAA yourself by looking for their logo. Have you ever seen the symbol at the end of the credits of a movie with the oval shape, inner oval, and five dots in the middle? If you haven't, look for it and you'll find it - on almost every movie you see.

While I won't go into everything the MPAA has done that crosses the line between business tactics and monopolistic practices, and I won't debate whether or not Ronald Regan was right in cutting the separation of the movie industry and movie theatre chains, I will go into one recent, blatant, and insulting event that has taken place at the hands of the MPAA.

I say recent because the court decision in favor of the MPAA is still in the appeal process, blatant because hopefully it will be easy to see why this is such an extreme violation, and insulting because it flies in the face of the first amendment. A program written by Jon Johansen called DeCSS decrypts (unscrambles) the encoding that the MPAA has put onto all DVD movie discs (more on this later). He put the source code into the public domain, and not only was he attacked by the MPAA, but so were web sites that merely linked to places where the DeCSS source code could be acquired. Source code, which is text describing a program, can be read just as anything else can, and not jut by a computer. So why is it that it is not protected under free speech laws? The MPAA's answer would be that its primary purpose was the unauthorized copying of DVD discs. They maintained this stance throughout the trial even though they could not document one case of piracy due to the program. The intent as stated by the author and the users of the program was that they wanted to create their own DVD movie playing software so that they wouldn't be contained to using the software made by other companies, which is mostly sold commercially. It would enable them to watch the DVD movies they own on any computer they wanted to program for, not just ones sanctioned by the MPAA. This would actually increase the number of potential buyers of DVDs but the MPAA still came down hard. Even if the intent of the software was for copying DVD movies, it should still be considered free speech. If something can be sung in a song, or put on a t-shirt then clearly it can and should be treated as speech. In fact, both of these things were done, the song was taken down from mp3.com for "offensive lyrics" and the retailers of the t-shirts, copyleft.net, were given a subpoena by the MPAA. At least they're consistent.

Even if you overlook all of atrocious logic of the MPAA, the fact still remains that they sued and won their case against 2600 magazine for merely providing a link to the source code of the program. This is the equivalent of one person telling another where to buy gasoline and getting blamed because that person could potentially use it to harm someone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the judge presiding over the case, Judge Kaplan, is a former employee of the MPAA. How do they get away with all of this? Maybe it's the huge political involvement they have, from the parties thrown at Republican national conventions to the large amount of financial support for the Democratic Party.

This isn't an isolated problem either; the RIAA is just as bad or worse than the MPAA. They're recent bought with digital music distribution methods like Napster, have been much publicized by the media, but the sheer legal aggression that they have shown in their battle to maintain their current revenue stream without increasing their quality of service, has been passed over for the most part. To quote the RIAA website directly: "RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States." Ninety percent control is a lot. Especially when it covers the entire industry. Microsoft has about a ninety percent control over the operating systems of desktop computers (the program that keeps everything running) with Windows, but a parallel example would be if they controlled ninety percent of all the software commercially sold. To be fair, the RIAA is composed of many more companies than the MPAA. Any record label that meets their requirements can apply. This should make everything fine as long as being a part of the group doesn't require monopolistic practices like price control. But it does. They even have an acronym for it - MAP. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price scheme. It says that no company can advertise CD's for below a certain price. Shouldn't the FCC step in and do something about this? They are, and it's about time. Deals have been struck out of court so that companies that don't agree with advertising for a certain price, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City don't get angry. But now the FCC is finally stepping up and alleging that fixed pricing schemes have cost consumers $480 million.

This is a typical pattern for the RIAA; they seem to want both ends of every deal. Another example would be that they receive royalties from any blank CD sold. This is supposedly to compensate for anticipated piracy, but the cost is spread around to everyone who buys CD-R discs, whether they use the blank CD's to copy and resell music or not. If I as a musician want to make music and distribute it recorded on CD-R discs, then I am not only paying the company that made the disk, I am paying the RIAA, my major competitor, with every CD I create. You would think that they would be satisfied, but they have still created large-scale efforts against supposed music piracy. I guess the compensation isn't enough.

One such effort is the ongoing lawsuits against music distributors such as mp3.com and Napster. Napster has made no money at all from its efforts at the time of this writing and even though they distribute no music themselves, and the people that do distribute music do it with no money changing hands at any point, the RIAA still feels that they are a threat created through illegal means. Even more odd, is that Napster should technically be shielded by the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, which states that any distribution of music that is not being sold by any standard is legal. It was meant to facilitate the copying of music between friends and such, and at the same time, compensate the RIAA with royalties from the mediums of choice. Now that there is no medium, as with network file sharing, there are no royalties and the piece of legislation that the RIAA personally created, lobbied for, and oversaw through congress, is now Napster's suit (pun intended) of armor, and what the RIAA is fighting against.

Another battle being waged is over mp3.com. A service offered by mp3.com allowed people to listen to music they owned whenever they were at a computer connected to the Internet. This was seen as a violation of the RIAA's property and mp3.com was attacked in a lawsuit, which they lost, and which crippled the entire company. Now mp3.com must pay royalties on every song that is "owned" by the RIAA and that the service offers, which has forced them into charging fees for the users (the service was originally free). In the end people are paying more money to listen to songs they already own. Could all this tight control be that the RIAA is looking out for the interests of the artist? Not likely. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", stated in an essay that in a typical situation with a hot band the money is distributed as follows: Lawyer: $12,000, Agent: $7,500, Previous Label: $50,000, Studio: $52,000, Manager: 51,000, Producer: $90,000, Record Company: $710,000, Band member net income each: $4,031. That's a total of $976,531 that the band has made. It is unfortunate that each band member gets 00.41% of the money they create. Yes, less than half of a percent comes back to each band member.

The RIAA and MPAA do not care about the consumer, or the artists that are making them rich. They have used tactics and business practices that go far beyond the limits of capitalism. As I have alluded to, there is much more to the story and many more instances of the RIAA, MPAA, and many other large companies flexing their corporate muscle to gain an unfair advantage in their industry, and to ultimately exploit consumers.


Bibliography 1. Music retailers irked by CD discounting (2000). 5 Dec. 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/05/cds.re ut/index.html

2. Who we are (2000). href="http://www.riaa.com/About-Who.cfm

3. Cave, Damien. A hacker crackdown? (2000). 7 Aug. 2000 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/07/yoink _napster/index.html

4. Sabin, Rob. The Movie's Digital Future is in Sight and it Works (2000). 26 Nov. 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/arts/26SABI.html ?pagewanted=6

5. Albini, Steve. The Problem With Music. href="http://www.negativland.com/albini.html.

6. Gross, Robin D. Court Uphold Right to Digital Music (1999). 29 June. 1999 href="http://www.mp3.com/news/283.html?lang=eng

"Some of your friends are probably already this fucked."

There's a copy of that article here

--
Garett

Well, I already KNEW about the fourth color, Squant... how about some NEW news?
---

the artists don't have to sign the contracts. But they do. Why? Because it's a damn good deal for them. Relatively talentless musicians make millions of dollars.

Squant

And here I thought Negativland was pulling my leg with this so-called discovery of the color squant.

Boy, is my face sqaunt!

-- Shamus

This space for rent

Thanks to the forward-thinking folks at NewHew, many of us have been artificially tetrachromatic for some time now... The fourth, newly discovered primary color is called "Squant" and you can find out more about it at http://www.negativland.com/squant/index.html. Unfortunately the plugin is not available for Linux, yet.

Happy Squanting!

--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,

Scientists are already developing new monitors for tetrachromats.

Actually, here's the link. The plug-in works great, once you get it installed...

We're bought and sold for corporate gold

Does this mean that we finally have people that can see squant without the special plugin now?

Make sure that any color-matching plugin you use has Squant support.

The FSF rep wasn't able to respond to this, but from my point of view, SDMI's ability to make a limited number of digital fulfills the "free speech" needs of the FSF, which was their main concern.

Unfortunately, Fair Use is a defense, which typically requires going to court. There is a precedent set in Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose (aka the 2 Live Crew "Pretty Woman" case,) where parody was accepted as Fair Use by the Supreme Court.

We're bought and sold for corporate gold

There's some stuff on their site

This is only happening because of a popular mystique surrounding compuer language. The motion picture industry wants to control how people watch DVDs.
Say the way to watch DVDs on your Linux box had a regular language solution. You just had to type, "pretty please play this DVD." This would piss the industry players off, but they wouldn't be able to ban people from tellling each other how to watch DVDs on their computers.

If the motion picture industry doesn't want people watching DVDs, they should come up with a way to prevent it that can't be bypassed with information that is simple to explain in an email. It would be like Ford making a car that can be stolen by saying "please open and start." If they're dumb enough to make a car like that, they can't whine about people telling each other how to steal them, and expect the gov't to launch a brigade of mind police to make sure nobody is spreading the news.

The same thing is happening with the music debate. The music industry won't be able to solve the problem of music sharing through technology, so they'll try to use legislation and enforcement. The problem is that the draconian nature of that enforcement will have far more devastating consequences to society than any degree of "copyright infringement."

This brings up a central and serious problem. The single most influential force acting on our democratic and legislative processes is lawyers and lobbyists employed by big business. This is a problem!

Negativeland has an incredible resource on copyright and related issues. Fairtunes is becoming a great place to get involved with these issues. Lots of stuff happening!

You need to read this: http://www.negativland.com/minidis.html to get an idea of how fast a format can go away when big money gets behind the new thing. I'm not saying it's a done deal, since consumers effectively deep-sixed DivX, but I don't think CD's are nearly as permanent as you think they will be.

"First off, I'd like to ask just how much credibility does one have who writes "to" as "2" and "be" as "b"."

About as much credibility as Salvador Dali, a man who never painted a scene *I* recognized...

"Obviously, this is just another disgruntled musician denouncing the very agency which protects him. Just look at what he did with his title, he became "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" just to show his disdain for the RIAA. Yet he fails to realize that without them, he would have no fame or fortune."

Heh. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Have you even read Courtney Love's breakdown of the numbers? I think he shows a lot of courage by speaking up. Normally it's the people that know what side their bread is buttered on that keep their traps shut. Do you think three kids in a VW that call themselves the Turnipheads are going to get this coverage?

"Instead of speaking out against the RIAA, he needs to grow up and realize just how much they've done for him."

I think that maturity is taking in life experiences and acting on them with integrity. What do you think?

My .02
Quux26

An essay describing the history of CD manufacturing and price-gouging can be found at:
http://www.negativland.com/minidis.html

Lots of other information on the record industry, copyright, and intellectual property issues is available on their site.

heck I wanna know when the Beastie Boys sample The Beatles and be notified and give the option to follow up on the samples within the songs.
As someone who routinely beats samples into a whir of unrecognizable sound, and would prefer not to pay any "sample clearance fees" whenver I sample anything. You want a rights issue, TacoBoy? You are NOT free to sample anything you want to. Maybe you might want to read what negativland has to say about Intellectual Property.

If you want more truly ugly details on how artists get fucked by big labels, read the depressing but informative essay The Problem With Music by Steve Albini.