Still More RIAA News

We just did an article about the RIAA's mendacity with statistics, and here come some more: first, someone has gone to the trouble to deconstruct their income figures over the past few years, showing that the RIAA's lack of investment in new releases is in itself sufficient to explain any dropping sales, and second, this website concerning the music industry settling a price-fixing lawsuit, which I believe is this one, filed two years ago.

Comments

Re:insight ?

[glesga_kiss]

kazaa and the like are simply about searching for music you know of and downloading it. The community feel is completly removed.

WinMX and AudioGalaxy both had chat rooms to discuss anything, including new music. WinMX also has a instant messaging system, and I've come across many great artists through talking to people on it. But, I prefer AllMusic for looking up new music, their "related artists" feature is pretty good.

I don't know why everyone prefers Kazza, or places it at the forefront of any p2p discussion. WinMX is much more configurable and you get great results if you know how to use it. It's like comparing Notepad with vi, sure notpad may be easier to figure out, but it's pretty limited.

Kazza is also full of spyware. I'm constantly pointing this out to friends that run it and are completely unaware of this.

Re:RTFA

[banzai51]

On the point of calling the RIAA a monopoly, I think it's perfectly fair.

Fair? Yes. Accurate? No. The RIAA is a cartel.

Re:Quibble

[theonetruekeebler]

The RIAA is not a record producer or publisher. It's an industry group that represents producers and publishers. [...] I point this out because it gets grating every time it's suggested that the RIAA is some giant monopoly that controls what gets published and whatnot. It isn't.

It is not a single-entity monopoly; rather, it is a trust. This is where anti-trust gets its name.

(Oversimlification follows Back in the day, trusts (e.g. the bourbon trust, the railroad trust) were organizations of the major companies in an industry. The trust's members would all play by the trust's rules, and the trust's rules often included ways to prevent non-trust companies from surviving. In the case of the railroad trust, for example, they would charge exhorbitant fees to connect local lines to trust-owned main lines; or about once a year they would design and patent new car-connectors, again charging exhorbitant licensing fees to use them. In other words, they would drive their competitors into ruin, then buy them out for a pittance.

Doubtless, the RIAA and its members have worked very carefully to avoid appearing to be a trust in any legal sense, but as the lawsuit referenced in this article claimed, the RIAA has been used as a way to improperly fix prices among its members.