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Apple and Pepsi Ad Sports RIAA Targets
eefsee writes "USA Today is running a story about Pepsi's Superbowl ad for their iTunes promotion. The ad will apparently feature teens sued by the RIAA, including one young woman who holds out a Pepsi and says, 'We are still going to download music for free off the Internet.' The RIAA response? 'This ad shows how everything has changed.'"
Corporate forces taking aim at the RIAA shows that the RIAA's business model is failing, and no amount of lawsuits, subpoenas, and para-military crap is going to stop it.
Either the RIAA can join in and make money, or they can sit back and hopelessly try to defend an oppressive business model that has been rendered technologically obsolete.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
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unfortunately taking a jab at the RIAA like this will do absolutely nothing. It will take more than a commercial make fun of them to make them stop this witch hunt.
As the RIAA responds "this is the way it is supposed to be" they will probably be filling out the next batch of legal filings accusing more senior citizens of stealing songs. The worst part of all this is that here they are making money off legal downloads while they attack people like rabid dogs trying to make more money.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Some 20 teens sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, which accuses them of unauthorized downloads
The entire article is wrong. They were busted for being uploaders (sharers) of music, not downloaders. In fact, it is perfectly legal to download music off the internet. It is against copyright law to share it, which is what they were doing.
Learn your values from megacorps, they know better than you! They never diverge from the moral high road, and are utterly devoid of corruption. Racketeering, denial of civil rights, litigation, employee shafting, price fixing are all available. Which value do we get to see megacorps teach our children next?
...the RIAA is all in favor of the spot. They still get their royalty money for the 100 million "free" downloads.
I think you have this wrong! We still live in the bleak and horrible past where most of the music the world has made is stuffed in vaults. Where most of the money which is used to buy music goes to the management. Sort of like directing cigarette advertising towards kids, and then telling them they can't smoke! Who exactly is wrong here?
Fuck them. Once again, it's not theft. It's copyright infringement. Fuck them.
Isnt this basically Pepsi paying the RIAA to distribute the songs, passing the buck onto the Pepsi drinkers, and having the RIAA kick back realizing that they're now abusing caffeine addiction to force their music fees?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
The radio stations in my town (Orlando, FL) call pretty much all their promotional CD giveaways "Win it before you can burn it" or a similar reference to downloading music online. One of the rock stations even played a promo for awhile that basically poked fun at "little Billy" for downloading music off the internet and while they didn't say it directly, prison rape was implied with a soap dropping reference. If this promo was run as a Slashdot post, it would have been modded down as troll.
Let's face it, while an ad during the Superbowl seems like a big deal to us geeks, people ALREADY know about teens being busted by the RIAA. While the buzz has definitly gotten around to non-techie people, people just aren't getting worked up over this enough to actually do anything about it.
As much as it's considered taboo to say "downloading music is stealing" on Slashdot, that's what many people who do not download music see it as - teens getting sued by the RIAA for stealing music. It really doesn't tug on your heartstrings when that's what you see it as. You gotta remember, the average person who doesn't use P2P services probably does not understand the chances for the wrong people getting accused by the RIAA. They don't realize the RIAA is basically extorting people for absurd amounts of money to settle or face civil prosecution and all the costs associated with it. They don't realize the RIAA is abusing its monopoly and rips off its artists. All people see are teens stealing music.
I see something much more sinister in the Pepsi commercial. I see the RIAA getting its way for $1 a track. I see once insubordinate teens that have been "shown the light" by becoming corporate whores and bowing to the RIAA's will. It only took Apple 20 years to be associated with a superbowl commercial totally opposite of their 1984 vision. This time, big brother wins.
It's a good thing I drink coke.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
yeah . . . wave one hand in the air to take attention away from what the other is doing.
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this ad, while ostensibly taking a shot at the RIAA, is actually helping them. It points out that these kids were sued for one, reminding a lot of people that the threat still exists. It makes i-tunes a very attractive alternative. The more popular i-tunes is, the less popular p2p necessarily becomes.
and does the RIAA make money from songs sold on i-tunes?
Um, you know, i think they do . .
so if you were thinking of screaming 'TAKE THAT RIAA! HELLS YEAH PEPSI!", maybe you should take a moment to consider that pepsi is probably just using your anti-RIAA sympathies to leverage its brand.
*disclaimer - i personally think i-tunes rocks. pay for your music . . . just don't buy RIAA.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
but my question is this: Do you think Apple is really charging Pepsi 99 cents per track, or do you think they got a volume discount? I would like to think that Pepsi got a smokin' deal on however many tracks they purchased to giveaway, meaning that the RIAA isn't making as much money off of the Pepsi tracks as it would if they were all independently purchased...
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
"An average geek downloads that much stuff in 2-3 months"
An average geek with a 3MB cable modem does that much stuff in 2-3 HOURS.
Pikers.
Try being a football statistician- then tell me the 30 seconds between plays is "downtime".
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Sorry, for picking you from among the many who are echoing such sentiments, but how is this "less evil than before"? As far as I can tell (not having yet seen the ad and given the article's details), the former defendants will be on the tube, hats in hand, promoting a pay service to obtain files over the Internet. Furthermore, the AAC files Apple sells on the iTMS are DRM'ed. This is everything the RIAA could have hoped for: former P2P'ers nodding to the beat of paying for their downloads.
Also keep in mind that members of the RIAA get a take of money earned by the iTMS if those tracks are copyrighted by RIAA-affiliated labels, and many are.
Don't get me wrong. I think iTMS is great (I'm a Mac head from way back who loves UNIX) and have maybe a couple dozen songs with the "m4p" extension. I also used Napster maybe a dozen times and hated the RIAA's campaign to destroy one of the best databases the world has ever known. But with the exception of profiting from digital music distribution, I don't see how the RIAA has changed at all.
blog
Downloading is not what got any of these people in trouble. Sharing -- making the songs available for download -- got them in trouble. They cannot tell what individuals downloaded. They can tell what individuals made available for download and confirm it by downloading it!
If you want to know why the RIAA is hip to this, just think a moment. It blurs the activity. Illegal downloading is now the problem in the public's mind. By saying they litigated on the demand side rather than the supply side, they make people worry about whether the downloads can be tracked.
I respect that the RIAA needs to enforce the publishing rights of its members. Given how creepy most people think the RIAA is, I don't see why the reinforce the perception by perpetuating a lie.
Why shouldn't they compliment the ad? The RIAA wants the money they (and their component labels) get when you buy a CD. Since (as many others have noted) they also get a cut of the cost of a track downloaded through legal music services on the Internet (and have probably set their fee to divide out to the same amount per song), the RIAA has no reason to discourage downloads from which they get their appropriate payment (and the control they assert in what is offered).
RIAA labels still have preferential access to music on radio, they still control their supply chain, and they're getting paid. What's even better is that the while the ad might portray Apple as standing up to the RIAA, Apple (and its customers) are paying them for the music all the same. It's like beer ads that preach mass-market nonconformity as a panacea for conformity - it allows people to feel that they're hurting the RIAA by buying iTunes while giving RIAA precisely what it wants from them (control over music choice, and money).
The RIAA should be cheering - they negate some of their opposition and get paid if they just sit back and shut up. They haven't changed - they still want control over aspects of music they have already shown they can't be trusted with. They're just smarter about it.
Life Lesson #4,582: The media is not your political watch dog. However much they pretend to be for informing you of important / relevant information, the only thing they will air is stuff that sells.
Fact: MoveOn.org does not pay for ads on a regular basis on TV, and certainly not on CBS.
Fact: Pepsi does
Fact: Politics and voting are of little concern to over 50% of the population
Fact: Comercials that are entertaining generate better response from the viewing audience.
Fact: The superbowl is not a political forum, nor is it supposed to be used as such.
Conclusion: CBS does not care for, nor will they air the MoveOn.org ad, especialy given that it's a political ad whihc means (IIRC) they then have to give equal time to an ad supporting bush. CBS does care about pepsi ads because papsi ads sell products, which generate more advertising revenue for them and also keep viewers entertained.
Therefore: You should stop expecting the media to be your political watchdog.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Except that the Bush-in-30-seconds thing isn't "informed political debate" it's rabid anti-Bush propagada. What else did anyone expect from judges like Micheal Moore, Carville and Franken? Their goal never was to promote an open, frank discussion of political issues, it was to promote hysteria. And what do Jack Black, Margaret Cho and Eddie Vedder know about politics anyway? An 'informed political debate' involves looking at an issue from all sides and studying all possible ramifications. These guys didn't even pretend to do that.
Apple gets 35 cents per song, but they must pay for the servers, services, programming, and maybe even part of the cost of encoding the songs.
'cause that post looks like something an 8 year-old would produce.
Blar.
I am a recent football fan, and I strongly agree with everything in the parent to my post.
/. for a few minutes before the game, just check out the rules and try to get a general idea of what's happening.
For a long time I was very anti-football. I saw it as a sport for idiot jocks that gets them billions of dollars a year. But then I was living with some rabid football fans for awhile, and I started watching.
Now, I'm hooked. Much like a turn based strategy game, if you don't know what's going on it's boring as hell (imagine watching a game of Civ with no clue whatsoever?). But once you know *why* there's pass interference, or false start, or the difference between an incidental face mask and one that's a personal foul, it becomes engrossing. Hell, I went out and bought the complete rules to football once I really started getting in to it. It's cool to be able to call out a penalty and then see the refs call it after you saw it.
Also, try to understand the different types of defense that are going on (e.g., zone (where you cover the ball / offensive players in an area) vs. man (where you cover a particular offensive player), and the blitz (where you send guys out of zone or man coverage to get the quarterback) ). Defensive stragety is *quite* interesting and fun, not to mention with a large element of psychology thrown in.
If you're going to be watching the super bowl anyway (for the ads) you might as well try to figure out what's going on. Instead of reading
In the end, I'm convinced that the reasons geeks hate football is because we got beat up by the football players in high school.
Rapid anti-Bush propaganda? Check out the ad. All it says is that the deficit being created now will be paid for by our children. That's really a very moderate and, in the classic sense of the word, conservative point of view.
Naturally, CBS is under no obligation to air the ad, but it is upsetting that such a mild ad gets the shaft while a company like Pepsi can pretty much do whatever it wants.
Remember, these are our airwaves. The same airwaves that will broadcast ads from Bush' drug policy office, in case anyone was getting worried about "equal time". If an organization is willing to pay fair market value, I see no good reason, aside from outright obscenity or something the FCC wouldn't allow, why they should be stopped from airing their views, commercial or political. If Pepsi can nudge the RIAA, then MoveOn can nudge Bush for the same dime.
well that's sort of true...yet I think the lesson might also be that the RIAA is roadkill and the subject of public mockery. Sure Pepsi is milking this incident for their own profit, but that doesn't make RIAA less like roadkill. The Pepsi drinking crowd and the music sharing crowd are overlapping sets; Pepsi is saying "we are listening" and that counts for a lot when RIAA certainly are not listening. Has no practical impact on music sharing of course.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
That often paraphrased quote attributed to Ben Franklin comes to mind. Something like Better to say nothing and be thought a fool then to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Before you all go looking for the quote there is like a thousand variations on it and I am just giving the general idea.
After getting MoveOn.org's email yesterday, I called CBS NYC yesterday to voice my disappointment in their judgement, but now that I'm looking into the issue, it's not black-and-white.
The MoveOn email and web site front page say that CBS will be airing ads from the White House. What they don't say is that the ads are from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Now, while I'm no fan of ONDCP, I wouldn't say that their anti-drug ad is likely to be a political one.
The question is: why is CBS refusing MoveOn's ad. One of the posters below says "No political ads have ever been aired during the Superbowl". If that's true, CBS is just continuing the precedent, not displaying a double standard.
If I get a loan from a bank to buy a house or a car, and I pay the loan back on time and in good faith, the bank doesn't keep my house or car. Not during the payback period and not after.
Now if I'm PAID to make a house or car, I don't get to keep the house or car I made.
If I don't like my employer, there are plenty of other cats to go to. The RIAA is a monopoly of the available employers for a particular industry. Smaller employers (indie labels) have a hard time breaking in.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
That isn't the lesson that I take away from this. This is the fans finally telling the recording industry what the artist have wanted to tell them for a long time. To put it politely, "Goodbye."
People want the convenience of downloading music. They want it on demand. And thanks to the net, there is no reason that it can't be provided that way. RIAA was scared. They know that the main hold they have on artists is their promotional muscle and distribution chain. Well if artists can get their stuff to fans on the net and make themselves known there, what do they need a record company for? Artists have hated the recording industry's contracts for a very long time.
RIAA didn't want music downloads to happen. Instead, they've dragged their feet too long. Now the fans have somewhere else to go. And all the indie record companies who are willing to deal with the artists on a more even basis should have no problem stealing them away from RIAA's members.
May I educate you please? You seem to be in desperate need of it.
The RIAA doesn't produce anything. That's not its purpose. It's an industry trade association.
The RIAA is made up of record labels. Record labels don't produce anything either. That's not their job. Their job is basically to be venture capitalists.
Artists produce things, along with producers and engineers and all the myriad technical professionals that help them. A guy with a guitar can't create anything tangible without money, and that's where the label comes in. A label listens to an artist, makes an educated guess about that artist's commercial potential, and offers (or chooses not to offer) financial backing proportionate to that potential.
So a record label is basically a VC firm.
Now, why do record labels choose to invest in some artists and not others? Because they know what's going to sell and what isn't. They know this better than anybody else, because they've got decades worth of empirical data. So they know that Britney Spears is going to sell $X billion in concert ticket sales, $Y billion in CD sales, and $Z billion in cross-promotional and other sundry revenues over the next 5 years. They also know that a fringe act like Zero 7 is going to do similar business, with all the numbers divided by ten thousand. (Sometimes they're wrong; witness Moby. He generated ten thousand times more business than anybody expected him to with his "Play" album. Same thing with the soundtrack to "O Brother Where Art Thou," except it was more like a hundred times instead of ten thousand.)
So here's how it all boils down: people want to listen to music. There are certain kinds of music they want to listen to a lot, and other kinds they want a little, and still other kinds they couldn't give two shits about. Record labels know this, because they've been around the block a time or two. So they can make educated guesses about which artists are going to make money and which aren't. They invest their money accordingly.
Let's sum up: who's producing crap? The artists. Why? Because people want to hear it.
The RIAA has nothing to do with it.
That's a great lesson to teach. Download music, get caught, get famous in a Super Bowl ad. What a bleak and horrible future we live in.
I think Apple and Pepsi are trying to show what world we are about to live in if nothing is done, that a 12 year old can get their asses sued just for downloading a song on the Internet. Granted, sharing the song is a different story, but no one would ever get sued for copying a song on the radio, which is pretty much what this kid was doing. Oh wait, but thats right, MP3s are digital quality.... err but they aren't.. or are they?
hrmm....
...stuffed in vaults. Safes, fireproof boxes... most of what was available on vinyl, never made it to cd. most of what is recorded, was never thought to have "commercial" value in the mass production sense. So, I mean actually stuffed in vaults, decaying. Films also suffer the same fate. By the contracts the band itself signs you, of course, mean the only viable contract. As if there were an alternative. You, of course, mean the contract where the artist pays for the wining and dining necessary to get airplay. "Payola" is such an old term! They're now called "music marketers," the most influential of which is actually upstairs from my office.
In the bleak and horrible past, people made decisions for us.
Supporting legal music downloading is the dumbest thing the RIAA ever did. Why, you ask?
The RIAA currenly has a monopoly on physical distribution. No pirate could every touch them when it comes to their ability to crank out physical CD's. However, once they get the downloading in to the mainstream, (and I mean making it totally replace cds) they will have changed the market so that they are totally obsolete. The RIAA cannot survive in an online world...they are too big, too slow, and too hated.
Let's face it, when it comes to the internet, Geeks have a thousand times more resources for distributing information than the RIAA ever will. What's to stop new bands from using services like itunes to be promoted alongside RIAA bands, and then selling their own music over the net?
Anyways, here's to the RIAA! Thanks for helping to make a world where you are irrelevant!
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Fair enough, but I'd argue that for most folks this is coming out of whatever "beverage budget" you already had. Instead of a Coke or an orange juice, you're buying a Pepsi.
It's also an economic multiplier -- "hey look, I'm getting a drink AND a song..." Or, "Hey, my drink/song costs less now..."
Yes, some outliers are going to buy litres of Pepsi, but I still think that most folks aren't actually going to drink more fluids as a result.
Yes, the 12 year old and 70 year old would be a great pair. I think they missed their mark though...to really make the point they could feature:
1) one of the millions who filed with the anti-trust suit in which the RIAA inflated CDS between 1995-2000. We're the victims here...
2) Prince or the Dixie Chicks explaining lawsuits around their unfair contracts with their record companies.
3) Howard Berman (Rep. Senator fighting P2P). I'd love to see Pepsi ask him about the 55 million in lobby money the RIAA spends a year.
4) Mitch Bainwol himself. I'd like to see them ask about the data posted on the RIAA site and have him explain in detail the "loss of sales" spreadsheet for last year. Apparently, the people who put together these figures assume you will buy several copies of the same CD for your car, your stereo, and your computer. It would be fun for him to watch him explain this while he's drinking a pepsi.
5) Interview someone from the CD-R division of any one of the Music companies and ask them why downloading music is wrong.
Come to my house on the 2nd and you're getting coke....
With 100M download codes, and the need to keep them short because they're
printed on bottle caps, how long until scripters start probing for music codes....
Damn pirates.
Talk about reaping what you sow.
When you turn the industry into something about trendiness and glitz and everything except actual quality of product, this is what you get.
Of course, of the 10, all 10 are just glitz products, and the actual skilled musicians, pot-bellies and ugly faces and all, sit at home and release quality albums in batches of 1000 on independent labels. Or they play in small jazz clubs and such.
If you create the bits in question. You have the RIGHT to a monopoly on its distrubution.
Sure you do...thats why its called copyright, and violating that right is called copyright infringement. Still doesn't have anything to do with theft.
yes. like quarterbacks, they get too much credit when they win, too much blame when they lose. reagan never took credit for the jobs created. he always credited the american people. it is the nature of politicians to take credit for the sun rising in the morning, and blaming their opponents for the night. business cycles happen, snowstorms happen, nothing government does or doesn't do is going to change any of that.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.