RIAA Dumps Unsold Inventory to Settle Anti-Trust Case

theodp writes "A music windfall promised to WA public schools and libraries from last year's $143M anti-trust settlement with the recording industry wasn't all it was cracked up to be. While WA got 115,241 music CDs out of the deal, folks aren't quite sure what to do with the odd collection, which includes 387 CDs containing explicit lyrics by Big Pun, 310 copies of Will Smith's Willenium and 48 copies of Spooky Scary Sounds for Halloween from Martha Stewart."

Comments

RIAA Criminally At Fault?

[mfh]

From the Article: Raunchy music wasn't what anyone in education or the Attorney General's Office had in mind when they announced that a windfall of music was coming to public schools and libraries from last year's $143 million anti-trust settlement with the recording industry.

Yes, but it's exactly what the RIAA had in mind, so couldn't the Attourney General charge the RIAA with the intentional corruption of youth? Gosh if the world was perfect, the RIAA would be charged criminally for trying to push explicit lyrics on children.

Re:RIAA Criminally At Fault?

[Troed]

RIAA would be charged criminally for trying to push explicit lyrics on children

Are you by any chance a US citizen?

In the rest of the world we let the parents raise their children .. really .. what do you think happens to kids who listen to "explict lyrics"? I'm seriously curious.

Re:RIAA Criminally At Fault?

[BandwidthHog]

I generally agree with you, but I can't fault the corps *entirely* for the whole conspicuous consumerism thing, as they're just doing what they're supposed to, i.e. trying to sell as many widgets as possible. It's kinda like the informercial phenomenon... it's not that the producers of those things are evil magicians who can make otherwise intelligent people call in a credit card number, it's that our society turns out so many otherwise functional people who *do* call in credit card numbers.

At heart I suppose I'm (to some extent) of the Adam Smith persuasion, and that this rampant consumerism is a problem that needs to sort itself out "naturally" but I'm really starting to wonder if "the system" is capable of correcting this one, as where's the profit margin in instilling stronger critical thinking skills in our youth?

Re:RIAA Criminally At Fault?

[DrEldarion]

Not really. There's nothing wrong with the RIAA in theory. It's just that in practice, things didn't go so well. If the RIAA cared more about the artists and consumers, it could be an excellent organization.

Re:RIAA Criminally At Fault?

[ryanwright]

You're talking about quality of education issues. The grandparent, and I, were talking about social skills.

There are some parents that simply shouldn't homeschool. They use homeschooling as an excuse to just keep the kids home, or otherwise don't do a very good job of it. These kids can end up not having the skills they need to function in the real world.

A bad thing? Sure. Isolated to homeschoolers? Far from it. Huge numbers of children graduate from the public school system lacking the same skills. Why? They had bad parents! If you look at successful adults vs unsuccessful adults, homeschooled or not, you'll usually find that parenting, or a lack thereof, contributed to that child's development more than anything else.

Now I will link you to the results of a study that show 74 percent of homeschooled adults aged 18 to 24 have taken college-level courses, compraed to 46 percent of the general U.S. population. Link. In other words, a large majority of homeschoolers are going on to college, compared to less than half of everyone else. This tells me these parents are doing a better job than the teachers you place your trust in.

To further solidify my "value of education" argument, I'll link you to this CBS News article that says, and I quote:

"Homeschoolers have been in the news in recent years, taking top honors at events such as the National Spelling Bee and National Geographic Bee."

Doesn't look like their education is lacking at all.

Wow...what a bunch of scumbags...

[FatSean]

An who in the gov't decided that shitty music that doesn't sell is an appropriate method of payment?!?!

Disgusted. I'm going to go steal some music off of the internet now.

Easy Answer!

[midifarm]

EBay!!!

Peace

Use them in science class

[amelagar]

They can use them in science class, for example to build a CD Spectroscope.

Compare to Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Microsoft would have been allowed to pay off its anti-trust with millions of copies of MS Bob?

What kind of an idiot agreed to this?

Happened here in South Carolina

[JLSigman]

The public library system got a bunch of CDs dumped on them, but the district attorney said that they're not allowed to put out the ones by Eminem or other profane artists. So not even adults could borrow them. God forbid we be allowed to decide for ourselves... (and down here in the South, they decide that God does forbid quite a bit of free-thinking)

Re:Artist royalties?

[curator_thew]

"Of course, if they're excess inventory"

You've probably come across a nice technicality: the recording contracts with the artists probably state that certain forms of offloading unsold inventory don't result in royalties, and so this "dumping" is a nice break for them: not only do they avoid paying hard cash, but they avoid paying royalties (which they may have been liable for it they dumped off the stock at $1/each), and avoid wastage (i.e. if they dumped the stock into an incinerator for no gain, and an overall loss [taking into account costs of production]).

Very saavy move by the RIAA, which only goes to show how commercially slick and smart they are in business terms, as opposed to the schools who were have been completely shafted because they probably assumed they were going to get some useful music out of the deal.

an experiment

[freddyfred89]

Sam Barros of PowerLabs has some tentative results regarding the point at which CDs explode due to excessive rotational velocity.

Why not bring those CDs down to the wood shop and gather additional observations on the ability of CDs to handle speed? Its surely more amusing than building a bread box. And, with 115,241 observations, I'm pretty sure the central limit theorem will give you a more reliable sample estimate of the true failure point.

I wonder if your shop teach has the cojones ...

Re:This stuff is useful, look for yourself!

[Warlok]

Big Pun is not an example of how NOT to speak. It is more an example of how TO speak

IMHO, Big Pun is an example of the fractionalization of the American culture. With businesses, government agencies, and schools trying to promote homogenization and equality for all, culturally we're breaking into distinct groups with very little cross-over and intermingling. The fact that it continues to happen despite the efforts of teachers and government leaders tells me either a) this is nromal natural process (like tides) that can't be stopped, or b) it's an unnatural process that is more powerful than the people who want to stop it.

I'm not a sociologist, but I've seen them on TV.

Settlements suck

[bigbigbison]

Class-action lawsuit settlements are one of the biggest scams out there. Friends, family and I have been in 3 or 4 of these over the years and every time and in every settlement I've heard of the cunsomers get crap like coupons -- to buy more products from the people who screwed the consumers to begin with!

The only people that profit are *gasp* the lawyers.

Junk in My Garage

[Esion Modnar]

So it's like I get sued, and then tell them I have no money, but I can settle by letting them have all the junk in my garage, and that's even including that accessory bit thingy which goes with I-know-not-what.

That RIAA settlement is worse than nothing. It's a slap in the face.

Re:It must be good stuff, it was on the Billboard!

[Ralph Wiggam]

In 22 channel surround you might be able to hear some way that Ice Ice Baby's beat is different from Under Pressure's. That video clip of Vanilla Ice explaining how his song is nothing like Under Pressure is one of the funniest things MTV has ever shown. For those of you who havn't seen it, Vanilla Ice says "Their version goes like this...ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding...and my version goes like this...ding-ding-ding-dinga-ding-ding". I've probably seen that clip a dozen times and I have yet to tell any difference between his two renditions.

-B

Re:Sell the CDs.

[Blondie-Wan]

I have a hunch it'd be more accurate to say it's certain individual RIAA member labels doing this. The article does say there's some good stuff in appropriate quantities in the selection as well. I'm guessing the various labels affected by the settlement were each asked to contribute something, and some of them submitted actual desirable material, while others looked at it as a convenient means to dump whatever they had lying around while fulfilling their legal obligation.

1800 CD's of mostly junk

[mschuyler]

I work in a library that just received 1800 CD's, 30 to 40 copies of each CD (we have nine branches), and mostly junk, and even lots of remaindered stuff. These guys obviously just cleaned out their warehouses of dead wood. The AG of WA state is running around saying what a great win-win deal this is. Nonsense. I won't claim every single title is bad, but it's mostly junk. Lots and lots of junk.

This is good.

[SomeOtherGuy]

I think this is a good precedent. If I ever get sued by the RIAA for my occasional "sample" of music before purchase, then I at least know that I can pay my fines by sending them back all of the crap CD's that I had purchased before I had the internet to screen the CD's.

Re:This stuff is useful, look for yourself!

[dasmegabyte]

You are more than welcome to look down your nose at anybody for any reason. You're only asserting a biological tendency towards competetive and classification.

However, I think it's important that you realize others will do this to you as well. And since the majority of people speak incorrectly, they're liable to look at you as though you have a stick up your ass for trying to enunciate speech flawlessly, and some might wonder why you don't spend this extra editorial energy coming up with better points.

After all, the term "grammar" means "a set of rules that give structure to a language" only because those are the words written in the dictionary. It could just as easily mean "a set of inexplicable, irrational and unfair restrictions on the open use of language imposed by elitists for the sole purpose of judging others who fail to recognize them."

Re:This stuff is useful, look for yourself!

[monkeydo]

According to the article the settlement state that, "Titles had to be on a Billboard chart for at least 26 weeks and had to peak in the top half of the chart." I can't think of many CD's fitting that description that aren't crapola.

No, No, No

[Furd]

Other sources (MSNBC) have already pointed out that the motives ascribed to the record companies in this article are just not there. Rather, it was a screw-up in their allocation scheme

But when the first shipments began arriving last week, some librarians suspected that the companies -- the Bertelsmann Music Group, EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment -- were dumping CDs that had been gathering dust in warehouses when they received hundreds of copies of some titles for which there is little or no demand.

The good news is that the mystery has been solved and the source of the overabundance has been determined to be nothing more sinister than a computer-programming glitch that will soon be fixed, law enforcement officials say.

The bad news is that libraries that were among the first to receive their free CDs are now going to have to figure out what to do with all the duplicates.

So, nothing to see here. Just keep moving. [via BoingBoing and my weblog]

Re:This stuff is useful, look for yourself!

[Lemmy Caution]

Completely wrong. The world is far less fractionalized (um?) than it used to be, the US included. The cultural barriers between black Americans in the South, Chinese workers in California, even people in different classes in the same place, used to be far higher and less permeable than they are now. Black english used to be even less like "standard" english, when it was a pidgen, then later a criolle/patois used among slaves.

Mass media is removing many regional accents, as well. The bland part-western, part-Midwestern accent that developed when displaced Okies moved to Los Angeles is now the standard accent of American TV, and thus of much of the English speaking world.

Re:This stuff is useful, look for yourself!

[upsidedown_duck]

culturally we're breaking into distinct groups with very little cross-over and intermingling

Well, I think one difference now is that people more often choose to segregate themselves into a particular group rather than society making their choice for them. The various sub-cultures I see now are primarily delineated by fashion and language than law or fear, and relatively few people today believe that any particular human sub-species is better or worse than any other.