Slashdot Mirror
Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral
eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."
Considering that R.E.M. essentially is a corporation, I think it's funny that here they are being portrayed as fighters for the independent musician against the corporate machine.
You obviously don't know their history or it would make perfect sense to you. R.E.M. got their start on I.R.S. Records, which was an independent label. It was a large and successful independent label, but this was largely through good management that signed a lot of really good bands at the time. R.E.M. was the kind of band that the majors wouldn't have touched in their early days, but they toured and built up a following on the college circuit and eventually signed a major label contract and became big stars. However, without I.R.S. Records, probably nobody outside of Athens would have ever heard of them.