Investors, "Beware" of Record Companies

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Motley Fool investment Web site warns investors to beware of 'Sony, BMG, Warner Music Group, Vivendi Universal, and EMI.' In an article entitled 'We're All Thieves to the RIAA,' a Motley Fool columnist, referring to the RIAA's pronouncement in early December in Atlantic v. Howell, that the copies which Mr. Howell had ripped from his CDs to MP3s in a shared files folder on his computer were 'unauthorized,' writer Alyce Lomax said 'a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value.'"

Comments

Re:The vicious last bites of a wounded animal

[altoz]

Oh, they'll be dead before that. Artists are leaving record companies in droves. They'll start producing their own music and hiring niche marketing agencies to create demand instead. Even now, the smart ones are already moving in the marketing/concert promoter direction.

Not like John Henry

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad comparison! John Henry was a champion for the dignity of human work. He illustrated the very real danger of big business treating individuals as disposable ever since the industrial revolution. John Henry as the RIAA? Ridiculous.

Re:Not like John Henry

[elrous0]

No, he was a damned fool. Stubbornly digging your heals in, refusing to change, and fighting innovation to the bitter death isn't dignified and heroic. It's pathetic and stupid. It's like the old man who's afraid of computers, and who, instead of conquering his fears and adapting to the changing world, simply refuses to use them and becomes a goddamned living relic.

If America were full of John Henry's, we'd have become a third-world backwater a long time ago.

Re:The vicious last bites of a wounded animal

[PhotoGuy]

Oh, they'll be dead before that. Artists are leaving record companies in droves. They'll start producing their own music and hiring niche marketing agencies to create demand instead. Even now, the smart ones are already moving in the marketing/concert promoter direction.

While I agree with the sentiment, are artists really leaving in "droves?" Other than indie artists maybe never pursuing a label to start with, how many already-signed artists are leaving the labels? Can you list more than 10? More than 20? Even if you listed 1000, I'm sure it would be something like a tiny single digit percentage (or less) of the total artists on labels, hardly qualifying as droves.

I think it *will* happen, and hopefully at an exponentially increasing rate. But for now, they still have the stranglehold on the artists.