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Why the RIAA Really Hates Downloads
wtansill recommends the saga of Jeff Price, who traveled from successful small record label owner to successful Internet-era music distributor. His piece describes clearly what the major record labels used to be good for and why they are now good for nothing but getting in the way. "Allowing all music creators 'in' is both exciting and frightening. Some argue that we need subjective gatekeepers as filters. No matter which way you feel about it, there are a few indisputable facts -- control has been taken away from the 'four major labels' and the traditional media outlets. We, the 'masses,' now have access to create, distribute, discover, promote, share and listen to any music. Hopefully access to all of this new music will inspire us, make us think and open doors and minds to new experiences we choose, not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want."
Where do you get this misinformation? Rich Internet Applications Anonymous loves downloads. Can't get enough of them. http://riaa.buzztown.org/
I wrote a (very) short piece on this a while ago, in response to an article on El' Reg.
Again, looking at the list of 'discoveries' there, and at the reasons given here, it's hard to believe that the industry hasn't already fallen over in a big screaming heap. The only thing propping it up thus far are multi-album recording contracts, and their McDonald's inspired ability to foist very average fair on to the average user.
In the last couple of years with GarageBand etc providing the ability for anyone to make reasonable music at home, the iTunes Music Store and it's ilk providing the ability for almost anyone to publish their work, and social networking sites providing the marketing (often viral), it's time these commercial dinosaurs went the way of their reptilian cousins did millions of years ago.
The Mothership
a few spaniards got on some boats, and with some fancy new technology, subdued entire noble ancient civilizations in central and south america
technological progress was not fair to the aztec and incan nobility. you wonder what they thought when they looked upon the gun, the horse, the metal armor, the smallpox. well, if you work for the riaa or a major label, you know more of what it is like to be on the losing side of technological progress like perhaps no other class of people in the western hemisphere right now
so here's to you, music label suit
heres to your vanishing jobs, to the jobs of blacksmiths, to the jobs of chimney sweeps, to the jobs of telegraph operators, to the jobs of steam ship engineer
to the dustbin of history with all of it
please no banging on your coffin while we nail it shut. thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"...not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want."
I never thought one could get pithy one-liners from a video game, but I think the GTA writers had the nail hit on the head with one of the radio station's advertisements (I think it was from Liberty City):
"We tell you what's good! Then play it 'till you like it!"
I think that sums up the Label's business methods quite succinctly.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
The Spanish conquest of the Americas is often overly dramatized. In all instances I am aware of, it was *not* Spanish technology that carried the day.
Takes the Aztec's for example. Many story tellers will spin a glorious yarn about the siege of Tenochtitlan. Most of those will be glad to talk about how Moctezuma revered Cortés as a god. Most will also completely gloss over the fact that the Spaniards were only a small percentage of the force that laid siege to Tenochtitlan. The Aztec's were not very popular amongst their neighbors, so when Cortés marched on Tenochtitlan the Aztec's enemies came in droves to capitalize on a change to take them down. The Inca's were smack in the middle of a civil war over succession when the Spaniards arrived on the scene, and by pure luck, managed to kidnap the heir apparent. (They held him hostage for gold and then executed him.) Their timing was fortuitous, to say the least. However, the capture of Cuzco was the real fall of Peru, and by that time the Spanish had again picked up indigenous allies to fight for them.
Finally, there is the Mayans. If you watched Apocalypto then you probably got the impression that the Maya were living in big cities and making a mess of things when the Spaniards showed up and conqured/saved them. Nope. They had abandoned their cities centuries before. Even with their civilization an echo of its former glory, the Maya put up more resistance against the Europeans than, perhaps, any other indigenous people in the america's. Unlike the Aztec's and Incas, there was no single Mayan center which could be attacked and neutralized. The Maya were spread out in some of the densest, nastiest, most brutal jungle on Earth. The Spaniards would capture one town and move on to the next only to find that they had to recapture the previous town all over again the next time they went past it. It took centuries to subdue just a *portion* of the Mayan population.
Now, it would seem that we're way off topic, but we can draw some pretty interesting parallels actually. RIAA is a centralized body, much like the Inca or Aztecs. All it would take is for one major record label to withdraw their support to RIAA and that would be their end. Likewise, a change to copyright law could doom all the labels overnight. Music pirates, on the other hand, are by their very nature decentralized. You can squash as many individuals with lawsuits as you want, but the P2P network lives on. Finding those individuals and gathering enough evidence to bring a lawsuit that has a chance of winning if they don't cave and settle is also not an easy task. They are like the Maya. Hard to find, difficult to suppress, and resilient. If RIAA and the labels somehow managed to keep going as they are now, it would take centuries to bring piracy to and end at best.
Anyways, I'm at the point where I just want easy access to good music. If the labels brought back Oink in all it's glory at $30/month I'd be their first customer. If they insist that I have to spend $10 an album for lossy DRM'd tracks on iTunes or $15 for a CD, neither of which net the artist more than $0.15, then no deal.
The way I see it, there is an answer to music distribution. Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies. Just the artists and the torrent site. Potentially, artists could make a lot more money than they are now. However, there are problems. Perhaps the stickiest is that little issue of critical mass. If a handful of independents got together and did this, they'd fail miserably. Such a site would need a *massive* catalog to get off the ground. It would have to include a very large number of artists from day 1. Still, it is a beautiful dream.
They are farmers, and the musicians are livestock.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Soribada. A P2P network you pay a few bucks a month for membership. Korea. Files authorized to be distributed by the program are tagged with a special code in the file and only files tagged as such will be recognized by the program. Except that, MP3s flow like water and most artists in Korea have signed on so the catalog is chock full of almost every major Korean artist... Most of it lossy (but high-quality) MP3 but some are FLAC and APE files...
The control of media means more money for the record company.
When I ran the music department of an independent store, I learned first-hand just how much control they exercise over the music industry. I knew six months in advance what songs were going to make the charts, because those songs were the ones the labels pushed off on radio stations. The line from the salesman would sound something like this:
"This is the next album from Blonde Dance Clone #4. Tracks 5 and 8 are going to be all over the radio before it comes out, and 5 will probably be in the top 10. We plan to have five million copies distributed for release. We've got endcaps, freestanding displays, placards, hanging signs, and posters. Later we'll have a pile of promotional goodies."
What downloads do to that industry even with no impact on sales is they make demand less predictable, which means their margins are reduced. That's what scared them from the start...the loss of their ability to dictate our tastes in music and control the top 40 charts. Napster especially meant that they could no longer shove their choice of music down our throats via radio because radio was no longer a primary source of new music for millions of users.
A record label that sells hundreds of millions of albums a year doesn't care about someone who might move 10,000 or even 50,000. It's not even that an artist wouldn't make money that they don't sign them...it's that the artist wouldn't make *enough*
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
If course, that's only true if signing a band or musician has zero overhead. If there's a cost to the label for each signing, then they have finite capacity, and will want to pick and choose.
There's also scarcity economics at work at this level as well. If every high school wannabe rock band had a contract with EMI or Sony BMG, then the perceived value of that contract would plummet. Similarly, if every museo you met had a contract, and was nevertheless practically penniless, then no one at all would sign up, since they'd be taking on obligations with no expectation of recompense.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Oh, 'They' are still making great music... mountains of it in fact.
What is happening is that only formulaic music is marketed.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.