Dear RIAA and Big Media companies
Start an ad campaign talking about how the RIAA is advancing the "art" of recorded music. Publish more technical standards for making MP3s and online music sound better. Define a standard for musical metadata and get all your member labels to commit to use it. Push for higher quality; easier access to music. Make your name synonymous with quality improvements to recorded music, rather than someone who sues kids and grandparents for copying a few songs.
In fact, you should spin-off your enforcement division altogether, and disassociate it from your name.
Dear Big Media:
Think about breaking yourselves up: reverse consolidation. You own lots of tiny labels that still have a lot of love and respect from the community. Let them leave the nest, and remove the "big media" stigma that's attached to them.
Bring back your old brands to keep older music alive and viable and make a point of showing how that brand (aka marketing label) is the guardian, the caretaker, of that music.
Just a thought... from someone who (as a child) used to love the big labels, and thought the RIAA was this great organization promoting technical and artistic excellence in records.
Labels: riaa
posted by Rusty Hodge [SomaFM] at
Thursday, April 09, 2009
4 Comments:
This is not the first ugliness from the Village Voice ownership.
So months ago, they summarily dispatched Alan Rich, the acknowledged dean of classical music critics working today.
Alan is a peripatetic octogenarian who is never home, always at a concert, and whose writing is as sharp as ever at his blog, http://www.soiveheard.org
Sorry-
This blog softwar sucks. This was not my comment here. My comment was that the big media companies are forcing people to use the torrent downloads at places like The Pirate Bay.
I am told that downloads of torrents take days and days. No one want that. What we want is a decent price.
CD's are yesterday. Today it is .mp3 downloads, and they are just way too expensive for files just sitting in cheap storage on servers.
Here’s the scenario: 1997, I heard “Fidelity” by The Durruti Column at a friend’s house. I spend the better part of 3 years searching for this gem until I finally found it buried deep in the bins of an obscure DJ shop in Montreal. Months earlier (during the heydays of Napster), I approached a local HMV to order this album at any cost, I had to have it. The response from the distributer was as follows:
“… This item is out of print, and as it is not financially practical for the record company to reproduce, it will not be going into production for the foreseeable future…” more or less.
I like the cover art. I love to open up the shrink-wrap and read the liner notes. I love putting the CD in the player for the first time, and I certainly feel the pride of ownership for something I searched so long for. And hey, I got an itch for really obscure, and definitely out of print selections. Downloading is not my favorite method of getting the music I want; purely for the fact that I am never sure what I am getting, the quality sometimes seriously lacking, or labeling is utterly wrong, and I don’t get that same elation that I got buying the albums. So any time I hear the whining coming from the biggies lawyers about how their artists are suffering the vast loss in sales, I get really steamed. Seems to me it is them that are holding the music hostage in lieu of profit.
How much does one have to spend in order to have something that they are nostalgic for? These people talk and talk about how the poor music industry suffers the loss of millions and millions due to the unlawful use of peer sharing networks/software. They make legal examples of unwitting teenagers to drive their agenda forward. They plague us with DRM… all of this posturing to make sure that their fat wallets stay fat.
I can’t even play some of the music I legally purchased and ripped to my mp4 player because it will not play DRM content.
In Canada, every sale of CD-R/CD-RW has a before taxes surcharge levied by the RIAA on the assumption that the media will be used for illegal music reproduction (that being said, the CD/DVDs I purchase are mainly used for delivering graphic design work to my clients or as back-up media).
I heard somewhere that they wanted to start charging dentists/family doctors for playing radio in their waiting rooms.
Revision3 servers were shutdown after a denial-of-service attack paid for by… you guessed it… Sony, BMG, etc. for using a peer-sharing scheme just so they could more easily deliver their podscasts.
Enough is enough. This has gone beyond ridiculous; the big record companies have their hand in the pockets of the artists, the audience, and everyone else along the way, and still want more. These guys are the real crooks, so bravo to Trent Rezner for sticking it to the fat-cats! The record companies just have to open up their vaults and sell legal, good quality copies of the music people want, not just what is financially booming at the time.
There was a time where the RIAA did good work? I can't imagine the RIAA not being the big bully it is today.
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