RIAA and the Music Luddites
p2pnet news | Music:- Signs are the rest of the world is at last coming to realise something we-all have known, and have been saying, all along, namely:
- P2P and file sharing are here to stay
- An online environment exists where music is free (as in free as a bird, not free beer) and where DRM withers and dies
- The days of the Corporate Music Dinosaurs are done
More than once, p2pnet has also wondered why investors are still allowing the idiots who run the Big 4 labels to exscind the two most important assets: customer goodwill and the client bases themselves.
Now, “The music industry’s lawsuit crusade against defenseless college students and housewives appears to have hit the skids lately,” says a sentence which might almost have been lifted whole from the pages of p2pnet.
It goes on:
That might mean it’s almost time for socially responsible investors to start looking at music publishers again, after their long industrywide hiatus from research lists.”
What ! ? Socially responsible investors?
The line comes in a fascinating Motley Fool post, the Fool being not another socially conscious blog, but a hard-core commercial web site discussing stocks, investing, and personal finance.
Anders Bylund, who wrote the piece, goes on:
Warner Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and EMI, the main movers behind the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), may have expected easy victories when they began their much-maligned campaign to sue alleged illegal music downloaders. But instead of settling their cases for a few thousand dollars each, many defendants decided to fight back – with great success.”
Further down, he continues:
If you follow this legal saga at all, you know that the RIAA members have lately been fighting primarily to avoid paying the defendants’ legal fees – and losing. Instead of a quick and easy cash machine, the labels’ lawsuit machine has become a costly public relations disaster, and it seems unlikely that any sane and responsible manager would order the madness to continue much longer.
Support for the lawsuits from artists and their representatives seems lukewarm, with a few high-profile exceptions like Metallica. And it’s easy to see why the lesser lights of the Billboard charts don’t swarm to the cause: Spreading your music like wildfire across the globe, for free, can be a brilliant word-of-mouth marketing tool.
Brilliant word-of-mouth marketing tool?
Yup.
And there’s more.
Says Motley Fool:
The Timberlakes and Aguileras of the world, on the other hand, do have something to lose. Their names are already well-known, and free downloads can cut into their profits more than they increase their market presence. These are the golden calves of the music industry, the acts for whom the RIAA is really fighting. Not to reimburse those artists for lost wages, mind you – just to protect their own easy profits.
Copyrights and trademarks need to be protected from “profit-taking, mass-producing pirate shops and so forth,” Bylund acknowledges, but, “John Doe filings against nameless IP addresses is wrong on so many levels that I can’t list them all in this brief space. Let me just name a few of the most important flaws:
It’s a great way to alienate music fans, with very little payoff. The lawsuits have so far failed to stem the illegal downloading tide, and the costs must rival the settlement payoff by now.
Even if the Internet service provider keeps very detailed access logs, it’s nearly impossible to prove that a certain IP address was used by a particular person at any given time.
Copyright is meant to encourage the creative process, not to fatten corporate coffers or limit the available means of distribution. Again, we haven’t seen any payouts to the actual artists and composers here, only to legal teams and company bankrolls.
Bylund concludes:
It’s about time for the Luddite music business to come around to the new realities of the media market. They’ve spent a lot of money on payola to get their chosen mainstream fodder played on the radio. If the computer is the new radio, why should they spend even more money and effort trying to stop that music from being played for free?
A less restrained distribution model would move some of the control from the music industry’s hands and into the consumer’s, which would be great news for a plethora of struggling, hopeful rockers and popsters. I’m thinking “paradigm shift” here – the end of massive superstars, and the rise of music for the people, by the people, and of the people. It’ll mean lower marketing costs, since the music speaks for itself; lower distribution costs, as a meaningful all-digital model takes the place of physical discs; and freedom for everyone to find their own favorites with a click of the mouse, rather than being told what to like.
Everybody wins.
Say no more ….
OK. Say more.
The Motley Fool’s Bylund bio states:
“Anders Bylund is a steady contributor to the Fool, with a weekly feature to his name. He tends to graze the pastures of technology and online business, but he also likes to dabble in this, that, and the other. Anders is an avid Dueler, too, with a respectable track record.
“Ater a solid education from Florida State in gathering and evaluating information and then writing up his findings, he spent five years as a mere cog in the wheels of various corporations. While that novel never did materialize, thanks to demanding day jobs, he got to see how technology is really used on the front lines in business – an experience that comes in handy every now and then.”
Also See:
Motley Fool – RIAA’s Day in Court Nearly Over, September 24, 2007
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September 24th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
What, the RIAA, in the mainstream media, in a bad light! My prayers have been answered. Amen. This could be the start of something great. We all know the news cartels are like sheep, if one goes in a certain direction, they all do.
What a great way to end the workday!
Liam
September 24th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Mainstream? NPR is hardly that.
September 24th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
This is not NPR – it’s Motley Fool. But NPR IS pretty mainstream anyhow.
September 25th, 2007 at 1:46 am
“the labels’ lawsuit machine has become a costly public relations disaster”
No. This is a deadly public relation disaster.
The music cartel is a perpetual stupidity machine. Clearly stupidity unlike energy can be created from the nothingness of what the music cartels was doing just like tapworms sucking off the food of the society.
Yes we have an effective worm kiler and it’s brand name is boycott.
They extort (or try to) some people. Some people get made and they boycott thus the sale of music drop. So they try to extort more people. More people boycott. The sale of music drop further. They attempt again to extort more people. People like me with very bad temper learn about it and setup some infringing server for massive distribution of their Brtiney Slut and madona crap junk in retaliation and in addition of conducting a massive campaign of boycott. The music sale drop even further accelerating exponentially because knowledge proliferate on internet. We are now down by 30%. In six year it will be 60%. Wirh few succesful class action law suit we will have a new music industry free of parasites in a couple of year.
Is it cool or what?
September 25th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Correction: In two year it will be 60%.