We need to find him and get him to talk to the press so then he can show a face. Our enemy is faceless and compassionless so we need a face to rally behind. To get people to understand how awful the enemy is using public outrage to destroy them or at least cripple them. There is good news the feds passed an antiterrorism bill to curtail some of RIAAs activities. Keep the faith and god bless.

Hang in there and keep yer head up we’ll get through this if we hang onto each other and hang onto hope and fight for what we believe America oughta be. Dream of what you believe is right then have the courage to look at how it is now and decide you aren’t going to be another number in the system or another statistic and decide you are going to make a difference no matter what you have to risk to make it go. Put your heart on the line, put your life on the line put everything on the line. You have nothing to lose and everything to prove. They think you are just animals only fit for slaughter it is up to you to show them how wrong they are. You decide whether you are going to stand up and fight or lie down and die.

So the question I got to ask is do you have the courage, do you have the integrity and are you ready to rock n roll? Do you have the guts your ancestors did or are you going to sit and whine about how RIAA is being a bully. Your ancestors fought Britain so you could live in a country that was free and now it’s your turn to fight for this country and fight for your freedom. You need to come together, forget what divides you and stand together. Someone says either we hang together or we most assuredly will hang seperately. Make your choice and make it a good one. That is all.

How about a story taking up how RIAA bastards keeps the musician’s money.

On the other hand, tey target musicians by ignoring them.

This article appeared today:
Musicians still waiting on a YouTube payday

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9887167-7.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703

Thes story says (it must be the joke-of-the-day) RIAAdoen’t know how to pay the artists

All of which raises some funny questions such as are the songwrters also ignored and not paid? Where is the songwriter union called ASCAP other than in bed with the RIAA boys?

The labels are dying because they are distributors of a thing we call “music”, but should more accurately call “sound”. Nowadays, sounds are digital ghosts that can be cloned infinitely and made to play out anything. Sound is cheap, and sound is everywhere.

If the labels are going to find a use for themselves, they need to get involved with distributing something MORE THAN JUST “SOUND”. They need to transform into tour booking agents, merchandise manufacturers, instrument makers, advertisers … ANYTHING that they can offer in service of a more complete art form than just the sound itself. Because nowadays, the sound is just the tiny, cheap corner of something bigger – a dance hall, a show, a concert, a tour, an open-mic jam session, a thing that people can DO or GO TO or take part in. In other words, music is transforming back into what it used to be, wayyy back in the days before most of us were born, before the labels, when the only music you heard was coming out of a real live person, and he/she was playing it for a real live reason.

The last forty years have raised an entire two generations who are watchers and listeners, but not participators. Now, with luck, that trend will reverse itself. As an aside, have any of you ever gone swing-dancing at a joint with a live band? If you have the guts to do it, I guarantee you’ll have more fun than any concert you’ve ever been to where you have to sit in a chair.

1) the industry has stopped looking at WHAT they are providing, but looked hard at how they are providing.

2) as a result, product quality (the reason we buy music after all, since it doesn’t durability or comparable competitors like coke v. pepsi) has gone into the crapper. More generic music is cranked out on the same laundry list of themes, beats, and vocals, and they wonder why people don’t find that attractive.

3) as a further result of concentrating on the method and not the content, the basic overhead for making a CD has ballooned like homer simpson at a candy fair. I’m willing to bet that the per unit cost of manufacture (burning and packaging a CD) has dropped considerably compared to cassette and earlier methods. But on the administration and marketing costs (especially administration) have flown upwards, and in order for them to be able to break even or turn a profit, this cost must be passed on to the end buyer.

4) couple the above to a conservative business culture (why try new when the old works just fine) and you get the urge to make sure that your model WILL SURVIVE.

A few years ago, there was a commercial, I forget what it was for, that showed a guy checking into a motel and the deskclerk tells him that all their rooms have TVs that can get every movie ever made. It sounded like a pipedream, but today it COULD be a reality. Studios could digitize their entire film catalog and put them online for next to nothing.

People WOULD pay for good quality, non-DRM copies. Of course they wouldn’t pay the same price as for a physical product, nor should they. Sure, there would still be piracy. There hads always been piracy and there always will be piracy.

What makes more sense? Putting out a superior product that equals or exceeds what you can get illegally, for a good price, or putting out an inferior product that makes people jump through hoops to use it, for a price that equals what people pay for a physical product?

Anyway, that’s how it appears to me in a nutshell. The simple truth is the the paradigm shifted in a radical way and while the Industry dabbled in the new distribution method they largely mistook it for a malicious kind of thievery. For one, it’s obviously not stealing. It’s intangible so it can’t be. Most of the early sharing was either legal (creating personal copies of a lesser quality was deemed legal during the time of radio and cassettes) or undefined (the fun, fun gray area). A few people were and still are pirating, but many had already paid the Industry for the music they like, sometimes multiple times over (vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD), but were sharing for other reasons, like say convenience or novelty. Yeah I can listen to my CD, but look, my computer plays music too, isn’t that neat? In time you had people able to sample music to see what music they wanted to buy. Download a interesting song, like it, buy the album, like more songs, buy other album by that artist. Really, the new distribution served overlapping functionality with the radio.

The sad truth is, it has been shown in studies that people are consuming less music. People aren’t illegally downloading to get out of buying CD’s. They are simply consuming less music. (Although, I personally believe thie fact that the Industry has been walking around waving and swing a big stick at everybody and boobing trapping their CD’s with software has contributed to this reduction. Quite frankly, I avoid Industry branded music now-a-days because I don’t want to be struck in the head.)

The industry as a “person”

The industry is behaving like a dying beast and indeed this is causing their slow death. They’re attacking everything in sight claiming it’s the world that’s wrong, not them. The People get what the People want. That’s how the world works. You can fight the tide for a while but if it keeps coming in, you will be consumed. Not long ago, the People wanted music on medium. The Industry was able to provide and they profited from it. Then the People wanted the same but with better quality. The Industry was able to provide and they profited from it. This happen a few times. Now quality music on medium is quite high. Now the People want convenient distribution. They have their mediums already. Distribution is now intangible and the Industry seems unsure how to cope. The People want convenient distribution. They will pay well for it. Most people are honest (not to be confused with the loud, dishonest few). They will even pay for music they already have if this convenience is delivered. They will pay for it. But they will have it whether they pay or not. Because the Industry has not provided a solution, the People are having it anyway, and the Industry is not making money from it. They are having a tantrum from not getting their way.

This brings me to the whole DRM nonsense. The problem is, by definition, it CAN NOT WORK. And yet, they try. The problem is, DRM can not stop a pirate, because pirates don’t pirate DRM’d material. The only people DRM can affect are people who legally purchase it. So DRM either allows people to listen/watch their material or it doesn’t. It can only stop legal owners from properly using it. Now, who wants to purchase something like that?

And finally, in the USA anyway, people have the right petition the federal government for protection or whatever, which usually takes the form of laws– it’s called lobbying. A problem with this is at one point companies were declared people, so a company, as a person, can lobby for protection. “We believe people downloading music is wrong. It hurts us and if we go bankrupt, thousands of people lose their jobs.” “Okay, we’ll make a law to make this once legal activity illegal so that downloaders may be punished and thus deterred from such activity.” The difference between me lobbying and Company A lobbying is I have a full time job and have very little time to represent myself due to my limited resources. Company A can designate a full time representative with massive resources. Who do you think will heard best? Add to this the fact that it doesn’t matter how many honest politicians may be in the system, it takes but one dishonest politician to exacerbate this and make it worse. One bad person usually can do more bad than one good person can do good. And yeah, I realize how numerous and prevalent dishonest and not-very-honest politicians there are currently in the system. Many don’t bother to hide it.

Anyway, I think I ranted long enough. Until the Industry gets their act together (and I’m no longer holding my breath), I won’t be doing business with them or the musicians they represent. I’d rather give my business to individual musicians as they make me happy, and thankfully the internet makes that possible. (Of course, the Industry also wants money for people they don’t represent but that’s a rant for another day.)

1) You reap what you sow. They’ve been suing tens of thousands of potential customers on the basis of shoddy (and illegal) investigations and possibly even fabricated evidence, and they think it won’t come back to bite them in the wazoo?

2) They’ve alienated their customer base. Suing your customers to force them to toe your corporate line is the way to get repeat business? NOT!!

3) They’ve lost the promotional value of casual file sharing, people hearing what they like and buying a CD of it to get better quality.

4) 99% of the stuff the big music cartel is putting out today is total crap, I’ve heard better sounds in factories.

5) The big music cartel flatly refuses to adapt to change. I sent RIAA a couple of emails a while back suggesting they license music file sharing for a few $$$ a month, and even suggesting they offer a secure site for doing so as an enticement to bring file sharers into compliance (some of current P2P services are conduits for all sorts of malware to get on your computer), and calculating the money they could take in by doing so. They didn’t even give me the courtesy of a reply.

6) The big record companies lock artists into long, exclusive contracts, keep the lion’s share of what their records bring in leaving those they make money off of a pittance, and use the money to finance their litigation/extortion campaign. No wonder they don’t have any decent music to offer.

7) Their CDs are grossly overpriced. The actual cost of production (including the master and creation of the recording, if they sell enough, is probably less than a dollar a disk. And yet you can buy DVDs of a lot of movies cheaper than what you’d pay for most CDs.

For those of you who like music from the days when music was really music and not the industrial noises that pass for music today, the University of California, Santa Barbara [http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/] has a library of hundreds of cylinder records available for free and legal download. Yes, they are not stereo, they’re not hi-fi, some of them are noisy from wear, but there’s some really good listening there. The digitized files are licensed under CC attribution-non commercial, meaning you can copy and share to your heart’s content, and do just about anything you want with them short of selling them.

It’s a good thing RIAA can’t copyright the public domain, I’m sure they would if they could.

Good for us, bad for them.

Matt, products that can be copied for free constitute something qualitatively different from the type of products you can buy at the black market. Sure, you can still buy discs of digital content there, but you would only go to this market because you don’t know how to file share or don’t own a computer. Once you know and have these things, then you too can acquire a copy of a copy, or it may have been a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy (ad nauseam).

People, you have to stop thinking about this issue separately from what else is going on in the world. And what’s that? What has always gone on, from the moment humans created the first surplus product. We are simply witnessing another chapter in the continuing contradiction of the ever-increasing development of the productive forces (technology increases productivity) coming into sharper and sharper conflict with the particular relations of production.

The main contradiction of the current relations of production is that we have socialized production but we haven’t socialized the ownership and ultimately the benefit of production. Slowly but surely, more and more of the world’s productive capacity is being used for the purposes of a smaller and smaller group of people (the filthy rich).

Soon, the world will be one giant supermarket for the extremely wealthy, where the masses stand behind whichever counter it may be, whether its coffee and fast food (Starbucks, McDonald’s, etc) or whichever shop or restaurant the monied class might want to visit, or whichever hotel they want to stay at, there will be someone there who’s forced into this servile situation just because we haven’t yet resolved this nightmare of a contradiction.

Further technological development is inevitable and soon the only ‘jobs’ will be in the service industry. Or that should read ‘Servants’ industry. Why not just bring back feudalism and be done with this democratic charade? The world as one giant castle, with the rich as the King and Queen, supported by Barons and Lords. All the world’s population toiling away in the kitchens and in the castle surrounds ensuring that no wish of their masters goes unfulfilled.

It totally *is* a democratic charade – we can vote politicians out of office, but we can’t vote the rich out of power. And even if we could, the guiding principle of elites is: when change threatens to rule, the rules are changed. This wisdom falls in the political intelligence category and if there’s one thing the rich have made certain of is to make the average political intelligence of the masses as low as they possibly can. Political intelligence is the ability to be able to tell if someone is bullshitting you about issues to do with society. Most of the time the corporate thugs let the politicians do their dirty work, after all, modern parliament is but the executive of the bourgeoisie, but this file sharing business is a new thing. We have mobs like the RIAA bypassing parliament (and even the law) because passing laws takes time and they have profits to save. So now we have to have political intelligence just to deal with economic issues!

And thus, this is why i’ve taken the time to write this screed and to congratulate Jon on a fantastic article as I think it will help further the political intelligence of everyone who reads it. The contradictions i outlined above are most apparent in the drama unfolding before us with the record company monopolies on one side pitted against the millions on the other who have taken to file sharing like ducks to water. The corporate block still wants their toll booths while at the same time technological development tears it down, aided and abetted by millions of ducks. Who will win? Find out after the ad break … NOT !!!! LOL.

Cheers from the ‘Punchbowl’ (surely that rings a bell, yes i’m the same guy)
Soporific.

PS – i threw my TV out 7 years ago and my life is a million times richer cause i get to choose what i watch, not the TV stations, not the movie moguls, and especially not the advertisers! Throw your TV out today. Do it! NOW!

It’s also a matter of value add, and an industry refusing to get in tune with the times. You are starting to see more of it through music download purchase ability, but there is still a lot to go.

I, for example, am very sad that the industry never adopted DVD-A sales. There was distinct value add in the purchase of one. I own all the ones released for the artists that I like, and many times, it was a duplicate of a CD that I had purchased at one time.

Musicians are professionals as well? Of course they are, but have they priced themselves out of the market? How different is this from the people who worked in coal mines in the US whose jobs are now done in other countries because labor there is cheaper. Or Call Center workers who were outsourced to India. You have to adapt, or you run the chance of no longer making any money.

Maybe the response should be: Lower the price of CDs (it isn’t like materials make up much of the cost anymore) and increase the cost of tickets for concerts, or t-shirts at concerts. Or maybe CDs should come with Lyrics still, or photographs of the band, or something that their fans would find of value? The market changes, adjust. if you alienate your customers, you’ll lose them for life. I’ve purchased all the music that matters to me, and I won’t download again (i’ve not been sued or anything), but based on the industries choices, I will never buy music again, and I’ll live with my 90’s music, and be perfectly content. The RIAA has lost Many customers for life…

When’s the last time you heard about someone getting sued for downloading an e-book? Each time one of those is downloaded, an author could have made a few bucks, and didn’t.