To Big 4 record labels – ‘Bring back the single!’
p2pnet news view RIAA | P2P:- “The RIAA’s claim that it’ll stop suing people may have serious consequences … for the RIAA,” says a Slashdot post, going on:
“When it dropped its attack on seven University of Michigan students, Recording Industry vs. The People wondered if the move was linked to three investigations, with MediaSentry as the target, before Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth. Now, ‘LSA sophomore Erin Breisacher said she stopped downloading music illegally after hearing about the possibility of receiving a lawsuit, but now that the RIAA has stopped pursuing lawsuits she ‘might start downloading again,’ says the Michigan Daily, going on to quote LSA senior Chad Nihranz as saying, ‘I figure, if there aren’t as many lawsuits they will come out with more software to allow students to download more.”
Then, “What about some of the other potential tactics we’ve discussed recently, such as the UK’s proposed £20 per year film and music tax or the $5 monthly fee suggested in the US?” – asks Soulskill in the Slashdot Fighting-a-Losing-Battle dept.
“Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?”
Well, is there?
The question generated a large crop of interesting replies, among them one from M1rth (790840).
- Start treating the indies and non-”top 40 list” artists with respect.
- Stop putting out crap content that isn’t worth the price they want to price-fix it at.
- Bring back the single (why do you think iTunes and similar do so well? Because most of the time only one song on the album is any good if it’s a MafiAA-produced album).
- Start making the production value of CD’s worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper. Also, stop pushing the normalized volume of the recording so fucking high that it clips out and sounds like crap. Master them lower and retain audio fidelity, thanks.
- Sign some fucking new artists for god’s sakes.
There’s also one thing I’d love to see happen from the government’s end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies; the biggest and crappiest, “Clear Channel”, owns over 50% of the market.
You want to know why your radio sucks today? Because you don’t GET local shows any more. There are a small handful of local shows, and the rest is either national-syndicated talk radio (schlesinger, limbaugh, hannity, beck, savage, etc), “top 40″ generic shit “music” stations with pre-recorded loops and a guy three states away “reading your local news” to you, or “niche top 40″ crap we get down here based on exploiting some racial group (local stations we have here: “La Raza”, aka “The Race”, the vilest racist mexican Aztlan-movement shit you’ve ever heard, and “the Box”, which is all (c)Rap music about killing cops and regularly features “guest” appearances of the local New Black Panthers leader).
Clear Channel moves into a city, cuts all the employees, pretty much just sets up the stations on automatic reproduction of their master feed, and forgets about you. They get an almost “captive audience” of commuters, and that’s that. In many local markets, there is no such thing as “competition” any more because CC owns the entire area.
Reinstate the media ownership rules; make it so we get REAL local music stations again, with REAL DJ’s who make their OWN daily playlists, occasionally spin a whole album, and maybe (just maybe) there will be a better chance for music to spread.
Of course, the MafiAA loves media consolidation. That way, they send just one gift basket to one person and get Britney Spears’ latest pile of crap spinning on half the stations in the US for five weeks or more, and lock the independent artists completely out of the system much easier. Gyah.
Good one.
Stay tuned. 
Slashdot – Will the New RIAA Tactic Boost P2P File Sharing?, February 1, 2009
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February 2nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Newtley is you Jon. Right?
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Yup.
Cheers!
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:41 pm
A demonstration of just how bad this setup with ClearChannel is came when local authorities needed to get the word out about evacuation because of a methane release to the local population. The first thought was call the radio station for a public announcement.
Only….there was no DJ. They got an answering machine instead. There was no one locally at the radio station to talk to.
Now in the broadcasting license agreement to obtain the license is a clause that states public announcements will be done and done on a monthly basis. This is given lip service to by ClearChannel and they make an attempt to do so by doing a national announcement collective.
I hate ClearChannel because it is the usual. It’s replay city with the same tunes coming up hour after hour in replay. You don’t hear anything by local artists, you don’t hear what is new that might interest you.
What ever happened to Eliot Spencer”s agreement with the major labels and the radio stations over payolla? You know, the part where local artists would have air play time? I’ve yet to hear of anything in meeting that requirement beyond the statement at the time that they would. Follow through never happened.
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
There’s a station in my area that gives local artists a show of their own, one hour a week, on Sunday nights. The station is not owned by Cheap Channel…uh oh, it’s the Mays Brothers calling, they want to buy the station. No? Hostile takeover…say it isn’t so! Noo…..
P.S. IMHO The death of the 7′ single started the death of the music industry as we know it!
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 am
Stop putting out crap content that isnât worth the price they want to price-fix it at. WHY is this at no. 2? This is the NUMBER ONE REASON people quit buying music in the first place!
February 5th, 2009 at 1:58 am
I gotta agree hen I was a kid I use to love music and I never thought I’d see the day that I stop listening to music altogether cause it’s so crap and not only that but new artist want to emulate the crappy sound, becuse they think that if they sound like current garbage sound that’s out they’ll sell records gain a fanbase, but most of what I’m saying is aimed at rap music music because it’s a dead genre everything else is just dying.