The RIAA has already lost
p2p news / p2pnet:- Bands and solo artists are being unfairly squeezed in the digital era, says a recent UK news report, talking about mainstream performers and completely ignoring the fact that Big Music’s machinations aren’t all that’s impacting and altering the world of digital music.
Because it’s not just about market share, ‘product’ and who gets what as the korporate music klans divvy up the money.
“A cartel is a group of producers whose goal it is to fix prices, to limit supply and to limit competition,” says Wikipedia. “Cartels are prohibited by antitrust laws in most countries; however, they continue to exist nationally and internationally, formally and informally.”
The infamous drug cartels are possibly the most insidious and powerful, but close behind them are the cartels run by the international software and entertainment industries which together control, almost absolutely, the traditional print and electronic news media.
The Net and blogs and independent news sites are slowly but surely changing that and in the same way, indie music labels are now making their presence known and felt, although EMI, Sony BMG, Warner and Universal, who together comprise the Big Music cartel, and the people who rely on them, are doing their best to pretend this new, vital form of competition doesn’t even exist.
In the meanwhile, through the Net, for the first time, indie musicians are showing the public there’s more available than merely Oasis, Radiohead and Jamelia, say.
And there’s nothing unfair about it.
I lived through the first punk revolution in ‘76, posts Julian Bond. in a comment to IFPI reports booming business.
And I worked in a studio in the early 80s. I well remember the explosion of creativity as people discovered they could self publish. For a brief while there were hundreds of indy labels and thousands of people doing short run pressings in the UK.
Of course, most of those bands sank without trace and the indy labels got swallowed up. It really is time to do this again and disintermediate the big cartel.
This time around the small labels can keep going and make a real run at it with pure internet pr, marketing and distribution. What’s needed is for the middle aggregators like Amazon to support them along with the search engines and information aggregators like last.fm.
Bond was responding to an earlier post.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The RIAA has already lost
No one ever mentions the fact that independent musicians / labels sales have exploded over the last three years and more than make up for any (perceived) losses the RIAA are claiming. (Christian Science Monitor, 2004).
That should also tell the courts that there are valid LEGAL reasons for free downloading! I doubt if Amazon would continue to offer free downloads if they hadn’t discovered it also fueled sales. The RIAA even cried when BBC offered Beethoven for free downloads – who owns the copyrights for Beethoven now?
That’s the real crime, they are stealing culture and history.
People exploring musical tastes are just what the RIAA fears the most. One of the first observations made by original Napster shortly after starting, was the majority of songs being traded were not songs the music industry (RIAA) had any interest in.
Times have changed and people want choices even if they have to pay for radio (Sirius) to get it. How many kids would really buy what they download, ie have the extra $5k to fill up their iPods with purchased music?
The mp3 player has the p2p network to thank for it’s success – another shot in the arm for creativity and innovation. That’s also why music stores the RIAA develop haven’t got a chance as long as they promote a very narrow, limited musical range – and it’s highly doubtful that they will voluntarily change.
I doubt if RIAA will ever offer the musician much more than $0.10 on the dollar.
I can’t think of an industry that works so hard against giving the customer what they want. P2p is only one part of the growing “music underground”.
The RIAA has already lost. The numbers tell the story.
The more aggressive RIAA becomes, the more downloading becomes symbolic.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
October 4th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
“Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>”
Please please please remove this terminology from your collective minds. It turns my stomach every time I see it…
October 4th, 2005 at 4:04 pm
The RIAA and other cartels are quickly adapting, we need to stay a couple of step ahead of them. I remeber when Google agregated more news from p2pnet than they do now. Google has been around for many, many years, so why has it only been very recently that Google has achieved wild financial success? I imagine it is investment. It is like a political candidate having his or her cronies drive around and remove the campaign signs of competitors. The media cartel knows that in order to stifle dissent, they only need to make the dissenters become unknown.
In my humble opinion, the likes of Google and Yahoo have sold their souls to the government-cartel alliances of this world and should no longer be a trustworthy source of information. Just about 80% of the sites I visit after a Google search for information lead me to lamescream media sites or sites that are trying to sell me something. I remember the days that I could search for information on how to accomplish a task, and what came up was tutorial sites. This becoming less and less common each year. This is onely one of many reasons why I recommend alternative search engines (if a good one exists) FreeWan, and peer to peer software.
I recommend that students set up private FreeWan cells at every college in the world. It is only when we no longer have to depend on anything belonging to the cartels that we will have a truly free press.
October 4th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
Sorry buddy… replace Google with Microsoft and I’ll agree with you… Google is in NO way a bad company…
And if your just worried about privacy junk… stop bein so paranoid… Google is a great company, and I’ll gladly give them info on my interests and habbits if it helps them.
Yahoo, i can agree has sold their souls… but Google has managed to keep it real.
How can you possibly compare Google with the corporate evil that is the RIAA… <_< nuts to you…
As much as I want a FreeWan, a free internet thats totally uncontrolled by anyone… Its probably not gonna happen… the big powers and governments wont allow it.
And Google isn’t the reason I want a freewan, i’d be glad if google helped setup the freewan… i’m more worried about the RIAA and the us Government…
October 4th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
—I remeber when Google agregated more news from p2pnet than they do now—
Me too : ) I’ve been emailing them for a long time, asking why they’ve been consistently failing to index significant posts while they faithfully include items that don’t really matter worth a damn.
They take literally weeks to answer, if they answer at all, and when they _do_ respond, their answers are in meaningless PR-speak.
Cheers!
October 4th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Take a look at http://www.google-watch.org I believe I have decent reasons for my paranoia. Google is too powerful, any company that controls the search results for over 2/3 of the web is too powerful. Ever hear the expression, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Google’s page rank system helps keep up and coming website down in listings. People are motivated to blog spam just to get a decent page rank. It would be better to adjust algorithms to take into account quality. I don’t trust very many companies that have billions of dollars in the bank.
I will say that Google is not a terrible company as Yahoo or the RIAA, but I think we need to make sure that they have healthy competition to prevent them from becoming like Yahoo. I admonish everyone to keep alternatives in mind.
I know google is not the RIAA. However, the RIAA is only one part of the cartel-government alliance. Anything that helps either governments or cartels should be carefully watched. I agree with you the RIAA is a corporate evil, however they would not have any power whatsoever if they could not use the government or courts as their enforcers.
As far as a FreeWan is concerned, the government may not have any choice in the matter. If they want to force their way into peoples’ houses to steal their equipment, then it will be time to band together in mass and defend each other. We buy the equipment, we use it the way WE WANT. You can start your own FreeWan Cell. If you live in a populated area or better yet, a college dormatory, you can expect to have many users in a short period of time.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
lol what fools
October 5th, 2005 at 8:21 am
ech your paranoid and those people are paranoid get a better grip of reality seriously the way I egt all the news about the RiAA is through gmail’s alert feature if they really wanted to keep things to themselves get a hold of yourself….
October 5th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
Agreed! I am only one small customer who used to reward myself
for my own good behavior with one CD per week. When the RIAA
announced the commencement of its customer lawsuits, (gads, was it July of 2003 or something like that?) I just stopped buying their product.
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/search.asp helps me easily determine a safe-to-buy CD. I love this site! (no relation whatsoever, BTW)
I do all I can to discourage people, especially young people with whom I associate at my local universities, to boycott RIAA products and artists. They listen.
There are others out there like me. It’s showing in the bottom line!