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Wired on the RIAA witch hunt

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  • Wired on the RIAA witch hunt

    Editorial.....

    RIAA Hits a Sour Note With Its File-Sharing Witch Hunt

    By Tony Long Email 10.11.07 | 12:00 AM

    If I were a big-shot L.A. music mogul, Jammie Thomas would not be my ideal poster child as the face of illegal file sharing.

    Thomas, you'll recall, was convicted last week in a Duluth, Minnesota, court for violating copyright law by making a couple of dozen songs available to the multitudes. For this she was ordered to pay the recording industry $222,000 in damages, and she could lose even more to court costs and appeals.

    All because she was among the 26,000 people sued by those Brioni suits known collectively as the Recording Industry Association of America, and hers was the first case to actually reach trial. The RIAA, faced with plummeting CD sales and increasingly restive artists, wanted to "send a message" to all the lowlifes out there who download music for free and undercut their profit margins.

    The message, apparently, is this: "We're idiots."


    The RIAA, after all, is the guardian of an industry so antiquated and oppressive that having sympathy for these guys is a little like feeling sorry for a Georgia slaveholder after watching Sherman's troops fire his mansion and scatter his livestock.

    So when their first victim, Thomas, turns out to be a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year -- latte money for the RIAA boys -- you have a hard time picturing these guys nailed to a cross. But that's the image the RIAA has tried hard to foster since some pimply-faced intern first explained to them what file sharing was. All of a sudden it was, oh, boo-hoo. Poor us.

    Cry me a river.


    Here's an industry so bloated with executives and middlemen, all of them greedily slurping up profit like bluepoint oysters, that the people who actually write the songs and play the music -- the "talent" -- are getting royally screwed in the royalty department. It's been like that for years. The Dylans and the Stones of the world might be able to rise above it and name their price, but for the rank and file it's "Dance to our tune, or go back and rot in that crummy little club."

    The usurious nature of the business is the main reason that the average CD, which at most costs a couple of bucks to produce, routinely sells for upwards of $20. Sometimes the songwriter makes out all right (forget about the singer or the musicians), but licensing and contracts have been sufficiently rigged by the boys in legal to ensure that the lion's share of the carcass goes to people who have absolutely nothing to do with the actual music.

    If there's an industry where the Marxist exhortation for the workers to control the means of production makes sense, this is it.

    Some artists are beginning to wise up to this. Thanks to technology (and when have you ever heard the Luddite say that?) bands are discovering that they can, in effect, become their own publishers, cut out the middleman and go directly to their audiences.

    Radiohead is the latest band to offer an album's worth of music online, for free. Fans are being asked to pay what they feel is fair, and my guess is that most people will kick in something. Given the chance to be reasonable, we usually will.

    The record companies are greedy, not reasonable, which is why it's hard to get worked up at the thought of people sharing "their" music for free. Thieves stealing from thieves? So what?

    It's this new artist-to-audience business model, though, that poses the real threat to the long-term survival of the traditional music companies. If you're among those who consider corporations and conglomerates to be evil incarnate, you'll be rooting hard for this new model to take hold. Not just for the sake of the little guy in the music world, but for the sake of little guys everywhere.

    Meanwhile, I think Jammie Thomas is going to turn out to be a public-relations nightmare for the RIAA. Crucifying someone who falls into about five demographically challenged categories to "send a message" hardly represents sound battle tactics for an entity already perceived as arrogant and overweening.

    Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.
    Dr. Mordrid
    ----------------------------
    An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.

    I carry a gun because I can't throw a rock 1,250 fps

  • #2
    My bet is someone foots the bill for Jammie Thomas' appeal and the RIAA loses.

    A great article though.
    “Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out”
    –The Light Fantastic, Terry Pratchett

    Comment


    • #3
      Follow up to Doc's post...
      Yes, that might just be the sound of record industry whimpering on what could ultimately prove to be one of the darkest days in its history.

      Only a band with an ardent following could distribute an album in the groundbreaking manner in which Radiohead is releasing its seventh album In Rainbows today. In a revolutionary move that has the entire industry losing sleep, the world's most beloved and respected band has conducted an end-run around the stronghold of the major record label and is distributing the album in a download format on a pay-what-you-want basis. According to pre-orders, the average fan is paying the average retail price — a social and economic phenomenon no doubt exclusive to a band of Radiohead's caliber. Could you imagine if a Britney or even a Maroon 5 attempted the same stunt? (Credit must also be given to Prince, who gave away his Planet Earth album in the UK earlier. He has long been the first to tirelessly lead this rebellion).

      And so today is the day when Radiohead puts its server to the test with an onslaught of downloads of In Rainbows, with a discbox version of the album, comprised of two CDs and two vinyl records, also available the first week of December. The $80 discbox is reportedly pre-selling even better than the pay-what-you-want downloads. It's the music versus greedy corporate interests and the corporation is losing. Go, boys, go.

      Business aside, how good is this 10-track studio album that is filled with tracks already road tested over the years for live audiences?

      Fans will not be disappointed. If The Bends or OK Computer didn't already convert you, it's doubtful that anything up until now will, so non-fans needn't bother. But fans will be all over this tidy guitar-fuelled moody balancing act that has Yorke's ethereal voice looming in and out of the dark with lyrics that are mostly indecipherable. While there's an atmospheric cohesion between the songs here, this would be classified as laid-back Radiohead, with more emphasis on dark piano chords and acoustic guitar this time out. If it's the grittier version you're hankering for, then the sprawling guitar of the machine-like and intentionally muddy sounding squall of Bodysnatchers is food for the soul. But that's about as heavy as it gets.

      For those who favour the lush paradise that is the nearly alien sound of Yorke's fragile vocal when paired with sweeping soundscapes, this will be a return to the form of the expansive OK Computer (but with guitars). There's nothing finer than the haunting Nude, or in a smaller, even accessible way, the strummy guitar and echo chamber intimacy of the lovely House of Cards, on which Yorke lazily intones, "I don't want to be your friend/I just want to be your lover."

      It's the second half of the release that really delivers on the Radiohead recipe of two parts lovely, three parts strange, always kept tightly wound with the overwhelming sense that the song you are hearing is an emotional shapeshifter. Faust Arp, with its strings and acoustic guitar, is one of the few tension-free examples of a Radiohead song. That lovely tension returns on Videotape, with its dark piano chords, skittering beat and creepy backing vocals.

      But Jigsaw Falling Into Place is one of the true highlights, a merger of Yorke's hyperactive styling with a frenzied interaction between guitars and strings that is jerky experimental, but lavishly laden with melody, too.

      More than any of the songs, it's an immediate draw and a natural for the live Radiohead experience.

      As for the album as a whole, it seems stronger than their last, and the band's confidence in the material shines through. Perhaps that's what usurping the system from within does for an artist.
      Titanium is the new bling!
      (you heard from me first!)

      Comment

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