RIAA President to stop downloading, save the empire

by aristan on Nov.20, 2005, under internet 'culture'

Cary Sherman wants you to know that he isn

5 comments for this entry:

Jay
November 21st, 2005 on 5:35 am
Somone should have asked what the RIAA was doing to make sure that Fair Use was being observed. These people, if that’s what you want to call them… It seems the more they talk, the more they sound like money grubbing bottom feeders. I love the way he played down the $15 price of a CD. Yes, people must get paid for their work. But here’s the kicker. $15 for about 2.5 average good songs is just wrong. On top of that, they also want to limit what you do with your $15 CD. I say they can copy protect it, but cut the price by half, if not more. I’m tired of paying top dollar for the tripe the RIAA members puts out. Oh, and the ONLY reason you can download a single legal track is because of Apple playing hardball, not because of the RIAA, et al..

If they get their way, they’ll have all of us paying through the nose to download legal music. Really, no song is worth more than $1, even the ones I consider good. If you really want to support the artists, go to their concerts, and buy their merchandise there. Show them that you really appreciate them.
paul
November 21st, 2005 on 11:33 am
Your page says it’s UTF-8 encoded (right above the DOCTYPE), but it’s not — the page is ISO Latin 1.

This is causing your curly quotes to not render in Safari.
Per
November 21st, 2005 on 12:11 pm
Baa, “Intellectual Property” is no property at all – its just an imoral concept designed to let people get away with doing a job once and getting paid for it over and over.
Aristan
November 21st, 2005 on 8:43 pm
Thanks, Paul… a combo of MT’s “smart” markup and writing it in Word originally seems to have come back and bit me in the rump. I just haven’t had a chance to fix it.
britboitexas
December 3rd, 2005 on 6:37 am
Ok i have a few problems with this RIAA fellow, i am involved in the promotion side of the music biz ( adj nothing fancy but the record labels use us to push the product), and the total costs including promotion, royalties, shop margin etc per cd is about 5 USD, so where is the other 10 to 15 dollars going.

The reason that campus record stores have closed and places like record rack in houston that supplied music to dj’s have closed is that the big corporations such as best buy, circuit city, wal-mart etc have pushed them out of all but the largest towns.

I buy a great deal of my music from europe on vinyl or cd direct from dutch and english distributers, but if the few local stores stocked it or would order it for me i would buy locally. Also the dance market is the us is there it is just not supported in the big chains, best buy has rows of hip-hop and rock and one tiny area of dance cd’s.

If i was dishonest i would download but i like to have an original product to use. What the record companies could do is provide extras, examples such as the new depeche mode cd, the version i have has a dvd with a full 5.1 version of the album also videos and extras just like a normal dvd. If the record companies would provide more rather than take away more people would buy the cd’s. If i was still a student on little or no income i would be tempted to download a full cd, but if that cd was available with undownloadable extras such as listed above i might be more likely to hand over my 15 USD at best buy for that version

In my opinion downloading has also introduced many people to artists and music that they may not have found before, and then when they find that they like the band buy the full cd.

Now he also mentions the fact the the record companies are fostering new acts, this is not true, where as 10 years ago there were maybe more than 10 times the number of record labels than now, also the big 3 have such small A & R teams that rather that developing 100 artists over 3 or 4 releases they have 10 artists who are pushed to the major radio companies and are therefore heard. As the US has only 2 major players in most markets it is impossible for bands to break out of a local area without big label support. Our local rock station has a limited number of slots for local music, all the rest comes from the corporate head office. If this system had existed 40 years ago there would be no Pink Floyd, Stones, Dire Straits, all of whom took a few albums to make it big. I dispair for the young people who are dreaming of fame and may have a great sound that needs nurtuiring and crafting, but will have even less of a chance today.

If you interviewed many of the big dance producers such as Benny Benassi, Amand Van Buuren etc they would support p2p as a way fo getting thier music out there. The satallite radio companies are doing a great job of helping here but they only have 8 million listeners compbined, but i noticed last week a track that was originally released on the p2p network last year has made it into the xm dance charts.

The American labels have got away with telling the public what it wants them to hear, single sales in the US are non existant, whereas in the uk they play an important role in the chart compositions. If you look at the billboard charts maybe only 15 percent are avaiable as a single so most of the chart is made up from airplay, which can be purchased with gifts and such, so the charts have no bearing whatsoever on what people want to buy or listen to.

Finally as for the sony thing, yes i install microsoft on my machine because i choose to and can remove it at anytime to go to linux or whatever, the same with games, when you install a game some will have internet portals built in but when you uninstall everything goes, so the parallel does not exist. I think it is terrible that they tried to foist this on the consumer, I disabled the autoplay long ago for this reason, it is my machine and i want to know what i am putting on it, not to have it compromise my security or report to sony what i am listening to, oh yes they will say it is so we can send you offers that fit your taste, but since when did it become thier business what i do in my house!

thats it rant over