March is Boycott the RIAA Month

People, get your thinking straight. The RIAA is an industry association, a trade group. It is merely a minor demon, it is the RIAA members who are the Devil Himself.

For example, consider Sony. They are a leading RIAA member, but they make little money in the music business. The lion’s share of Sony profits come from hardware. You don’t hurt RIAA or Sony by boycotting music.

If you want to hit the RIAA where they live and where decisions are made, pick some RIAA members and boycott all their buinesses, especially their other, more profitable businesses. That’s why no new products from Sony are allowed in this house.

Your post pretty much echoes my sentiments regarding the antics of the riaa. I’ve said it for a long time: vote with your wallet, people! Instead of buying CDs from the major labels (or any CDs, at all), seek out the indie labels and unsigned artists, and make it also clear with your wallet vote that you want freely transferable downloads (MP3s, but also FLAC, or Ogg) without any DRM (=dirty rotten mess).

Sony drove the last nail into the CD coffin for me when they put those nasty rootkits on their CDs, making countless PCs vulnerable to malicious intruders, effectively contributing to damaging an increasingly important infrastructure backbone of our modern society: the Internet. It is impossible to say how many PCs became “drones” in botnets because of Sony’s DRM rootkit and were subsequently used (and may still be used until this day) to launch denial-of-service attacks on web sites, send out ludicrous amounts of spam, or even further the cause of terrorists. Sony needs to be held accountable for that. A class-action lawsuit, filed on behalf of all Internet users (as damage to the Internet infrastructure affects all users), in the amount of one billion, or even several billion, dollars sounds about appropriate to me. And instead of paying every Internet user an infinitesimally small amount, once Sony has been found guilty, the money could be used to improve the overall security of the Internet through a number of independent organizations with the best people of the security expert community on their panels. I hope my friends over at the EFF pick up on this idea.

Saying “no” to DRM consequently also means saying “no thanks” to Apple and their iTunes. I do, however, like the idea of showing the old labels our wallet voting power by making artists they’ve kicked out number one on the iTunes single charts, despite Apple’s own DRM “lock-down” methods, simply because those single charts are currently the only way to compare “apples with apples” (please excuse the pun) = indie artists with big label artists.

The infrastructure I see evolve naturally in the near future is a direct artist-to-audience connection, with the old middleman completely out of the picture.

R.I.P. (rest in pieces) R.I.A.A.

David Sundancer

Readers interested in this should also check out the excellent documentary “Before the Music Dies” to understand how the business has changed and what the major labels & mega radio stations are doing

From radioparadise.com:

The US Copyright Office has released their new set of rates for the payment of royalties by Internet Radio, and they ignored all of the facts presented by webcasters (including RP) and gave the record industry exactly what they asked for: royalty rates so high that they will put RP and every other independent webcaster out of business. See Kurt Hanson’s newsletter for 3/2/07 for the details on how the rates work and what they will mean to stations like RP.

For some time, we’ve suffered with a system where we pay a large chunk (10%-12%) of our income to the Big 5 record companies - while FM stations and radio conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing. Now they want even more. In our case, an amount equal to 125% of our income. Our only hope is to create as much public awareness and outrage about this staggeringly unfair situation as possible. Neither the record industry nor Congress are ready to listen to us at this point. But members of the media may well be, and we need to get their attention.

If you have a blog, write about it. Feel free to quote anything I’ve written in the Listener Forum. If you find a good blog post about the subject, Digg it or Slashdot it. If you work for a media outlet, look over the facts of the situation and see if you don’t feel the same sense of outrage that we do. Write a letter to the editor of your favorite magazine or newspaper. Let everyone you can know what a loss it would be to you personally if your favorite Internet radio stations, including RP, were no longer available.

The RIAA can, at any time, agree to strike a deal with independent webcasters to allow us to pay a more realistic royalty, one based on a percentage of our income. We’re hoping that if all of you make enough noise they’ll be more inclined to do so. We’d also like to hope that at least one member of Congress will take a look at this situation and become willing to propose ammendments to the deeply flawed 1990s pieces of legislation that are responsible for the unfair treatment of Internet radio.

Thanks a lot for reading this, and for considering the idea of taking some action on it. We’ll be posting new information and links here as they become available.

I agree with you (mostly).
…but “I am have about 400 cassettes”?! Dude! You need a proofreader.

italics belong to lumpy

I enjoyed this piece very much. It appeals to the “smacking me will result in ingenious forms of payback” in me. The most effective form of payback on a personal level is to remove your magnificent presence from that person’s sphere of influence. The most effective form of payback of a business entity is to withhold from them exactly what they covet, your money.

The research you do and the links to follow are excellent reading, please keep writing.

Thanks.

Hey, don’t forget about eMusic.com

First: Sounds like a great idea.
Second: What can I do (and how do I do it) to help make the 3/22 date happen?
Sorry, I’m an over-60 techie, not savy past ripping and burning.
PS I’ve been using eMusic.com for years. What is your position on them?

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[...] March is Boycott the RIAA Month ~ webbits March is Boycott the RIAA Month by lumpy on March 1, 2007 at 6:06 pm · CommentsCategorized by Opinion, Copyright, RIAA / Related Information [...]

One little known secret is that some mp3 players, specifically the Creative Zen Nano, come with a special line-in cable that you can hook directly to your cassette deck. Not only does it record the cassette, but encodes it to mp3. You can use programs like Audacity to break up the recording into individual songs. Audacity will create ID tags as you go. Very cool.
Later. MD

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