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makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Tue, December 14

RIAA Is Love

I download music.

The RIAA would have my face on a million ads in every newspaper in the country with a fearful warning about how much money they sucked out of me.  There’s something more though.  There’s a deep, dark secret they don’t want you to know about.  They like to keep the people telling this secret quiet, hidden and without public voice.

Fuck ‘em.  I’m squealing.

I download music because it helps me purchase way more music than I otherwise could.  I download an album and then buy it.  And then I buy the entire back catalog of that artist.  And then I go to their concerts and then I buy their shirts and posters.  And then I write about how great that show was and then I encourage you to buy their music.  I download music and then I pump money into the music industry.  Most of my spending money, in fact.

The RIAA doesn’t want me saying this because it’s everything they deny.  All music downloaders are money-grubbing thieves if you ask them.  I am the vocal antithesis to everything they want a fearful public to believe.

Last spring, my good buddy said, “Hey, you need to hear this CD.”  It was Interpol’s “Turn On The Bright Lights”.  He sent me a digital copy and I madly fell in love with it.  He doesn’t listen to it much anymore, but I can’t go more than a few days without hearing that particular album.  Which is to say nothing at all about how often I listen to their other album and the numerous singles and EP’s of theirs I’ve bought.  You might even remember that I wrote about the incredible concert of theirs that I attended or the other general praise I’ve written for them along with song recommendations.

Today, at a historic record store here in downtown Ann Arbor, I found Interpol’s rare, import-only Black EP.  Very happy with this find, I immediately bought it and couldn’t wait to get home to hear it.

pop!  hiss!  pop!

“What the hell?  Why is this CD popping?”  Dumb question.  Copy-protected.  Those clever guys developed a way to physically write the disc in such a way that your burner won’t read it but your regular CD player will.  Or at least, your regular CD play will be able to try.

pop.

I returned that $14, 6 song CD immediately.  For a group interested in selling CD’s, the RIAA certainly has a knack for making the people most likely to buy CD’s do the exact opposite.

I encourage you to read about the campaign running at Downhill Battle for further information about ending the RIAA’s draconian practices and making music fair and free as we all know it should be.

6 people have chimed in.
→ Add your 2¢ by reading through and commenting at the end.

1 → shanecavanaugh  –  (Dec 15 2004, 11:32 PM)

For further reading see the executive VP of the RIAA Neil Turkewitz’s article entitled “Copyright, Fair Use and the Public Interest.”

2 → mike schiano  –  (Dec 16 2004,  2:19 AM)

It’s still a blow to the stomach when Paramount Pictures sends you an 8 page letter stating you illegally downloaded their copyrighted work.  sigh.

3 → Kev  –  (Dec 16 2004,  3:00 AM)

Big Music is a senseless, soulless machine, just like Big anything usually is.  As a musician, I’m offended when these know-nothing corporate suits refer to the output of someone’s heart and soul as “product,” except that what they’re generating usually is little more than a commodity. 

And yes, a lot of people are doing exactly what you do—using the downloaded music as samples to buy things later.  A full mp3 gives you a much better feel for a song than the crappy little 30-second Real Audio files on Amazon.

By going after their customers with lawsuits, they’re just struggling to hang on to a world that they know is leaving them…the fact is, with a CD burner, a website and mp3’s, we don’t need them anymore, and they will eventually go away if they continue putting out the crap that they have recently.

I’ve ranted at length on this subject here.

4 → cyberkid  –  (Dec 29 2004,  8:19 AM)

In Japan a new CD costs about $35. Funny thing is that there are many places you can rent music CDs, and it is legal. So many people just wait for 6 months, rent those “new” CDs for $3 a shot and download them to their computer.

5 → Paul  –  (Feb 18 2005,  9:11 PM)

Just finished arguing with my roommate about file sharing. He is against it (even though he freely downloads movies) and I am all for sharing. We circled the wagons around the usual arguments of how the artists and production companies are or are not hurt by sharing. He used the analogy that if I steal Donald Trump’s wallet, it is still wrong even though it may not truly hurt him. I said I wouldn’t do that and that his analogy was a poor one. I challenged to show me artists or companies being put out of business because of downloading. He and the RIAA are unable to do so because it doesn’t happen. We also discussed the moral implications of what he termed the “theft” of the intellectual property. I basically agree with the blog and the post from Kev in that the time has come for music to be free and for the people to get back at the huge corporations who have been fleecing us and putting out really poor product to boot.
The funniest thing is though…my roommate, who reads this blog regularly (I sadly never do), referred me here to support his argument. Upon my reading out loud of the blog’s final sentence regarding how music should be free and fair…he put on his headphones (without saying a word) and starting listening to music he downloaded from iTunes presumably. Keep on sharing people.

6 → pd  –  (Feb 18 2005,  9:33 PM)

I suppose I should have been a bit more precise in my usage of the word “free”.  The usage of that word in the final paragraph wasn’t necessarily a free as in “monetarily free” but rather a “free from the insanity imposed by the deadly workings of the RIAA”.

This is an important point, as I certainly do download music without any thought of paying for it right then and there.  What I do is much more a sampling endeavor.  I download a complete album and then I listen to it for a while.  If I like it, I buy it sooner or later (depending mostly the level of must-have-ness that the album creates in me) and if I don’t, I inevitably delete it.

Think of it this way: I listen to the music for free and then if I enjoy it, I buy it and if I don’t, then I remove it.  I fully support the artists I enjoy and I fully ignore the artists I don’t.

My beef with the RIAA stems from the fact that they want to punish me for my methods in acquiring music.  My methods lead me to buy more than I would otherwise and I cannot see anything in that that they should take issue with.






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