I protest.

RIAA: About the corporation, not the artist.

Ampersand has a great post on his weblog, "How record labels exploit bands." He refers to an article by Steve Albini that begins by comparing signing with a label to swimming a sixty-yard-long pool of shit.

I suspect that Albini understates the case.

The upshot: The corporate label gets virtually all of the money for the artist's work, the artist gets virtually none. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the corporation owns the copyright to all the artist's work done while under contract.

Ampersand suggests a few changes to laws, which would basically have the effect of regulating the industry. Go read his post for his suggestions; while I generally agree with him, I just don't think he goes far enough. These days, no artist should ever sign with a label. Ever. With current technology and this new communication medium you and I are using right now, self-publishing is trivially easy. Sure, you won't make $10,000,000, but then artists don't make that money, it all goes to the corporation. You certainly will make more than $5,000 on a $3,000,000 gross that Amp mentions. By self-publishing, every dime over production costs goes in your pocket.

As for me, yeah, I've downloaded songs. I don't any more, really, simply because the music I like isn't popular. Besides, and more importantly, I really do want the artists to whom I listen to benefit from my purchases. To that end, I never buy from a major label. Instead, when I buy a CD, I buy it from places like this or this. At most I will buy from an independent label like this one.

And by the way, I'm also never again going to buy another song to which I haven't already listened. Self-publishing and the independent labels neatly solve that problem. Of course, the major labels refuse to even recognize it as a problem.

The RIAA (and the MPAA as well, for that matter) is a dinosaur. A very large, very slow dinosaur which is dead, but whose walnut-sized brain hasn't quite gotten the message just yet. The principals of the RIAA, though, are so accustomed to their tradition of screwing both the artist and the audience that they have begun to think of doing so as their right. Robert A. Heinlein, in his story "Life Line," had something to say about this viewpoint:

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.

This is probably the point at which I should mention that the RIAA is now trying to link peer-to-peer file sharing to child pornography. Their intent, of course, is to destroy the ability of users of the Internet to share files with each other, in the hope that this will curb music downloads. Of course, the obvious fact (pointed out by the graphic on that New York Times article) is that peer-to-peer file sharing has a miniscule, and dropping, portion of such traffic. Maybe the RIAA should go after web sites in general, eh? After all, that's where most of the kiddie porn is, right?

Feh.

As a society, we at last have the ability for music-makers (not to mention writers and moviemakers) to directly reach their audiences without the intervention of middlemen like those in the RIAA. Middlemen who make their living by stealing from both the artist and the audience. It is time and past time that we tell the RIAA just where to stuff their lies and their lawsuits.