Their flesh-wasting lobbying appendage, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), displays more of the obtuse idiocy that brought them to the waiting room of Dr. Kevorkian's death mill by following their current business plan of spending all of their money and creative effort making lawyers wealthy chasing a phantom menace they call "copyright infringement", instead of the old, obsolete plan of scouting, signing, developing and promoting talented musicians.
Read how the RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000! Genius! For the 3 year period from 2006 to 2008, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000.
And these morons have the gall to claim that all this self destructive stupidity is in the name of protecting artist's rights. HaHaHa! The great and beneficent moguls of this criminal enterprise have always made their profit by stealing from their artists. Lyle Lovett sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales.The band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.
Fortunately for the future of musicians and their fans, there are many models being developed by the musicians themselves to create, distribute and promote music, thereby bypassing the parasitic zombies in suits whose only aim appears to be to collapse an entire art form into a black hole- following our once-vaunted auto and financial industries over the cliff.
Oh... and betcha coulda guessed that this bloated piece of useless suet was paid over $2 million last year to orchestrate this abomination of a business plan. Burn in Hell scumbags!
For some interesting insiders' looks at this decayed and stinking corpse of an industry, take a gander at this current state of affairs, and this classic take-down from the 90's.
Rock On Dudes!!
Update: Roast aficionado Jody McAllister provides this link to Janis Ian's point-by-point refutation of the RIAA's distortions and continuing prevarication about the "illegal download problem", first referenced by Nils Nichols in a comment to this post. She also is an advocate of providing free downloads to attract new listeners, many of whom come to her concerts or purchase her music and other merchandise. This article is a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the music business. If you are any kind of fan or consumer of music, it is a must read.
2 comments:
I once read something in The Nation by a copyright law professor at Columbia U. -- Who said the industry needed to find a new business model... another way to pay the artists because, the downloading wasn't going to stop... and he had some further defenses for the "moral rightness" of downloading.
I also read an article, on the subject, by Janis Ian; she said that anytime a record executive told her he was just watching out for her money, she would reach into her pocket to make sure her wallet was still there.
She said she earned her profits from her concerts, and that providing downloadable content on her web site, garnered her new fans, who would then attend her concerts.
Here is a link to the Nation artcile: http://www.thenation.com/article/pay-artists-not-owners
The anal raping of artists by their labels and managers long pre-dates the internet and mp3 download era. When I was in booking and management in the early 80's, I represented many old blues, R&B and rock relics, the vast majority of whom signed away all of the rights to their music early in their careers, and who only made any money at all by touring.
If you didn't follow the link in my original post, you really should read this revealing, fully itemized accounting of the predatory theft that has always been the profit model of the music business gangsters. It is by Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana among others.
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