Why Are You Still Giving the RIAA Money?!
by Giulianna LamannaLet’s go over the facts. The basic, undeniable, I-thought-this-was-known-to-pretty-much-everyone facts.
1. People can’t find out about new music if they don’t hear it first.
On the first day of school, an exhuberant Jessica ran across the playground to her friend Brittany. Breathless with excitement, she described the new boy band she’d discovered over the summer. Their music was catchy, their lyrics made her swoon, and all the members of the band were drop-dead gorgeous. In fact, she was already picking out what wedding dress she would wear when T.J. inevitably proposed to her.
“Wow!” Brittany said. “Can I listen to the CD?”
“Give me 10 bucks,” Jessica said.
Naturally, Brittany never did hear the CD and never did care much about the band. It’s just common sense. Are you going to put up money for a band that may very well suck monkey balls? Of course not. You want to listen to the music a few times, make sure it’s worth the investment of your time and money, and then consider purchasing it. This is why we have radio. Or at least that’s what most people believe.
In fact, since the beginning, the large record companies have not viewed the radio as publicity. From the beginning, radio stations have had to pay the record companies to play their songs: after all, every free listen is a lost sale. And the record companies had to be reimbursed.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re imagining a world in which music is sold entirely through soundless cover art and artist names. And maybe - maybe if we’re feeling generous - 30 second clips of two or three songs. You’re wondering why anyone would ever buy new music without having any idea of what they were buying. You’re balking at the fact that record companies are somehow getting away with forcing other people to pay them to promote their product. Ah, my naive, uninformed little music-buyer. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
2. File sharing allows people to hear about new music.
I know, I know. The RIAA has told you that every downloaded mp3 is a lost sale. However, as we previously discussed, the RIAA also believes that every time you hear that goddamn Nickelback song on the radio, you are thinking to yourself, “Ha-ha! I heard ‘Someday’ for free! Now I never have to pay any money - ever!!!” In short, the RIAA is completely wrong.
The Effect on File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis is a scientific study of exactly how much money record companies lose when people download music. Basically, nothing. Some people download mp3s and never buy the CDs, but others buy CDs they’d never otherwise have heard of without file-sharing. In the end, the two extremes balance each other out. If anything, the miniscule effect of file sharing works in the record companies’ favor, especially when it comes to lesser-known or indie bands who don’t otherwise get a lot of press.
The RIAA’s reasoned, logical response to this study - and others like it - has consisted of sticking their fingers in their ears and going, “LALALALALALALALALALALALALA.” And oddly enough, people are actually buying it. The RIAA tells the world that file sharing hurts the artists. They have no evidence for this. They have not done any kind of scientific study. In fact, the independent studies done on this subject have said that file sharing has an effect so miniscule on the music industry that it’s not even statistically significant. But the RIAA says that file sharing hurts the artists, so golly gee whiz, it must be so.
3. Artists and bands make their vast piles of money from touring, not from selling CDs.
Record companies do far more to deprive their artists of their fair share than file sharing does. Bands and artists receive pennies in royalties - if that. More often, they end up paying the record company money for not selling enough.
Let’s pause for a minute and consider what we have learned here.
- First, a band makes a deal with a record label. The record label needs the band, because without bands, record labels have no reason for being. They show exactly how necessary these bands are by paying them nothing in royalties. If the band does not make them enough money, the record company gets more money.
- The deal having been struck and an album having been recorded, the record label then proceeds to the radio station where it gets paid to get publicity.
- Then the CD hits stores, where it costs the consumer almost $20 because the record label grossly - and knowingly - overestimates the cost of packaging.
- Then the record label finds out that some people are downloading the band’s songs off the Internet. They sue 12-year-old girls and elderly couples. They make more money. Once again, the band sees not a penny of this money.
In short, if you get involved in any way with the RIAA, you will lose. If you are an artist, you lose. If you are a radio station, you lose. If you buy a CD, you lose. If you download music, you definitely lose. If you even think about a major-label band, you have already lost. And the RIAA walks away looking like Ebenezer Scrooge, yet still taking all your money with it.
So my question to you is: WHY are you still buying CDs? Do you seriously want to donate your hard-earned dollars to this insanity? If you want to support your favorite artists, a good way to do so is to go to their concerts. A better way is to show the RIAA that you know they’re ripping off your favorite bands - and you - and you’re not going to stand for it any longer.
Record sales are already plummeting, as they have been ever since Napster was shut down. I think we should make them grind entirely to a halt. If that doesn’t make the RIAA come to its senses, then at least it’ll make it bleed. And we’ll all feel better about ourselves for not supporting it. I say we show the RIAA what really harms sales: acting like a paranoid, money-grubbing douchebag.
My initial idea for this post was to challenge everyone to stop buying CDs and simply download mp3s. The RIAA couldn’t possibly sue us all, could it? Answer: Yes. Yes, it could. And it will. And I could never figure out how to work one of those damn file sharing doo-hickeys anyway. So I have a better idea: Buy used. It’s not as hard as it sounds. eBay has thousands of CDs, most in perfect condition, for far less than you’d pay at a store. (That includes shipping and handling.) Amazon also allows people to buy and sell each other’s used stuff for a fraction of the price of a new CD. And in case you’d forgotten, there are still used bins and racks at your local stores. So in many cases, you don’t even need to wait for shipping.
Although I’m happy to wait a few days for some music if it means giving a big fuck-you to the RIAA.
Interesting, the post before this is Thesis #6: Humans are still Pleistocene animals, where I showed how sharing arose in the context of human evolution as one of our most defining traits, and how modern life denies the very nature that we evolved with–that it is the very definition of dehumanizing.
The RIAA is just providing another example. Sharing was the foundation of human society right up to 10,000 years ago. We still believe it to be “good,” but modern civilization tells us otherwise. For a very long time, it was simply an impractical good–laudable, but something that would put you behind and endanger your own welfare (as opposed to tribalism, where it was your primary guarantee of survival). Now, we have made it blatantly wrong to share. Consider the case Richard Stallman made years ago:
Earlier this month, I wrote a post on property rights, where I highlighted the absurdity and philosophical bankruptcy of the very notion of “intellectual property rights.” Software and music are both abstract things, and thus impossible to “steal” in any meaningful way. As abstract things, software and music are only useful when they are shared.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2005 @ 1:54 PM
Of course it’s probably well known on this site but just for any other readers, check out the Creative Commons and the Copyleft Movement (the copyleft link will lead to the wiki entry - for music, check out Magnatune Label. I have no idea how good they are but I love their slogan - “We are not evil.”)
And for software, I just got into open source stuff (yes, I’m behind the times…). To check out their best programs go to The OpenCD project.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 28 August 2005 @ 3:21 PM
I recently wrote a post along similar lines (specifically about the failings of the Creative Commons concept). I agree completely: the RIAA could find a way to sue us all. In fact, they’re actively doing this right now by the various clandestine attempts to turn the internet into an instrument of corporate control and hierarchal structure. Used to be you could just dial up with a modem and any phone line. Now, you need to pay for a special broadband connection–sure, you get benefits, but you also open the door to control. Same thing with “trusted” this and “certificate” that. I’m not a tech-savvy as I should be, but it seems like increasingly the capability to control and commercialize our internet experience is being hardwired into our browsers (yeah firefox? too tech-dumb to do anything here but parrot the people that tell me that it’s a good thing).
I like the solution to buy used media. I’d like to propose an additional (NOT alternative) solution: consciously support those artists that don’t express ownership to their work. Like many things primitivist, for 99% of the history of human performance/entertainment there was no technical means to express ownership–all you had was the quality of your performance! Bards and poets were famed and rewarded based on their live performance ability, their ability to improvise and adapt on the spot. Then, for just the last few decades, the technological capability to mass-distribute their performances led to the legal fiction of “ownership”. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this led to a focus on what could be owned, and not on the sublime quality of a performance that you can only see once and will have a far more profound effect on you. Perhaps now that technology has undermined this “ownership”, we can get back to the heart and soul of music, acting, etc. I own a lot of CDs, bought mostly in the late ’90s. None of them can replicate the Cure concert that I saw in a rainy forest clearing in Austria. I recently bought tickets to a Social Distortion show this fall–for the cost of the tickets I could have bought 3 of their CDs and listened over and over, but in my mind that isn’t worth near the anticipated few hours in a smoke filled room. Let’s get back to supporting the performance (and make it the intimate performance of the local artist while we’re at it)–because that is something that can’t be “owned”, and is worth the money, in my opinion.
In some ways, the path of the performance industry is followig the same path as peak oil, as civilization in general. Hmmm…
Comment by Jeff — 28 August 2005 @ 9:53 PM
Good article. Very eye-opening, G! I hadn’t thought about this situation very much except for how much I hate Metallica. For you see, I hate them. I hate them so very, very much.
Comment by Chuck — 29 August 2005 @ 8:34 AM
Hey –
You wanna talk shareware music, just check out the Jam scene….
The Grateful Dead were not just about drugs and long hair and free love… they started the whole concept of allowing tapers to come to thier shows, record them and distribute the recordings however they pleased….
Now the rest of the scene they spawned tends to do the same…
Its good stuff, maynard:-)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 29 August 2005 @ 2:13 PM
eBay and Amazon aren’t always viable options outside the U.S. I live in Canada, and it seems like the cheaper I find something on eBay, the more the shipping to Toronto will cost, so the total expenditure works out about the same.
An option that you didn’t mention, which also depends on where you live and what type of music you like, is borrowing CDs from the library to rip. They won’t have everything you want, but if you have a big enough hard drive you can rip in a lossless codec and not lose as much quality as you do in a 128Kbps MP3. (The difference is often noticeable.)
Comment by Chris — 12 August 2008 @ 12:12 AM
yep, what Chris said. It’s what I do. It’s risky if the CD has anti-copy software on it but I think they mark those now.
Comment by Dana — 16 October 2008 @ 3:26 PM