Here's a link that lets you conveniently check to see if an album you're about to buy was released under the auspices of a RIAA label.

Thing about a boycott of the RIAA is that I highly doubt that most people really care enough to do so unless they're personally affected by the RIAA's actions. The remaining people are likely those such as myself support a boycot (and indeed have for a long time), but believe their voice would be rather meaningless. Consider that very few of my CDs are actually put out by a RIAA label in the first place. I'd estimate that less than 20% of the music I've purchased since 2000 has been released by a label associated with that particular entity. I wouldn't miss much by contributing to a boycot, but by the same token, it's not like my own abstinance would hurt them much more than it has to date, you know?

I've had my own personal mini-boycot of bad music going on ever since ways of hearing music before you buy it have come about. Consequently, I suppose this is why so little of my recent purchases have been RIAA produced. I must say that I was sad to learn that the works of Garmarna, Hedningarna, Sorten Muld, and all sorts of other cool folksy scandinavian music is all RIAA stuff, though.

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i'm wondering if using kazaa as it is intended basically means you can be sued, why is the program itself not illegal?

i was also wondering what would be the worst music to be drug into court over

i was thinking like maybe the complete collection of Journey

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what they are doing is pretty offensive to me

it's like the dairy council suing someone for getting their own cow, or suspecting them of having their own cow

this is just the next generation of people making mixed tapes and they need to adapt to it

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

The only way to stop the RIAA is to pay journey to kill them.

I'm on it.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

Drexle is right that hardly anyone cares enough to boycott RIAA. But they don't have to care. Mass abstinence from purchasing new CD's is a de facto boycott. The interests represented by the RIAA have found themselves subject to what are called "market forces," and they hate that invisible hand. They will, as they have in the past, do everything possible to rig the market in a way that lets them survive, but I think they're about to lose.

It doesn't matter if they sue everyone who trades copyright material online, because the market is changing on them. mAAk's a little off the mark here, in my opinion. This isn't just mix tapes. This is the technology of distribution. It is no longer necessary to manufacture and move tons of plastic to get music out there. Suddenly, record companies are the superfluous and parasitic organisms we've always said they were. If you can make a recording studio in your basement (which you can), and if you can get copies of the work out there without the cost of pressing (which you can), then for what exactly do you need a record company?

Used to be distribution muscle was what you wanted from a record label. That's not totally gone yet, but it's on the way out, and the business is going to have to find a different role for itself.

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What others say about boorite!

Same thing with publishing houses.

But like you know, the issue is larger than just distribution. It has to do with intellectual property and "pirating" and what exactly those things currently mean and more importantly, what we want them to mean.

You ask just about anyone in the country if they're for free music online and they're going to say yes. Free is good. Everyone likes free.

So, if we're a democracy, and the majority wants free music, why shouldn't we have free music? A country is defined not only by the laws it has on the books, but on the laws it wants on the books. And to me, the face-off seems to be between intellectual property and access to information. I definitely come down on the side of access to information. I think that probably holds true for most people.

But if there was some kind of law that made it legal to download copyrighted music, the thing we *might* have to make sure to do is subsidize the artists. In the long term i can see the free downloading of music making it hard for musicians to support themselves by just their music. For me, art alone is a noble pursuit, and I'd hate to see the musicians of the world, no matter how successful, having to flip burgers to get by.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

the music is already free and they just don't realize it yet

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Same thing with publishing houses.

Except you still need paper to publish a book. E-books haven't caught on. A .txt file isnt as good as a nice hardback edition. But an MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD track. Comes though the headphones, same same.

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What others say about boorite!

Kazaa has quite a few E-books online. You should download some.

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Life is a lot like getting mugged; you get your kicks, you take your punches, and when it's over, someone else gets your cash.

I made a shirt with iron on stuff that says "I got sued by the RIAA and now all I have is this crummy tshirt"

did you make one that says "i am a waste of genetic material / earth's natural resources" yet

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I have! Eediot!

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What others say about boorite!

put it up on cafepress

Copying music is legal in canada
http://techcentralstation.com/081803C.html

Artists speak out against lawsuits
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/11/MN12066.DTL

If the record labels had a lick of sense, they'd stop trying to get $12.99 per unit for a .39¢ product (sans recording costs) that showcases one hit single and is, basically, all filler, otherwise.

People don't want to hork up major money to listen to 10 or 11 tracks of Brittney Spears "seeking her artistic vision" to get one hit single.

The whole raison d` etre for Napster, Morpheus and KaZaa is very simple. In spite of what sorts of media they may offer, they all came about because people want hit singles. 45 RPM single records are toast. And they sold a lot more of those than they did of LP's back in the day.

Are you listening, SONY? People - Want - Hit - Singles.

I would drop $1.99 per download for hit singles at the drop of a hat. Older back catalogues of classic stuff? A buck a song. Bing. All handled.

Beating up a 12 year old girl with your buggy whip IS fucking stupid, if you think you're gonna keep her out of the Model T showroom by doing so.

Nobody sane is going to blow a few bucks for gas, parking and an Orange Julius fix, in order to head to the mall and pay $12.99 for something they can get for free. Free, I might add, with all of the fat trimmed off.

Buying it from your home, online, is still more attractive than the mall scenario. Offering clean, release quality music at a reasonable song per price is, IMHO, about the ONLY thing that is going to save the recording industry's fat, bloated ass.

From the mastering two-track to a company T-1, straight to the consumer. No CD's. No cases. No rack jobbing. No artwork costs. No shipping. No truck fleet costs. No drivers to pay. No overhead.

It's a distributor's wet dream. And it's the future. And it's here.

If the recording industry doesn't have sufficient product of better quality to displace the dodgy, badly ripped .mp3 files being traded on P2P clients with marketable music, then that's THEIR fucking problem.

Sell the Rolls Royces, boys, and tell Madonna to buy her own fucking Dom Perignon.

The touring industry is thriving and is the largest income sector for recording artists under the present model. Maybe this will seperate the working, talented, entertaining musical artists from the process rack primadonnas who sound like a gargling moose when playing live.

I am releasing a CD in the Spring of '04 and, yeah, I'm going to be flogging the whole CD for $10.00 here and there. I have a few available distribution outlets. This is a vanity release, in industry terms, and the scale is stunningly smaller, true. However.... Should one or two tracks pop up as being the reason that people who DO buy the CD buy it, I'm bloody well gonna toss those tracks up on any useful .net service that will offer them for download for .50¢, or a buck, or whatever the market will bear.

I don't see myself setting the world on fire with one release from an unknown artist, but if it gets to the point where people "wanna hear that one song", I'm sure as hell gonna use whatever service will allow me to sell a copy of that one song, cheaply, to anybody who will pay for it.

Is this the only useful approach now? I have no idea.

I do know that the industry model that the RIAA is trying to prop up is as dead as a doornail. As dead as old Jacob Marley.

This must be distinctly understood, or else nothing wonderful can come of this story.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

I was just about to say that.

i don't think it's really that people want hit singles (i can't imagine anyone wanting to change a CD over and over) but i'd agree that people might be more apt to buy an industry "mixed" cd of hit singles or even user-customizable cds...

..maybe..

no, i assure you that they, along with everyone else important, are not listening to you

even i stopped reading you halfway through and i'm not important in the slightest

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

If the record companies would just listen to the consumer than they would sell way more albums. What the public really wants is for Air Supply to reunite, tour Japan and then release a six disc live boxed set of said Japanese tour.

Are you sure about this? I was under the impression from bands I've spoken to that the majority of tours are loss-makers, and the real money is in merchandising.

Actually, the touring industry is in much better shape than the recording industry. Not only does it promote the artist's present release, but the artist is guaranteed n~ amount of the gate and the balance of the funds from ticket sales and, yeah, merch, covers production, promotion, hotels, trucking and transfer, etcetera... These tours are also often sponsored by large corporations who can write off their investement into the production and promotion as advertising expenses.

Merchandise is a very large income stream for the artist, but on both the arena and mid-size venue and club levels, most of the merchandise is sold at the shows. This another reason that touring is paying more than CD sales for artists in this era of file swapping.

Touring is an expensive proposition on the arena level, but the huge gate receipts that bloated ticket prices bring more than covers the expense of touring, as well as artist's profits. All of this is mapped out well before the beginning of the tour and no high profile artist is going to go out on the road unless they have a specific guarantee of a minimum amount of income. It's happened, though. Whitney Houston's tour a few years back hit a financial brick wall when the anticipated advance sales of tickets, basically, tanked. They folded up their tents and bailed. A lot of money was lost, contracts were cancelled and promoters started doing a lot more advancing before putting together an itinerary for anybody, regardless of their star status.

On the club and mid-line venue/shed level, the production costs drop proportionally due to smaller audio and lighting rigs, smaller crews, less luxurious transportation and accomodataions, et al...

Smaller bands also flog their discs and wearable merchandise at the gigs using their own crews to make the sales, so they have a larger margin but, naturally, less volume.

Older, bankable classic rock acts like Bryan Adams, Cheap Trick, The Moody Blues, Eddie Money, etc... tour theatres, rib burnoffs, sheds and such with a smaller budget, lower ticket prices and a smaller profit. Reardless of the scale, since their catalogues are all but out of print, this has become their main income stream.

There are a whole lot more side deals and promotions involved in large scale tours than there used to be, and nobody goes out the door anymore relying simply on sales of tickets.

Like most industries, it depends where you are on the food chain.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

so you are saying rich more popular people make more money unless they become unpopular

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

RIAA pushes for ban on computers, Internet, electricity

WTF

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

it's called satire :X

Guess who's writing democracy into Iraq?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30441.html

yeah no kidding

what are you a fucking genius

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008