Rubénerd!

Absolutely the best description outside WholeWheatRadio.org I've read of the RIAA, in a comment on a CNET story of all places:

The RIAA as a group of members is a criminal enterprise. It has been found guilty of price-fixing, collusion, market manipulation and likely other RICO (and perhaps criminal) violations. Only their political donations to [Washington] keep them from looking like the mafia as far as the law goes.

The RIAA's claims of "theft" falls on deaf ears. They have legally unclean hands in their claim to ownership of artist's music. Many artist's find they are in dept to the industry through it's "creative book-keeping" in what amounts to modern indentured servitude. These situations are engineered to keep the artist's poor and the RIAA in charge of distribution and profit.

Shut-em-down... Don't feel guilty, stealing from a thief isn't stealing in a moral sense and perhaps not in the legal sense either. Unclean hands...

I'd also add that their claim of "theft" falls on deaf ears because theft != copyright infringement, as I talked about a year ago.

Optimistic pessimism?

I can't sing (although I've been told I do a mean Louis Armstrong impression), but if I did I sure as heck wouldn't want to be "represented" by such a scummy organisation. Hopefully with The Internets more people will be able to do without signing their souls over to an RIAA member label that'll use the funds to extort customers out of more money in frivolous lawsuits than BP is being asked for in response to the latest environmental catastrophe.

How can one feel cautiously hopeful, yet so pessimistic at the same time?

You know that now notorious error message you sometimes see on YouTube videos claiming the music in a video was copyrighted and had been disabled?

Out of curiosity I clicked the Learn More link and was told this on their Copyright Tips page:

What is copyright infringement?

Now now, nobody likes a rhetorical question, do they?

Copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.

Ah that nagging little thing called "fair use" is such a spanner in the works, isn't it?

Atuuschaaw shared a link in Google Reader to Digital Music News about a sharp decline in music sales in the United States, specifically albums:

How long does this story go on? Surprisingly, the latest CD death-watch report comes from Billboard, typically a label cheerleader. According to an analysis published Thursday, US-based album sales tanked 18.1 percent year-over-year during the month of August. And, compared to the same period in 2007, sales were off by 37.2 percent.

There are several things I could say about this. The first thing would be to slouch over, pick up a walking stick, dye my hair grey, get fitted for dentures and say most commercial, top 40 music thesedays is just... terrible. I certainly don't like all the music from previous decades, but it's quite obvious to me there have been far less breakout acts in this decade and far less original, fresh material. That's flamebait for some people who are diehard fans of the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cirus or what I call "commercial, artificial, mass produced disposable music" for example, but I stand by the claim. Not that I'm bitter.

What I think is interesting though when I read these gloom and doom stories about falling music sales is nothing could be further from the truth with our family, and I can thank two different reasons for it. I've talked at length about Whole Wheat Radio before, but they're an example of a website of artists that instead of complaining about how commercial music is going down the toilet, actually took a stand and released their music independently or with indie labels. I've bought dozens of CDs from them, the latest of which only a day ago!

Another way we've been different though we have Gramophone to thank for. Gramophone is a somewhat typical chain of boutique CD shops in Singapore that took the opposite approach to HMV (which recently shut their flagship store in Heeren, I remember when they opened there back in the 1990s) by having smaller shops with more friendly staff and an emphasis on variety rather than Billboard charts.

While nice, that's not the reason why we bought more music because of Gramophone. The reason is Gramophone at The Cathay building on Orchard Road heavily discounts CDs that don't move off the shelves as quickly. I don't mean taking a $30 CD and selling it for $20, I'm talking about taking a $30 CD and selling it for $1, or $2! My sister, dad and I when we were all back in Singapore would take baskets down to Gramophone and buy hundreds of these CDs almost at random (NOT an exaggeration), and while some where terrible the vast majority were brilliant. We ripped them all to our music server and have been thrilled with the results! Much of it is world music we would never have heard before.

Sure musicians have to make a living, but even as a 23 year old I'm already sick and tired of the over-commercialisation of music. If labels weren't greedy arses (HA!) and spent more time with artists who had something new and fresh to contribute, there could be a renaissance. We're starting to see this without the labels' help on the Internet.

Back in March I talked here about Last.fm's decision to start charging users outside the United States, United Kingdom and Germany for the right to stream audio. Initially I was quite angry about it, but eventually realised that they were probably bullied into doing it by old media companies and that all they were guilty of was poor execution.

It seems now though there's further evidence of unscrupulous activity on Last.fm's part, and it has to do with sending listening information to the RIAA in the United States. You can read the whole saga on TechCrunch (Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?), the Last.fm blog (Techcrunch are full of sh*t), and TechCrunch again (Deny This, Last.fm), but if you want the quick lowdown Paul Richard Cook summarised it very well on a posted message on the Last.fm site.

Even if the Last.fm team had no idea this was happening as they claim, and even though I'm outside the de jure jurisdiction of the RIAA both in Australia and Singapore, this still really rubs me the wrong way. It's creepy this kind of behavior is going on, though to be fair we should all have expected this when they were bought out by CBS.

I really enjoyed my time with you Last.fm, but we must part ways now. My lifeboat has left the ship and I'm now rowing over to Libre.fm which will be the topic for another post. Sayonara.

Referring to an article on CNET News.com published earlier today entitled Why Microsoft, labels cling to music subscriptions?:

For anybody wondering why Microsoft and the top record labels continue to promote subscription music services, the answer was revealed Thursday.

David Ring, executive vice president of business development for Universal Music Group's digital arm, said at the EconMusic Conference that the recording industry simply can't sustain itself with download sales alone.

"If what we're trying to do is one-by-one downloads...that's not a business that can grow," Ring told conference attendees during panel discussion he participated in. "It won't be healthy for the industry."

The commercial music industry has long enjoyed exorbitant prices for their content for one simple reason: they could get away with it. Now a paradigm shift in the form of the internet has happened which allows people to purchase individual good tracks from an otherwise mediocre album where before they had to buy the whole thing. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Yes the labels themselves will lose money (not "loose" money!), but to be blunt they're only losing what they shouldn't really have had in the first place. With the internet artists don't need labels anymore. It's time to bury them and move on.

What the report should have said was "beurocratic top heavy and now unnessisary labels can't susatin themselves with download sales alone" and that it "wouldn't be healty for labels.". It really aggrevates me when I read music label executives talking about how they're the music industry... you're only a part of it, and not a good part.

Two other paragraphs that stood out:

Ring made clear subscription services are not the only business model Universal Music, the largest of the four top record labels, is exploring. Universal execs will continue testing strategies until they find one, or a combination, that works.

I think they meant "that works for the labels, not artists or consumers"

What strategies show promise? Panel members discussed some well-worn ideas, such as bundling music fees into people's Internet-access bills.

Pardon my French, but what bullshit. These people really don't have a clue -- once again they don't think they have to earn our money, they think they're entitled to it (a quote from Digital Flotsam I heard on a Whole Wheat Radio audio magazine from 2004).

Update

There certainly are a lot of Microsoft and music industry shills commenting on the thread for that story, they're really quite painful to read. If I read one more comment on such a site by a person equating walking into a store and stealing a CD compared to someone removing the DRM from a track they bought a vein in my head is going to burst!

Whew, calm down. Off to listen to some Marian Call :)

The "Fairness Engine" rant episode!

A rant episode in response to a new technology reported by Webware and an article calling the exposing of P2P as a red herring; talking about net neutrality, attacking symptoms not causes, RIAA/MPAA inspired bullying tactics. Not the same calibre as a Jimbob Kloss rant but I try my best!

Also briefly talk about a fascinating interview article from Slashdot from the inventor of C++, and the internets are working again at home!

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 40:24, 18.6MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

It was another one of those "I knew it wouldn't work but I was hoping it would" kind of situations. Amazon has released a MP3 download service that has no Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) tacked on and unlike all the other so called "iTunes killers" it is a pleasure to use.

And surprise surprise you need an American postal address before you can finish the transaction! Yay!

Seriously can music companies really be angry over illegal downloads if they don't care about their customers overseas? The local Singaporean music association has their painfully embarrassing "Be HIP" campaign which does nothing to create new methods of distribution which clearly people want and would use, then blames us. Pure genius.

It's Rant Thursday! The Commercial Music Industry, not adapting to new business models, overpricing, why DRM is a joke, music subscription services stink, iTunes, and are they going to wake up before they kill themselves? Ha!

Download MP3 ↓ 10:00 minutes, 6.4MiB

You can also stream it and view its Internet Archive page.