- Sunday, 29 November 2009
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No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had - Samuel Johnson
It's time for the RIAA to the face the music
MUSIC ON THE INTERWEB is a touchy subject for the record labels. They fork over a load of dosh to make sure little old ladies without Interweb connections, maybe without a computer, are severely punished for sharing music. They need no proof, and the courts in the US and elsewhere have inverted the notion that a crime must be proven. Now innocence must be proven in music share cases. The SCO-ish notion of litigation as a business model is still very much in vogue with the music industry. That is the music industry as represented by middle-men like as the RIAA.
Pirating music must be stopped! The artists have to eat! Those are the cries from the likes of the RIAA. Never mind that the bands and musicians, the real artists, only ever see a small percentage of what the labels and their enforcers rake in. Music piracy is clearly (in the eyes of the RIAA, it's ilk, and the bastion of lawyers they employ) the Ultimate Evil facing our times.
Is there a solution for this evil and uncivilised music pirating?
It seems there may be a solution. Most of you already know that Radiohead is experimenting with direct sales of their latest album. They are offering In Rainbows for whatever price you want to pay for it. You can even get it for free. Free as in beer. This is a heretical concept that moots greedy monsters like the RIAA.
You set the price, pay it directly to the artists, they have little overhead, make money, and you get DRM-free music.
Even though we could not get the Radiohead download to work in our China office after six tries, it seems like a perfect solution to an ugly problem. Our inability to get the tunes has to do with The Great Firewall of China, not with the concept. Yes, we finally did get the album from a Chinese site, and it is good Radiohead stuff. Give it a try yourself.
Now comes another artist trying the same thing. Saul Williams is giving the model a go with The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggytardust. You can sign up for the download on the site, and again you pay whatever you want. If you choose to pay nothing for the album, you get it in 192Kbps MP3 format. If you fork over some virtual dosh, you can get the tunes in 192Kbps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, or FLAC lossless audio format. Money from the sales does not pass through the hands of the big labels, their enforcers, or their lawyers.
Utopian dreams and reality.
Some of us remember the early days of the 'Net. There was a lot of talk then about how it would link buyers directly to sellers. It has panned out that way if you are looking to enlarge your penis or help get TEN MILLION DOLLARS out of Rwanda. On the other hand, it looks to us like the idea of artists releasing music directly to the public over the Interweb is exactly what we were promised those many years ago.
What will happen if this direct release model takes flight? We are thinking it could be a genuine benefit for everyone. That might even include the record labels. Outfits like the RIAA and their lawyers might have to go on the dole, but that would not be a bad thing. A dose of humility might help their Karma load. If the direct-release model does move from experiment to commonality, we would see the record labels either moving to embrace it, or going the way of the carrier pigeon.
Direct-release is a model we fully embrace. There are some downsides, like the poor lawyers that might be out of income, or the middle-men that would have to work for a living, but it seems like A Good Thing to us. ยต
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Sell directly to the consumer!

I find it hard to believe that something like this is going to flop in the long run, if for no other reason than that which is simple and functional is always more appealing to the consumer than that which is neither.

This also has the added benefit of, barring any existing contracts, being something the RIAA cannot stop via the courts.
If the RIAA have an ounce of evil in them they will try to discourage everyone from this model. Its their death sentence. I would not be surprised if they try and stamp all over this dream.
It's never been about illegal downloads. It's always been about killing the electronic download completely. It's always been about controlling the market from the cartel's middleman position.

If the artist can sell direct to the customer, they can charge a quarter of the price to the consumer, and still make ten times as much as going through the record cartels, all while keeping ownership of their own intellectual property. Benefit for the customer and benefit for the artist

If the artist and the customer deals directly over the internet, that leaves the media cartels nowhere and with nothing. They've been circumvented, and that's the one thing they've always been afraid of, and is the thing that is a dead certainty.

The cartels' function is to rake in the profit by screwing over the artist with a loansharking agreement, while controlling distribution and advertising at the other end. That's a business model that is coming to an end, and the people to benefit the most from it's download will be those that make music, and those that buy it - not those that package up "product" and are only interested in "shipping units", all the while screwing over the artist and the customer at each end of the spectrum.


I would love to see a record label pay the Artist to have the privilege to sell the music on a CD in the store. It's about time that the artists get the empowerment that they've deserved for so long.
...but you need a market for everything. Imagine a street with a Radiohead CD store, a Rolling Stones CD store, and a James Blunt CD store. You have to visit three different stores to buy all of the CDs you want. Same goes for web sites, you need a cental market for these things. I have a feeling all of the lazy bums out there will just go pull it off the torrents, as that will become the new, convenient, one-stop-shop and the artist will again be starving. Then the record labels will rise from the ashes...sorry for the doom and gloom.
From the corporate standpoint, this must seem like the worst kind of communism. To me, it's capitalism at its most basic. 

It harks us back to the day, (Saturday, ackshirley), when we went down to the market and bought our veggies right from the grower at whatever best price the two of you could haggle out...no middle man/woman/weasel, no overhead except the metaphorical, (and in the case of the veggies, actual), stall, from which the transactions were, well, transacted.

Will it catch on...? I hope so. Will it last...? I hope so again. 

The RIAA is capitalism at its most basic. If you dont have a product - they dont any more - then own someone elses.
Its a complete antithesis of the free market.
These sort of companies will die, they may create a huge amount of collateral damage but they will die. Its the consumer and producer that will suffer untile they do.
At a certain point in history, the record industries had a reason to be, exploited this reason and flourished. Nowadays, records no longer matter; those folks should have shifted business before some dramatic change took place. Sorry for those greedy bastids: business has changed, they could not cope, their days are counted. Sure, they will fight... but in the end, even the unsinkable Titanic.... sunk!
The RIAA takes $2 from each CD sold.
The MUSICIAN gets only $1. 
The record company gets the rest. 

This is ridiculous!!! The bands don't even care as much as the industry does. 

I agree with one of the commenters above, we need to take this into our own hands and sell DIRECTLY to consumers. 

I only use http://www.musicneutral.com to support musicians. No way I'm giving a cut of my cash to the industry. 

It's important that we all come together to show that we have had ENOUGH!!!!
how inflexible the record companies are. They keep beating the same dead RIAA horse as their only tactic. They are just sticking to their sinking ship and refusing to adapt even in order to survive.

I suppose they are unable to adapt because all the parasites in the record company boardrooms have got so fat and lazy after years of leeching off the sweat of others that they haven't got a clue about original thought, or how to create anything themselves that has actual intrinsic value.

I'm actually pleased about this, as it means that they will just all go away quicker.
what I like about this model is that the kids can get it for free since they don't have means of paying online anyway. (assuming they can atleast blag their parents for the minimal 49p on there c card) whilst adults can pay a few quid for the album, and the riaa can suck my fat wan.
While I'm not trying to justify what the record companies do, they do add some value to the mix. They do promote (some more than others) the artists works and second, they also gather (and pass on a very small portion to the artists) the royalties when the music is played in a public forum, such as radio, sound track to a movie, etc.
you do mean the same radiohead that just signed with a label right?