If you didn't sense the scathing sarcasm in the thread title, it was there
I'm not going to quote the entire articles, but I will be quoting sections from the following articles:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...dupdate24.html
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http://www.wisinfo.com/journal/spjlo...33486275.shtml
Quote:
Wisconsin libraries have received more than 105,000 CDs as part of a national settlement with the recording industry to settle a price-fixing lawsuit, but few are choices most listeners would opt for.
The selections are raising a few eyebrows and unlikely to get a lot of use. Among the several hundred CDs given to the Charles M. White Public Library were many duplicates, including 29 copies of Handel's Italian Cantatas and 21 copies of Mozart's Le Nozze Di Figaro.
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Quote:
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Among the 592 CDs shipped to the Marshfield Public Library, there are 22 copies of Ricky Martin's "Sound Loaded," 20 copies of Samantha Mumba's "Gotta Tell You," 16 copies of "The Three Tenors in Concert," 12 copies of Georg Philipp Telemann's "String Concertos/Musica Antiqua Kšln-Goebel," and 12 copies of Mandy Moore's self-titled album.
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Quote:
"We definitely have duplicates and we have a lot of plain - is there a nicer word than junk?" [librarian Jane] Medenwaldt said.
Milwaukee Public Library received 1,235 copies of Whitney Houston's 1991 recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner," 188 copies of Michael Bolton's "Timeless," 375 of "Entertainment Weekly: The Greatest Hits 1971," and 104 copies of Will Smith's "Willennium," and nearly everything in between.
The booty also included 77 copies of a CD by chanting Spanish monks, all part of a $142 million national class-action lawsuit against five major music distributors and three large music retailers.
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And over in the state of Washington...
Quote:
Listening to oldies such as "Mr. Bojangles" and "What's Going On?" might be a fun music history lesson for schoolkids in King and Pierce counties.
But 413 free copies of "Greatest Hits 1971" might prove to be too much of a good thing.
And 387 CDs containing explicit lyrics by the late Puerto Rican rapper Big Punisher, along with 356 copies of "Staying Power" by the late Barry White, weren't high on the public schools' wish list.
Raunchy music wasn't what anyone in education or the Attorney General's Office had in mind when they announced that a windfall of music was coming to public schools and libraries from last year's $143 million anti-trust settlement with the recording industry. The industry was accused of setting artificially high prices.
Washington got 115,241 music CDs -- which would retail at $1.5 million -- out of the deal. Boxes of free music began hitting schools and libraries last week.
But some teachers are not sure what they will do with, for example, 114 copies of Meredith Brooks' "Blurring the Edges," which includes the Grammy-nominated song, "Bitch."
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Quote:
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Farley's regional district, which covers 35 school districts, received 1,355 copies of Whitney Houston singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." The hit single, which Houston sang before the 1991 Super Bowl at the height of the Gulf War, was 5 percent of the district's cache.
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Quote:
Too busy organizing their new digs, officials at Seattle Public Library didn't open theirs until yesterday, said library spokeswoman Andra Addison.
Included in the shipment: 84 copies of an album by rhythm-and-blues artist Samantha Mumba, 69 by Lenny Kravitz and 48 copies of "Scary Sounds for Halloween" from Martha Stewart.
With 23 branches, the Seattle Public Library received many more copies of albums it can use, but officials don't know what they will do with the extras.
The King County Regional Library System already has decided to try to hock its gifts, all 7,700 of them.
"We didn't feel they were up to snuff to be added to our collection," said library spokeswoman Julie Wallace.
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Let's all give a nice hand to the altruistic RIAA. It looks like, realizing the error of their ways after being sued, they decided that they should really do the right thing and use the settlement to work for some good. They're fighting for the little artists everywhere
No, they're not giving CDs that people would actually WANT to get from the library to the libraries. Instead, they're giving the libraries HUNDRES of CDs no one cares about, so as to force these albums down their throats and make them appreciate music that's not necessarily on Top 40 radio
Clearly, I'm being sarcastic here. What they're really doing is abusing the loppholes of the settlement to get rid of extra inventory they have because no one wants to buy the albums anyway. Just another example of the typical crap they pull.