Mp3`s the RIAA and the Truth!
 

This thread Here inspired me to make this one.

Everyone knows that the RIAA has been trying to sue everyone who shares music and such to try and stop the flow of mp`s and other such files.

1. The RIAA has cited that music sales have dropped 6% since the advent of mp3`s!!!! What they don`t mention is that new albumbs and singles released within that same timeframe have dropped 25%. What this means is that music sales have increased in proportion to the actual music avaliable.

2. The RIAA and their cronies are the same people who were recently under investigation for keeping a CD costing over $15 and the artists starving. Music pirating isnt killing new artists and big bands, they get a signing deal, plus sales from their concerts and memorabilia. (yes they get a small part of each CD Sale).

3. When was the last time you saw a CD worth buying? It seems that most new artists are coasting on their one or two big hits that you have already heard on the radio a million times.

Treble charger, Nickleback, etc. . .

On the average CD with 15-17 songs are there really more than 4 worth listening to?

Here is the solution.

1. Kick the RIAA in the nuts and let the artists have a decent share.

2. Make CD`s $5.00 that way people will buy 5 times as many, and it wont be worth it to pirate songs.

This is just my opinion, but to me it seems sound! (excuse the pun).

Arrrgh, friggin' pirates!

I completly and whole heartedly agree.

I agree that the system as it stands is very fucked up. The RIAA is definitely a bane to both artists and people.

This said what solution were you proposing exactly? government enforced price fixing? Trustbusting?

The way I see it is P2P is going to kill them eventually. money has never been what drove good music, so that's not really a problem. Basically this is one of the few situations in the world where if everything stands as it does, and no big horrible changes are made to the legal system or laws as they stand everything will clear itself up.

maybe I'm just being optimistic today.

The RIAA really has no definitive control over what happens on filesharing; the amount of resources available and that will become available in the future is too much to chain up.

Another point:

I've bought MORE CDs because of mp3s. Say a friend of mine recommends a band, am I supposed to go spend almost a day's work worth of money on a CD that I don't even like? If I download a few mp3s, I'm able to judge and eventually appreciate the music, and chances are, if I think the band deserves it, I buy their CD. It makes music more available.

I buy all old classic rock. Downloading music is great, but I like to collect all the original albums (on cd) from my favorite bands. Maybe its just me...

I usually buy Vinyls of the artists I like (if they have them available). Costs more but I like the way they look.

I've bought more music because of file-sharing in the past 3 months than I have in the rest of my life.

Take that statistic and shove it up there ass.

P.S.- I know one person who goes against the norm probably isn't big news......but there are ALOT of people like me.

Re: Mp3`s the RIAA and the Truth!
 

Quote:

Originally posted by Blistex Make CD`s $5.00 that way people will buy 5 times as many

DUH! but they wont do that.

Wow, if CDs were $5.....I'd have a roomfull of them!

As a musician myself, and one who has studied music business to some degree, I can't express how much I whole-heartedly agree.

Unfortunately, it won't happen. Let's hope that David Bowie's vision of an RIAA-less music industry comes to fruition.

When I hear something I like, I check it out online. I've bought stuff when it's been worth owning (like the Matrix: Reloaded soundtrack), but for other crap I'm not going to pay for the 2 songs I enjoyed.

What irks me is that the same stuff that the RIAA whines about online is being distributed for free on the radio. Entire CD's are being played for everyone. I fail to see how, from a copyright standpoint, they can argue one form of distribution is legal but another is not.

Amen to all that's been mentioned. In the ideal world, companies don't exploit, aren't corrupt and aren't comprised of a bunch of jackasses. Unfourtunately, this is what happens with a free market. They can charge anything they want as long as there's demand.

There should be a law that caps profit at xxxxx% of production, marketing, machinery etc costs. That way if they want more profit, they'd also have to pay their workers more. [With that there are other complications but essentially it seems to be a good solution to a bad problem]

If you're making music to make money then STOP MAKING MUSIC, because you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

Precisely. They tried the same argument when tapes came out, claiming tapes were hurting album sales, etc. Nevermind people were simply being inundated with disco.

I agree here, but it still doesn't make the situation between the band's pay and the suits piece of the pie justified. They should get a higher % of the profits if anything, not the suits, so thats a shame... But even so you're right.:)

I hope this backfires in a major way against the RIAA. Its not just annoyance at the prices of CDs or their lawsuits being filed - but IMO the legal basis (unfortunately with Congress backing) is ridiculous and IMO unconstitutional. I think the most ridiculous thing I've heard is how some Congressman wanted to allow the RIAA to hire hackers to hack and shut down the computers of offending downloaders. That didn't pass - but even the thought of it getting any consideration in congress is mind boggling.

Re: Mp3`s the RIAA and the Truth!
 

Its pretty funny, sell it for 25 bucks.. and no one will buy it... sell 5 things for 5 bucks.. and they might just buy them all (cause they're so cheap). Human mentality is funny... you think they'd be banking off of it by now.

I was saying the exact same shit on this post Which Is Illegal - File Downloading or File Sharing? my sentiments exactly yo. I think this is all a bunch a bullshit. They actually filed a lawsuit on a record label a while back for over-pricing their cd's and forced them to make a claim website where if you propose a claim where if you purchased a CD over the legal sales price they would ship you a 20 dollar check. They made them do this because they owed the public a large sum of money they stole from us....the people who are supposedly "stealing" from them. It's all just a bunch a fuckin greed. They can all kiss my ass.

Asta!!

Blistex: spot on man.

Hell yes! I am totally for this, I would start buying cds again if they were 5 dollars.

It makes me so angry when they say they are trying to help artists. That is such crap, they are only trying to make more money for the corporations, which is why it is so hard to download and buy music in Europe.

Thanks to P2P programs, I have discovered new artists that I never would have heard before (I hardly listen to the radio/the don't usually play the music I like anyways) and because I have been able to check out 3-4 songs, it's helped me decide which CD's I want to buy.

The RIAA is just pissed off that they can't sucker people into buying one hit wonder band's CD now. They think this is where the majority of sales loss is coming from. So now they have to start getting picky and sign bands that are actually worth signing, and not just sign a bunch of bands whenever a new trend comes out. (i.e. Seattle Grunge)

If the RIAA and MPAA had their way, videos cassettes, tapes, and blank CD's would be $20 each in order to "compensate" for piracy. They asked for an $18 surcharge on each individual ppiece of blank media, all of which would go to them.

Little known fact:

CD's purchased through companies such as BMG or Columbia Music (or whatever it is) are written off not as sales, but as lost or unaccounted for product.

That's just criminal.

He has a valid point...

Even before mp3s, i rarely bought cds at retail price. Id wait for BMG to get them, then they averaged about $5-7 apeice. Now, id rather listen to the radio then shell out $15 for one or two good songs on an overl crappy cd.

I shop for CD's at Hastings. If ya wait a few years (or sometimes just a week) eventually they got em in the used section for like $4.99 n shit. I remember 1 week Nsuck's "No Strings Attached" released and then the next week you look in the used section and you see entire rows top to bottom for like 4 rows all filled with that cd and britney's. I thought it was hilarious. Me n my friends were like "Now why would they wanna return Nsync?!" good times.

Asta!!

And I believe they got slapped for it too. It was the basis of one of the anti-trust suits.

I wonder how many local/regional bands stay that way so they don't have to deal with the RIAA and their pet cocksuckers.

Maybe that's what happened to all the talent, they don't go national because they'd end up working harder for less money to do so.

I read in Billboard's Aug 16 issue that the major retail chains (Best Buy, Target, Wal Mart) have supposedly decided to confront them on the issue of cd prices. I tried to link to the article, but Billboard demands quite the high subscription price...
The gist of the article was that the stores wanted lower prices, and if the record labels didn't comply, they would greatly reduce their music stock.
If that is actually true, it could mean cheaper cds in the near future!

That would be pretty cool, especially as Wal-Mart is the only store I know of that actually buys the clean versions of popular CDs. The record companies would practically have to stop producing those. :p The downside, however, is that the RIAA will then be able to come down harder on filesharing in public, because with less stock out, less will be bought and more will be traded. D'oh. :(

Bit's are Bit's - it dosent matter what it contains. They are just a bunch of 1's and 0's. The only thing you purchase is the delivery medium . On a CD it's a plastic disc, on the internet it's packets delivered over the network, on satellite it's streaming from space.

So yeah CD's sales have declined, but what about all the other mediums that the record companies make their sales that did not exist before then? I-Tunes, XM radio, Launchcast, BuyMusic.com - we are just seeing the beginning of a whole new avenue of content delivery.

Digital Cable, and Digitial TV are just in their infancy - soon you will be buying the music through the cable box (which will be in every home) and uploading the music to your MP3 player for portable travel, and transferring to you jukebox for play. You didnt buy an actual CD - but you did purchase the music.

Now - who wants to pay full price for digital bits that dont contain artwork, a box, or anything tangible. Certainly it's cheaper for the Record Companies to product and deliver digital copies without the overhead of packaging and retail distribution. It probably costs 10 bucks to encode an album and put it on the internet in a database. Sure there will be an inflated price associated with it because of artist royalties, management, etc - but if you remove the prodution costs of the actual phystical medium, including shipping, and retail costs - the tracks would be considerable cheaper, and the same percentage of dollars got into their pockets.

CD's are the old cassette tapes, and before that LP's - it's just that technology advanced so fast this time round that it caught the Record companies off track and they're panicking - cause it costs a lot of money to keep these "stars" around.

It's the last gasp of a dying industry, and the beginning of a new era of content delivery and inpendent publishing and distribution. Websites will be the artwork for a digital album.